Amateur Theaters Ahead of the Pros In Mining the Hart-Kaufman Canon

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.

But it wasn’t until Ellis Rabb staged a Broadway revival of “You Can’t Take It With You” in 1965, four years after both Hart and Kaufman had died, that it began to receive major attention from professional theaters.

“It all evolved from Rabb’s first revival,” says Anne Kaufman Schneider, Kaufman’s daughter and literary executor. “That set up the play as an American classic, as it were. Over the course of the years since then, I think I’ve seen it a hundred times. It really has been quite constant.”

In addition to a second Broadway revival in 1983, starring Jason Robards Jr., “You Can’t Take It With You” has been done on television with Jean Stapleton and Art Carney.

Other celebrated Hart-Kaufman comedies also have received considerable attention.

The Royal Shakespeare Company revived “Once in a Lifetime,” the playwrights’ 1930 spoof of Hollywood, a decade ago in London. It was revived again, earlier this winter, at Robert Brustein’s American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass. An Italian production opened a few days ago near Rome, Schneider says.

In the meantime, a revival of “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” the 1939 Hart-Kaufman comedy about a family’s encounter with a curmudgeon, opened Thursday at Hollywood’s West Coast Ensemble Theatre under the direction of Chris Hart, Moss Hart’s son. Another revival is scheduled at Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater in the spring.