You Can T Take It With You Play

Ever since its original Broadway production in the late '30s, "You Can't Take It With You," by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, has been part of the amateur theatrical cano n. The Pasadena Playhouse offered it, for example, during an all-Kaufman season in 1941. The Laguna Playhouse did it in 1966.

A visit to the Vanderhof-Sycamore household of "You Can't Take It With You" is pretty much guaranteed to make a person wish for a permanent place in this bustling, happy family.

When South Coast Repertory's revival of "You Can't Take It With You" opens here tonight, it will be the first time in the theater's 27-year history that it has mounted anything by those acknowledged masters of American comedy, Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman.

Ever since its original Broadway production in the late '30s, "You Can't Take It With You," by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, has been part of the amateur theatrical cano n. The Pasadena Playhouse offered it, for example, during an all-Kaufman season in 1941. The Laguna Playhouse did it in 1966.

A visit to the Vanderhof-Sycamore household of "You Can't Take It With You" is pretty much guaranteed to make a person wish for a permanent place in this bustling, happy family.

Tired of staging standard high school fare such as "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "Our Town," drama students at El Dorado High were excited when they first saw another school perform the play "And They Dance Real Slow in Jackson." Eager to stage a contemporary work that has not been performed countless times on high school stages across the country, the El Dorado drama students chose it for their May production.

Christopher Hart fondly remembers those rainy Saturday afternoons in Pennsylvania, when family friends visiting for the day were compelled to entertain themselves within the warm, dry interior of his parents' 18th-Century colonial farmhouse. "My father would bring out play books and all the guests would act out the various roles," Hart said, smiling at the recollection. "I always seemed to get the non-speaking parts."

When South Coast Repertory's revival of "You Can't Take It With You" opens here tonight, it will be the first time in the theater's 27-year history that it has mounted anything by those acknowledged masters of American comedy, Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman.