The setup lines are familiar, the surprises few. And yet, "You Can't Take It With You" proves that theatrical classics, with the style of the Energizer Bunny, just keep running and running. Even dozens of bad school productions (except for our kids, of course), and worse, ego-driven amateur productions cannot spoil the hope and warmth provided by Penny Sycamore's dreams or Grandpa Vanderhof's visits with God, a conversational style revived years later by Tevye in "Fiddler on the Roof."
The Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman comedy, originally produced in 1936, when the nation and the world were in almost-equally distressing political, economic and social straits, opened the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis season last night at the Loretto-Hilton, and will run through Oct. 3.
The ever-zany Sycamore family takes a relaxed attitude toward life. Grandpa, in a charming, easy-going performance by Joneal Joplin, walked away from work 35 years earlier and has done little except read, go to circuses and commencements and enjoy his family and his life, though the dollar bills he easily pulls from his pocket show that there's a portfolio or an annuity around there somewhere. It can't be solely the fact that he does not pay any income tax (or city earnings tax), and the family's casual approach to the world ensures that he often doesn't receive his mail or messages. Joplin, by the way, also opened the 1972 season in "Of Mice and Men," giving him 38 years and 91 productions at the Rep.
A brief aside: When the play opened in 1936, no one instructed an audience to turn off beeping devices or things that indicated the possibility of blue-light specials in the theater. What you carried in your pocket stayed in your pocket and did not disturb anyone.
With the exception of Alice (Amelia McClain), who goes to work every day, each of the Sycamores marches to a different drummer. People make a delivery and end up living in the house. A typewriter delivered by mistake creates a career as a playwright for Penny Sycamore, a fine, balanced, poised performance by Carol Schultz. She's mother to Alice, and also to Essie (nifty, well-timed work by Stephanie Cozart), who has studied ballet for eight years under Russian emigre Boris Kolenkhov ( a bewigged, bedazzling comic tour de force by Anderson Matthews), and cannot execute even the most basic of steps.
Their father, Paul (Tony Campisi), makes fireworks in the basement with the aid of Mr. De Pinna (Scott Shafer), who arrived years earlier to make a delivery and delivered both ice and himself. Only the ice melted away. This group is kept fed and alive by Rheba (Rachel Leslie) and Donald (Scott Whitehurst) who, in the racial style of our country in those days, aren't even granted the respect of last names by the playwrights.
And then boy meets girl. Alice, employed by a large corporation, turns the head of her immediate boss, Tony Kirby (Bejamin Eakeley), son of the owner, who is a very upright, uptight Wall Streeter (Jeffrey Hayenga) and his wife (Barbara Kingsley). Tony and his parents come to dinner one night, and the stage is set for the third act (yes, this is an old-fashioned three-act play, with two intermissions).
Steven Woolf, the Rep's artistic director, directed the season-opener, with excellent focus and pacing, trying diligently to make the lines funnier than they are, which often is not quite funny enough. And another point: Why did he cast so that the same actress, Kingsley, played both Mrs. Kirby and Grand Duchess Olga? The fact that both roles are mentioned in the program makes it obvious, of course, but Olga was on stage for the climactic scene, and Mrs. Kirby was absent, leaving a vacancy that stuck out like a sore thumb. Granted the scene plays passably well without her, but it's not like the Rep to cut corners like that.
Technical work was, as always, outstanding, especially John Ezell's set, which stretches the stage and piles it high with stuff that accentuates the idiosyncracies of the Sycamores. Elizabeth Covey's costumes and Peter Sargent's lights (if memory serves, he lit "Of Mice and Men," too) blended well.
"You Can't Take it With You," a production of the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, plays at the Loretto-Hilton Center through Oct. 3
—Joe