On May 2, the Malibu Stage Company opened a six-week run of Moss Hart’s 1948 spoof of the theater world he adored, “Light Up the Sky.” Judging from the performance last Saturday, the play, produced by Jacqueline Bridgeman and directed by Hart’s son, Christopher, should run forever. True, the play, set in a suite at Boston’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel on the angst-filled opening day of a work by a new playwright, is a predictable, melodramatic piece peopled with stereotypically flamboyant theater types. But it works because Moss Hart caught the milieu perfectly, which is no wonder-he was a theater person through-and-through, and, although he denied it, many of the characters were based on real life models.
On the whole, Chris Hart’s cast performed splendidly. Michael Laskin as Sidney Black, the producer of “Light Up the Sky’s” fictional play (based on the legendary impresario Billy Rose) was appropriately oily and opportunistic. Virginia Hamilton as his ice-skating wife, Frances (Rose’s wife was the Olympic swimmer Elinore Holmes) was also near perfect; her ditsy, Judy Holliday-like portrayal drew frequent guffaws from the sold-out audience. In the role of the play’s director Carleton Fitzgerald (based on Guthrie McClintic, director husband of Katherine Cornell), Greg Zerkle was delightfully self-dramatizing.
Moss Hart also cast himself in “Light Up the Sky”- twice: as the rookie playwright Peter Sloan (Gene Lythgow’s performance was appropriately shy and defensive), and as the older, more experienced Owen Turner (Mark Arnott, who lacked the sophisticated edge the real Moss Hart possessed at that point in his career). Top honors were carried off, however, by Suzanne Ford who played the fictional play’s overwrought star Irene Livingston with hysterical brilliance (the part was probably based on Gertrude Lawrence), and Mary Gregory, who played Stella, Irene’s cynically formidable mother, with the sort of comic timing that had the audience laughing before she uttered her lines.
Ferrell Marshall, Carl Johnson, Sean Everett and David Green were fine in their secondary roles; especially so was Lou Wagner as the potential investor William Gallagher whose comic homage to the theater stopped the show with applause.
But it was, after all, Chris Hart’s direction of this production of his father’s play that again brought alive the sense of joy that endlessly drives people to the theater.
Gary Randall’s set is near perfect; so are the costumes. Douglas Cummings is responsible for the sound; Paula Post is stage manager, the props are by Lori Berg, and Ellen Mack Knight was casting director.
Performances of “Light Up the Sky,” with tickets priced at $20, are at 8 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, and on Sundays at 3 p.m. The Malibu Stage Company is located at 29243 Pacific Coast Highway, just northwest of Heathercliff. More information can be obtained by calling 310.589.1998.