STAGE REVIEW : ‘ANGEL’ HAS ITS WINGS CLIPPED

Within every fat man, they say, there’s a thin man crying to get out. Sometimes he actually does so--and you find yourself missing the fat man.

So it is with Ketti Frings’ 1957 stage version of “Look Homeward, Angel,” which opened Friday at the Pasadena Playhouse. Frings does a good job cutting down Thomas Wolfe’s sprawling novel into a playable family drama about a boy stumbling toward manhood against considerable resistance from his mother.

It would have worked beautifully on Philco Playhouse. Today, you wish Frings had been able to incorporate more of Wolfe’s voice as narrator. “Eugene Gant” is, of course, young Thomas Wolfe, and Wolfe writes about his coming-of-age with enormous excitement, like a man discovering that his homely backyard is full of buried treasure. The sentences roll into paragraphs, the pages grow into chapters, the chapters mount and mount, and the memories keep coming.

Even when he’s laughing at young Eugene, Wolfe truly feels himself embarked on an epic, and the reader can still feel the heat with which he wrote. In comparison, Frings’ script sees Eugene from the outside, and allows the viewer to see his adventures-on-the-road-to-manhood as fairly typical, given this genre. What teen-ager hasn’t been told by his mother to throw his shoulders back and look at people?

An extraordinary book, “Look Homeward, Angel” makes a fairly predictable play. (It might make a wonderful TV miniseries, shot on location in Wolfe’s North Carolina.) Nor can one get particularly excited about Jessica Ismana Myerson’s Pasadena Playhouse staging. We see who the characters are supposed to be, and can relate to them in a distant sort of way, but the heart isn’t stung.

Kyle Secor is young Eugene Gant, and Shaun Cassidy is his beloved, doomed big brother, Ben. Each gives a likable, open, but disappointingly mild performance--the volatility of Wolfe’s young men isn’t felt.

John Astin as their alcoholic father tries for emotional extravagance, but the results are pushed and phony. Joyce Van Patten as their mother suggests the mother in “The Glass Menagerie” without the charm. It’s admirable that Van Patten doesn’t ask us to love her, but we ought to feel something.

The Pasadena Playhouse doesn’t have the money to spend on long rehearsal periods, and that may be why the acting has a lick-and-a-promise feel to it. The large supporting cast represent the townsfolk capably (particularly Grace Zabriskie as Madame Elizabeth, proprietor of the local fancy house), but their performances tend toward caricature and you wouldn’t be surprised to hear them break out with a chorus of “Lyda Rose.” If it dared, this “Look Homeward, Angel” would be a musical comedy.