Theatre in Review: You Can't Take It With You (Longacre Theatre)

You Can't Take It With You ends in a display of fireworks, which, however colorful, pales compared to the human sparklers on stage at the Longacre. Scott Ellis' production of Kaufman and Hart's utopian farce, about a family of screwballs who spend their days following their bliss, features some of the most luxurious casting we've seen in some time, with prominent names filling even the tiniest of roles. Seemingly, everyone wanted to get in on the fun-- - and why not? It's a privilege to be part a company that stirs up this much hilarity.

Among those playing the oddball members of the Sycamore household, pride of place goes to Kristine Nielsen. She is Penny Sycamore, housewife, hostess, and artiste manqué, who turns out one unfinished play after another, usually with titles like Sex Takes a Holiday. (As her daughter, Alice, ruefully notes, Penny became a playwright because one day a typewriter was delivered to the house by mistake.) In Penny's current epic, the heroine escapes into a monastery, a premise that, surprisingly, leaves her creatively stuck. "With 40 monks and one girl, you'd think something would happen," she muses. When the playwriting bug deserts her, she turns to painting Greco-Roman tableaux with equally risible results. Never mind: Nielsen has a way of making the strangest behavior seem perfectly sane; after all, who wouldn't use kittens as paperweights?

Equally entrancing is Annaleigh Ashford as Essie, another of Penny's daughters. Essie is a confectioner-- - her specialty is a chocolate known as Love Dreams-- - but the dance is her true calling. Outfitted with toe shoes, this parlor Pavlova goes about her duties en pointe, making like one of the Wilis in Giselle as she crosses the room, striking poses right out of a Degas canvas and making soulful faces that indicate her deep, deep devotion to her art. Her dance solo, performed to Beethoven's "Ode to Joy"-- -- played on a xylophone (don't ask)-- -- is a perfect farrago of bourrées, jetés, and cabrioles, ending in a somersault, just for the hell of it. Ashford is a distinctive deadpan comedienne in the Judy Holliday style, and everything she does here is delectable.

There's plenty of fun from the other members of the extended Sycamore family, too, including Mark Linn-Baker as Penny's husband, a fireworks inventor who toils in the basement with his assistant, Mr. DePinna (Patrick Kerr), a mailman who came one day to deliver the post and never left; Will Brill as Essie's "husband" (they never got around to marrying), who leaves Trotskyite messages in Essie's chocolate boxes; and Crystal Dickinson and Marc Damon Johnson as the family's breezy housekeeper and her live-in boyfriend.

Watching this bizarre clan go through their daily paces provides abundant fun, especially under Ellis' sure directorial hand, which guarantees that doors will slam, explosions will ignite, and a hysteric will discover the family's snake farm, all at precisely the right moment. Despite the play's cast-iron construction, however, Kaufman and Hart were no mere gag mechanics. It is essential to the play's success that we care about Alice, the one normal sprig on the Sycamore family tree, and her romance with Tony Kirby, the reluctant scion of a wealthy banking clan. Again, casting is key: Making her New York theatre debut, the Australian film and television actress Rose Byrne more than holds her own as Alice, who desperately loves her family but fears that their eccentricities will bar her from marrying into the stiflingly conventional Kirby family. She looks sensational in a blue chiffon evening gown and she lands plenty of laughs as she struggles to maintain decorum when the Sycamores and the Kirbys get together with predictably disastrous results. Fran Kranz is her equal in charm as the ardent Tony, who believes that love can conquer all. During their proposal scene, these young lovers make some beguiling fireworks of their own.

Presiding over everything is James Earl Jones as the sunny patriarch Martin Vanderhof, who walked off the job 35 years earlier and has never regretted it. He now happily fills his days with visits to the zoo and college graduations, when not practicing his own particular form of tax evasion. For all his nonconformist tendencies, he is the family's center of sanity. He knows that Penny can't write for beans and Essie will never collect roses on opening night--but, as long as they're enjoying themselves, who cares? And his eleventh-hour denunciation of the Protestant work ethic, the pursuit of the dollar for its own sake, is as powerful as it ever was. Not only does this passage anchor the play's wild carryings-on in a foundation of reality, it leaves one with the lingering suspicion that Kaufman and Hart may have been our first countercultural playwrights.

And we still haven't gotten to the rest of the cast of crack comic actors that fills the stage, including Reg Rogers as an overdramatic ballet master ("Life is chasing around in me like a squirrel."); Julie Halston as a dipsomaniacal actress ("Minute I enter the stage door, the bottle gets put away--until intermission."); Byron Jennings and Johanna Day as Tony's petrified parents; Karl Kenzler as an apoplectic Treasury agent; and, sweeping into the third act in a burst of stardust and grand dame hauteur, Elizabeth Ashley as Olga, a White Russian countess reduced to waiting tables at Child's Restaurant, who happily takes over the Sycamores' kitchen for a meal they'll never forget. ("The Tsar always told me, 'Olga, don't be stingy with the blintzes!'")

The design team has responded with detailed work worthy of a first-class revival of a Broadway classic. David Rockwell's set design uses a turntable to give us both the exterior and interior of the Sycamores' Victorian clapboard house. The interior, depicting the combination living room/dining room, is amusingly stuffed to the rafters with a parade of props: photos, paintings, pennants, birdcages, swords, antlers, barometers, hatchets, circus posters, Russian dolls, baskets, planters, candelabras, and God only knows what else. Jane Greenwood's costumes range over a variety of styles and social strata, from Mrs. Kirby's stunning evening wear to Essie's tutus, to Olga's time-worn finery. The men's suits are equally superbly tailored. (Greenwood is aided considerably by Tom Watson's period wig and hair designs.) Don Holder's beautifully understated lighting and Jon Weston's sound, which includes a variety of effects and reinforcement of Jason Robert Brown's lively pastiche of '30s dance-band styles, are also fine.

For all its comic complications and slam-bang action, what's most surprising about You Can't Take It With You is the claim it makes on your emotions. Most of us would find it difficult, if not impossible, to live by Martin Vanderhof's philosophy --"Life is simple and kind of beautiful if you let it come to you."--but it still speaks deeply to something inside us. And when Martin gathers his family around the dinner table for a quick prayer ("Of course we want to keep our health, but as far as anything else is concerned, we'll leave it to You.") you suddenly grasp just how fragile this little piece of happiness really is. (It's even more obvious to modern audiences who know that, only two years later, the world will be plunged into war.) You're all but guaranteed to leave the Longacre sated with laughter, but you can count on a couple of honestly earned tears as well.--David Barbour