#George kaufman madcap comedy movie
#George kaufman madcap comedy plus

There’s not a moment in this play when anyone tries to harm anyone else, they always have the best intentions, and that’s refreshing.'

The most important aspect of the play is not about being funny, it’s about how important they are to each other and the love they have, and that’s missing in a lot of families in a lot of modern plays. 'What drew me in was the relationship of the family.

#George kaufman madcap comedy movie

'I had to read it a few times to make sense of it, then I watched the movie with Jimmy Stewart and I really got into the play,' Wesen says. Playing the caught-between-two-families role of Tony, Ryan Wesen needed a couple of passes at the script before he felt its kinetic comic energy.

#George kaufman madcap comedy plus

Kaufman and Hart were craftsmen with these jokes they wrote, plus they tell a good story.' At the first read-through, I (marked) each time we laughed throughout the play, and it added up to 52 laughs. 'And I’ve got a cast of innately funny people. 'We do speed rehearsals, running it as quickly as we can, everything in fast-forward motion, then we reduce it to half, then we cut it in half again, and that’s the pace we want,' she says, and even then the three-act piece, with an intermission, clocks in at just under two hours. 'We’ve taken a look at the Great Depression and made comparisons to then and now, and the kids get it immediately,' Lilly says about her student thespians, though she also had to acquaint them with the quick-quips pace of screwball comedy that dazzled audiences decades ago. Though a theatrical artifact from a long-ago era, the play’s lesson of life as a cherished commodity should resonate for contemporary audiences coping in a tough economic era, when joy might be missing from many people’s lives. Will the stuffy, straitjacketed Kirbys embrace the ethos of the delightfully daffy Sycamores? But Tony realizes that the Sycamores’ philosophy - the pursuit of joy and enjoyment of each other - is sanity in disguise, that what others dismiss as madness is the best response to a world gone mad. When the eccentrics host the conservatives for dinner, their polar-opposite personalities convince Alice that marriage would be a disaster from 'I Do' onward.

'I love the timeless themes, the idea that money doesn’t buy happiness, that hope is going to prevail even through a time of fear, and enjoying life to the utmost within the moment.'įirst produced onstage in 1936 and translated into a Frank Capra film favorite two years later, 'You Can’t Take It With You' focuses on twin families - the loving, loony Sycamores and the unfun, unhappy Kirbys - who are linked as Sycamore daughter Alice falls for Kirby kid Tony.

'It’s so relevant because people living through the Depression learned life wisdom that we have yet to learn today,' says Melissa Lilly, director of the production that’s geared for guffaws and staged at the Las Vegas Academy of International Studies, Performing and Visual Arts. Kaufman comedy, Great Recession theatergoers might find escape as well in the company of the madcap Sycamores. Would there be much left to take anymore?īut if Great Depression audiences found solace in the merry Moss Hart-George S. Consider the title: 'You Can’t Take It With You.'