While her harried manager (a savvy Laurence Ballard) picks up the slack, Current Queen of the Theatre Julie Cavendish (Barbara Dirickson) presides over the romantic and professional misadventures of her up-and-coming actress daughter Gwen (Betsy Brandt), her foolhardy, cinema idol brother Anthony (Frank Corrado), and her aging grande dame mother Fanny (Jeannie Carson).
In a mostly accomplished ensemble, Dirickson is the central charm. She's in hip-swinging, clenched-fist mode, and it's effortlessly funny. Her hysterical nervous breakdown that closes Act Two is priceless, a bit that is written, directed, and performed to be a showstopper that, I promise, accomplishes its task.
Though his glowing affection for this material is obvious, I wish director Warner Shook had kicked up his heels that high a bit more. The play may be a more substantial look at a theatrical clan than, say, Coward's Hay Fever, but it's fueled by some of the same comic energy, which is occasionally (and unfortunately) downplayed here; the show is often more genial than truly funny. This is especially true in the hands of hardworking R. Hamilton Wright and Katie Forgette, both of whom are a bit thick-tongued with the play's crackling vernacular as vain Cavendish family friends. I could've handled a lot more of the vigor with which the exhilaratingly jaunty Corrado bounds about the stage, hurling ripe commands like "Come on upstairs everybody, while I take a bath!"
Shook's approach undeniably pays off in spades when Kaufman and Ferber lurch into their dramatic moments. In a typical '30s conceit that is difficult to make organic, the playwrights toss a life-threatening cog into the wheel, and because Shook has paid such close attention to the essential good nature of these familial ties, he manages to keep things spinning; negotiating touching, tender work from Carson's fading matriarch. The sentiment here has a shine to it, a sparkling sense of all the golden treasures we've sacrificed in losing the grand theatrical tradition that the Intiman and The Royal Family are fondly toasting.
