Theater

True de-Light

Moss Hart and Good Theater send up thespians

By MEGAN GRUMBLING | April 22, 2009

DECADENT FUN: A strong cast, as usual.

It's opening night, and in the leading lady's suite at the Ritz-Carlton, key players are drinking a litany of pre-curtain toasts: Fast-talking financier Sidney Black (Stephen Underwood) blesses his first-ever investment in the theater. Veteran playwright Owen Turner (Bob McCormack), himself on hiatus from writing, intones a tribute to nervous young playwright Peter Sloan (Marc Brann, endearingly), who ingenuously extols the "democracy of the theater." Gleaming star Irene Livingstone (Denise Poirer)

glitters, beams, laughs mellifluously. Prone-to-weeping director Carlton Fitzgerald (Mark Honan) pouts when he realizes he's been forgotten in the toastmaking, then raises his glass and emotes. And all the while, Irene's jaded mom Stella (Tootie Van Reenen) and Sidney's sassy celebrity ice-skater wife Frances (Janice Gardner) play gin, ignoring the accolades but never forgetting to drink their neat bourbon. Thus the dramatis personae of Moss Hart's 1948 comedy Light Up the Sky, a love letter to the stage. Brian P. Allen directs a vivacious and superbly cast Good Theater production of Hart's classic, in which the veteran playwright both skewers and celebrates the theatrical life of Broadway's Golden Age.

But the show these folks are drinking to hasn't made it to Broadway yet. This is a Boston trial-run, common during the era, and the critics' pronouncements will mean everything to the future of the play's run in New York and beyond. We witness in Light Up, then, the brief but crucial windows in the life of the show: the jittery pre-curtain "magic time," the manic immediate aftermath of the performance, and the final wee-hour rulings of the critics. Hart provides objective takes on this emotional process in the person of young literary woman Miss Lowell (Laura Graham, crisply), a non-theater person who's ghost-writing Irene's autobiography, and in elder playwright Owen, a knowing theater insider, but an outsider of this particular show. We witness, in this plush suite at the Ritz (given an echt luxury-hotel sheen in Craig Robinson's refined navy blues and golds), the pangs and pleasures of a new birth to the stage.

Caught in the throes of the show's growing pains is a vibrant array of types, with which the Good Theater's cast has decadent and often very virtuosic fun. The role of diva Irene might as well have been written for Poirier, who glides and flutters, effuses and struts and frets, and looks fabulous in a series of luxurious costumes (many on loan from the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis). She and Honan egg each other on as the sensitive artistic temperaments of the bunch; and the watchful, knowing gaze of McCormick's Owen, both amused and affectionate, is an elegant counterweight to their histrionics.

1 | 2 | next >

Related: Friends, Romans..., Portland's got talent, Starstruck, More

Topics: Theater , Entertainment, Performing Arts, George Washington, More

Comments

Add a Comment

Today's Event Picks

ARTICLES BY MEGAN GRUMBLING

BASKING IN LIFE | November 18, 2009
Nancy and Charlie (Kate Braun and Peter Josephson) have made it to the other side: Their kids are raised, released into the world, and producing their own offspring.

STEP RIGHT IN | November 11, 2009
Laura Reynolds, the young wife of a schoolmaster at a New England boys' boarding school in the '50s, has been advised about her proper role there: "Interested bystander."

SPOT ON | November 04, 2009
After Watergate and an opened China, Nixon’s next most recognized legacy is probably the warning to make sure you know your medium: His infamously sweaty, maladroit television appearance in the Kennedy-Nixon debate was widely perceived to have cost him that year’s presidency.

SOFT THRUSTS | October 28, 2009
Seeking the gore-porn stimulations of mutilations, leather, and fellatio to get your Halloween on? Well, Players’ Ring is offering severed fingers, wanton women with whips, and a very, very demanding master, not to mention a mordant punchline. Rolling Die Productions does it all in the spirit of the early 20th-century French horror spectacles of the Grand Guignol Theater.

TIME AND TIDE | October 21, 2009
"The tide goes in, and the tide goes out," refrain the players of Lamplight Dialogues: A Nighttime Journey into the Ghost Lives of Puddle Dock . In the show's setting, the nearly 400-year-old city of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the literal tide is the force of the mighty tidal Piscataqua River.

See all articles by: MEGAN GRUMBLING

Most Viewed

Most Emailed

A WEED GROWS IN BOSTON
Even though it's a crisp November day, the flower boxes of Mary Jones's neat little bungalow are overflowing with brightly colored blooms.

COAKLEY CASHES IN AT THE BAR
It's no surprise that Martha Coakley has raised much of her money for her US Senate campaign from lawyers — that has been her professional and social circle for pretty much her entire adult life.

QUESTIONING THE LEGALITY OF STRAIGHT MARRIAGE
When it comes to supporting gay rights, two straight Boston University grads are putting their marriage where their mouths are.

REVIEW: LADY GAGA AT THE WANG
Lady Gaga, resplendent, striding onto the stage of the Wang Theatre, has just removed an intricate half-Egyptian/half-Wagnerian headdress from her person, freeing her enormous blonde hairdo from its confinement.

CAPUANO FOR SENATE
After a telescoped campaign, Massachusetts Democrats go to the polls Tuesday to choose a successor to a legend, Ted Kennedy.

A WEED GROWS IN BOSTON
Even though it's a crisp November day, the flower boxes of Mary Jones's neat little bungalow are overflowing with brightly colored blooms.

SOLDIER'S JOY
For a deconstructionist, the new album from Aaron Lee Marshall presents any number of philosophical difficulties.

COAKLEY TAKES A STAND
Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley this week separated herself from the gang of essentially like-minded candidates seeking to fill Senator Ted Kennedy's Washington seat by rejecting the US House of Representatives compromise that traded approval of a health-care-reform bill for greater restrictions to abortion access. Good for Coakley.

QUESTIONING THE LEGALITY OF STRAIGHT MARRIAGE
When it comes to supporting gay rights, two straight Boston University grads are putting their marriage where their mouths are.

COAKLEY CASHES IN AT THE BAR
It's no surprise that Martha Coakley has raised much of her money for her US Senate campaign from lawyers — that has been her professional and social circle for pretty much her entire adult life.

HOT TOPICS

Massachusetts Institute of Technology , William Shakespeare , Anton Chekhov , Rick Lombardo , Barbara Lee , Nicholas Martin , Ryan Landry , Jackson Pollock , Philip Glass , School of the Museum of Fine Arts