Show People Still ‘Light’ Up a Stage

“How do you say hello to the Salzburg Festival? How do you shake hands with Tchaikovsky’s Fifth?”

In the theater world according to Moss Hart, those rhetorical questions are the sound of a producer, raving. He’s raving about a playwright whose end-of-the-world allegory is so bold, so fine, that taking it to Broadway will be like “sticking a Roman candle into the tired face of show business.”

Hart’s 1948 comedy “Light Up the Sky” depicts 12 hours in the life of an allegory. It is a three-act mash note to the theater, a dispatch from a good-humored war correspondent, the war being the ego-mashing purgatory known as the out-of-town tryout.

As classy boulevard entertainments go, “Light Up the Sky” is pretty swell. So is the Pasadena Playhouse revival, one of the most accomplished productions on a major L.A. stage all season.

Some of us always will be suckers for the bitchery and wisecrackery of what used to be called “show people,” at least as orchestrated by Hart. It’s not easy to nail in terms of style, however. When it’s made to appear that way, you’re lucky.

We’re witness here to the birth of a “shattering and beautiful play” (in the words of its tremulous director) and its baptism by fire in Boston. Hart sets the action in a suite at the Boston Ritz-Carlton, peopled by actors, writers, mothers of actors, husbands, Shriners. In a loop-the-loop worthy of Pirandello, Hart actually spent much of the Boston tryout for “Light Up the Sky” in a hotel room at the Ritz, transforming a seriocomic piece about the theater’s travails into the savvier audience-pleasing standard we have today.

*

Act 1 introduces the key players, all knocking back cocktails three hours before opening night. This is “magic time,” as director Carleton Fitzgerald (Mark Capri) calls it. The playwright (Matt Roth) is nervous but grateful. The producer (Dan Butler), a burlesque and ice-show man at heart, is grateful--and not nervous. The star, Irene Livingston (Suzie Plakson, very good, mistress of the plummy Eastern-lockjaw vocal inflection), can’t thank the writer enough for the chance at something noble.

Act 2: The bomb drops. The audience, we learn from the stunned participants postshow, laughs at the wrong places. Tempers flare. Insults fly, and fly again.

Act 3: A reversal of fortune.

Time was, you could easily assemble a “Light Up the Sky” cast, schooled in the knowledge of the archetypes and vanities depicted in the script. These days, it’s harder. Director David Lee takes a pacing risk here--and it pays off. He has a strong enough ensemble to sustain an easygoing stride of a production.

The play’s hotfoot is the hard-driving, ever-kvetching Billy Rose archetype, impresario Sidney Black. He’s played by Butler, Bulldog on TV’s “Frasier” (co-created by Lee). It’s a nimble performance, a tad monotonous vocally but extremely deft with things such as a spit-take involving a cigarette. The shtick doesn’t come fast and furiously in this “Light Up the Sky”; anyway, it’s not that sort of play. But some choice sight gags never hurt. At one point the regally imposing Plakson sinks into her cocktail dress on the floor, in a pout. It’s as if she were melting, like the wicked witch in “The Wizard of Oz.”

*

You hate to pull a favorite out of this ensemble, but what the hell. Linda Hart’s a riot as Frances Black, wife of the producer, laden with diamonds and a complete lack of pretense. (As “Guys and Dolls” gangster Big Jule once said: “Now there’s a right broad.”) Hart has a skeet shooter’s sense of timing, yet, at the risk of sounding like a report card, she also plays well with others. Potentially dullish roles are brought artfully to life by such pros as Elizabeth Anne Smith (Miss Lowell) and Tom Byrd (as Irene’s stockbroker husband, the Ralph Bellamy role).

Scenic designer Roy Christopher’s vision of the Ritz isn’t quite as luxe as you’d like; the color scheme’s a bit drab, rather than muted-swanky. It does, however, allow Randy Gardell’s first-rate costumes to pop out--hilariously so, in the case of Capri’s screaming-red jammies and slippers.

A sharp detail. It’s one of many in a confident production, showing off a play--not shattering and beautiful, perhaps, but as fetching as ever--to polished advantage.

* “Light Up the Sky,” Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 5 and 9 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends Dec. 19. $13.50-$42.50. (800) 233-3123. Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes.

Elizabeth Anne Smith: Miss Lowell

Mark Capri: Carleton Fitzgerald

Linda Hart: Frances Black

Mark Blum: Owen Turner

Millicent Martin: Stella Livingston

Matt Roth: Peter Sloan

Dan Butler: Stanley Black

Milan Dragicevich: Sven/Shriner/1st man

Suzie Plakson: Irene Livingston

Tom Byrd: Tyler Rayburn

Sheridan Crist: Max/Cop/2nd man

Patrick Kerr: William H. Gallagher/3rd man

Written by Moss Hart. Directed by David Lee. Set by Roy Christopher. Costumes by Randy Gardell. Lighting by Michael Gilliam. Sound by Anthony Carr. Hair, wig and makeup by Judi Lewin. Production stage manager Cari Norton.