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The Wonderful World of Theater: Moss Hart Revived
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14496 |
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THE ARTS
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3 / 1988 |
1,927 Words |
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Cynthia Grenier
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The Broadway theater season of 1948-49 had some really big hits. It you never saw them on stage, you certainly caught some of them on film, or at least on late night television. Death of a Salesman; Anne of a Thousand Days; The Madwoman of Chaillot; Detective Story; Edward, My Son; Life with Mother: Remember them? But how about Light Up the Sky? Moss Hart wrote it--you remember him, didn't you?
It wasn't that long ago that Moss Hart was often described as being synonymous with the American theater. Alone, and with George S. Kaufman, he wrote some of the most successful American plays of the thirties and forties: Lady in the Dark, You Can't Take It with You, and The Man Who Came to Dinner. Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Kurt Weill, and Ira Gershwin composed the scores for his musicals. Light Up the Sky had a respectable run in the 1948-49 season; it made the Burns Mantle list of the ten best plays of its season, but it was not to be revived until 1985 by the Old Vic in London. Impressed by its success, Hart's son, Christopher (to whom the play is dedicated), launched a production at the Ahmanson in Los Angeles early the following year. Encouraged by the reaction to the West Coast run, the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., decided to mount it at the end of 1987.
Based on Experience
Hart wrote Light Up the Sky out of very long and genuine experience with the problems of having a play open out of town. The setting is a suite in the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Boston whose windows face out toward the Colonial Theater. The first act takes place at 5:30 in the afternoon before opening night of a new play at the Colonial; the second at 11:45 that evening after a disastrous reaction from the audience; and the third at 3:30 in the morning when producer, director, and leading actress finally learn what the critics thought. It is a comedy, a fairly broad comedy, but the play we see today was created out of some real pain.
Light Up the Sky won the actual Boston first-night audience with its first act, but lost audience and critics alike with the second and third acts, apparently because playwright Hart had decided to handle his material seriously. He had wanted to show what it felt like to have an audience miss the point, to show how a hostile house could affect people who lived only for the theater. Like the author of the play within the play, Hart shut himself up in his suite at the Ritz Carlton, emerging ten days later with a new second and third act, both now conceived as comedy. In Philadelphia, he wrote the last ten minutes of the last act a second time. Broadway loved it.
Theater was everything to Moss Hart. In his aptly entitled autobiography, Act One, which tells of his life up to his first hit when he was still less than thirty, Hart laid out what he described as a pet theory that was, as he modestly put it, probably invalid. He claimed that the theater was the inevitable refuge of the unhappy child. Suggesting that children alleviate their unhappiness by creating a world of their own, Hart says that it is a small step from that private world into the fantasy world of the theater.
"What," asks Hart, "is any play but the expression of the author's conscious fantasy at that particular moment? I would hazard a guess that no play idea is ever completely accidental, and I would hazard a further guess that the temperament, the
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