THEATER REVIEW : ‘The Big Knife’ No Laughing Matter : It is to the cast’s credit that it refused to go along with the audience, and instead enacted the play straight.

Sometimes stupid audiences can harm plays as much as the director or the actors.

For instance, many in the opening night audience for Clifford Odets’ vitriolic Hollywood diatribe “The Big Knife”--currently at the Alliance Repertory Company in Burbank--appeared under the illusion that they were watching a movie-land parody instead of a dark drama, as in film noir.

Cackling and howling at every little excessive gesture, half the house either found it impossible to connect with the Hollywood of the 1940s or acted like friends of the company who thought that they were doing the show a favor by laughing it up.

True, “The Big Knife” (which premiered on Broadway in 1949) is occasionally turgid and melodramatic, triggering some warm smiles, but it’s not a comedy. It’s to the 12-member cast’s credit that it refused to play along with the hyenas in the house and continued to enact this tale of idealism corrupted by power and venality as straight as you can play it nearly half a century after it was written.

Along with George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s Hollywood satire “You Can’t Take It With You,” “The Big Knife,” despite its talkiness, is among the best plays about Hollywood yet written. It translated into one of the most stark movies made about Hollywood (the 1955 “Big Knife” with Jack Palance and Rod Steiger). And its popularity continues to produce multiple revivals: among them, the just-shuttered version at the Stella Adler Academy Theatre in Hollywood, a production three years ago at the Gene Dynarski Theater and an American Playhouse PBS teleplay in 1988.

But let’s not kid ourselves. More than its noble theme, the biggest reason for the play’s popularity is that actors and directors love to chomp into its juicy roles. Also working to the players’ advantage is the fact that Hollywood hasn’t changed that much.

In Burbank, the show’s director and co-star Scott Allan Campbell makes a terrific nefarious studio boss who forces his biggest contract star (Sherman Howard) to make a pact with Satan (himself). Short, muscular and dripping an oily charm, Campbell may not be representative of today’s studio chief, but he sure suggests a mix of old moguls, particularly MGM’s Louis B. Mayer and Columbia’s Harry Cohn.

With the audience seated arena-style around the lush Art Deco set (a towering, multileveled Beverly Hills mansion impressively designed by Matthew C. Jacobs), the production inexorably marches to its dark conclusion.

But not without its missteps. As the embattled action mega-star wrestling with his principles, Howard is too smooth and worldly to mirror the character’s craggy depths.

But the rest of the cast, notably co-producer Suzan Fellman as a trampy hanger-on and Bruno Acalinas as the star’s wimpy publicist, are artfully crafted portraits.

Other actors are right on the mark: Bob Neches’ loyal agent, Susan Burke’s Louella Parsons / Hedda Hopper / Dorothy Manners-inspired gossip columnist, stand-in John Cirigliano’s sensitive screenwriter and, perhaps most strongly, Peter Fox’s studio hatchet man. Fox takes a hackneyed role and remains so blissfully in callow character that you strangely come to like the guy.

The wardrobes--check out those plaid jackets and cottons--are a hoot by costume designer Rachel Leathers. The coiffeurs (uncredited) have big band sound written all over them. And, on a politically incorrect front, how refreshing it is to watch characters who can’t function without a cigarette and a Scotch and water in their hand.

WHERE AND WHEN

What: “The Big Knife.”

Location: Alliance Repertory Company, 3204 W. Magnolia Blvd., Burbank. (Entrance from rear.)

Hours: 8 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays, through Oct. 24.

Price: $15.

Call: (213) 660-8587.