Ambitious, fluidly staged, "The First Picture Show" wants it all. The show's makers--librettists and lyricists Ain Gordon and David Gordon, and composer Jeanine Tesori, whose evocative score is played on two pianos, silent movie-style--tell their stories of early Hollywood in the expansive, try-anything spirit of their subject.
That subject is a fictional female silent movie director, Anne First, working in the ragged but golden era before consolidation forced small studios out of business. During that time, more women managed to wear more movie-making hats than the mainline history books would suggest. "The First Picture Show" pays tribute to those pioneers, while dealing on the fly with issues of censorship, prejudice, racism, hypocrisy and ruthless commercial pressures. (All of which, thankfully, have left the film industry by now.)
This near-musical, now at the Mark Taper Forum after its world premiere in San Francisco, offers a lot. It's cleverly mounted. Everything on scenic designer Robert Brill's soundstage setting is on wheels, pushed around by the 14-person ensemble. Director-choreographer David Gordon generates a constant but discerning swirl of movement, shifting the action on a dime. At its best, the staging deploys silent film techniques--title cards locating the action, deliberately out-of-tune piano underscoring--in ways that work theatrically.
When it's clicking, this investigation of unsung heroines behind the camera makes a virtue of its layered storytelling, its attempt to blend history with domestic drama, in two time periods, no less. Other times, it's as if the show's primary streams were disconnected from their many tributaries.
"The First Picture Show" has foremost on its mind the story of a movie-mad sister and brother. Anne Furstmann (Ellen Greene, winning and in swell voice) leaves brother Louie (Steven Skybell) and Louie's scowling wife (Norma Fire) behind in Ohio for a crack at the movies. Furstmann becomes First, and goes to work for producer Carl Laemmle (Ken Marks, playing one of the show's many real-life characters). She joins a group of female movie-making colleagues, creating socially conscious movies alongside the usual serial fodder. Later Louie and his wife join Anne, only to have personal and political forces divide the family.
