Like Father, Like Son? Sort Of

Christopher Hart has dropped a bombshell.

As often happens, Moss Hart’s son--who has directed several of his father’s plays--has been asked about his dad’s collaboration with George S. Kaufman. What, exactly, did each man contribute to such comedies as “Once in a Lifetime,” “You Can’t Take It With You” and “The Man Who Came to Dinner”?

“I have a list at home of every word from every play, and who wrote what,” he says.

Wow! Once this gets out, theater historians from everywhere will be camped on his doorstep. . . .

Hey, wait a minute. He said that much too calmly.

Rats. He’s just kidding.

Truth is, Hart goes on to explain: “They never discussed it; it was never something that they wanted to be pinned down about.”

The 51-year-old Hart--whose mother is actress, television personality and arts advocate Kitty Carlisle Hart--was just 13 when his father died at 57 in 1961, so much of what he knows comes from his father’s 1959 autobiography, “Act One.”

However, based upon his child’s-eye view of the men, as well as his subsequent study of the plays, he offers this observation: “George was a brilliant structuralist, and I think he contributed a lot of that to all of his work.” As for his father, he says: “I’m amazed at the imagination and the ability to create characters who are funny and moving and real.”

He marveled anew at these talents while directing “You Can’t Take It With You” for Actors Co-op in Hollywood, and it shows through in his work. Reviews have praised him for the affection and the attention to detail that he brought to the production.

“My father had a history of being good with actors, and I hope I’ve inherited some of that. My mother has a strong theatrical flair; she’s a very strong-willed, intelligent woman--and I hope I’ve picked up some of that. I think I’m a good combination of the two.”

He speaks in a soft, gentle voice, and he has an easy--often self-deprecating--sense of humor. What’s most notable, though, is the striking resemblance he bears to his father, particularly in his broad, professorial face.

Hart was too young to have seen the original productions of his father’s famous comedies of manners with Kaufman, or his dad’s collaboration with George Gershwin and Kurt Weill on the musical “Lady in the Dark.” It wasn’t until 1948--the same year his father wrote and directed “Light Up the Sky” for Broadway--that the younger Hart arrived on the scene.

By the mid-’50s, however, he was old enough to watch his father in action. These were Moss Hart’s prime directing years, as he staged the legendary premiere of “My Fair Lady” and, later, “Camelot.”

“I’d like to say I got all sorts of wonderful insight,” Chris Hart says of his visits to rehearsals, “but I really didn’t.”

With a smile, he adds that it was the ingenue in both productions--and not his father--who made the strongest impression at the time. “I fell in love with Julie Andrews.”

But, he adds: “I got the sense of ‘family’ that was created in these situations”--that “wonderful warmth engendered in the company”--which he now nurtures in his own productions.

He gets high marks from Alan Young, star of the early ‘60s television show “Mister Ed,” who plays Grandpa Vanderhof in “You Can’t Take It With You.”

“He’s got what I would call the perfect director’s approach, in that he lets the actor go ahead and give his interpretation and moves, and then he guides them,” Young says. “He’s a very gentle man, but there’s a strength there.”

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That strength shows through in Hart’s respect for his father’s writing, which Young, in turn, respects, even though it means that the actors get stuck with jokes here and there that die at every performance.

Young explains that he pointed out one such line during rehearsals, suggesting that its humor might be lost on present-day audiences. Hart’s response: “Let’s do it anyway.”

“At the first show, I heard one laugh, and it was Chris,” Young recalls with a chuckle.

Mother Kitty Carlisle Hart admits that she worried, at first, about her son’s entry into show business. “I think it’s a handicap being Moss’ son--the comparisons, particularly in the beginning, before you’ve even found your sea legs. It’s unfair.” She feels, though, that with each new project, he’s moving further and further beyond all of that.

Chris Hart lives in Chatsworth with wife Beth Taylor Hart, who works in the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s development division, and their 4-year-old daughter, Emma Catherine.

He didn’t rush into the family business. First, he studied literature and music composition, wrote rock music criticism and toyed with the idea of medical school (his younger sister, Catherine, eventually became the doctor in the family). Finally, theater called to him, and he set about teaching himself how to produce, eventually becoming part of the teams behind the Broadway presentations of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Song & Dance” and the 25th anniversary revival of Athol Fugard’s “Blood Knot,” both in 1985.

In Los Angeles, he co-produced a staging of “Light Up the Sky,” starring Peter Falk and Nancy Marchand, at the Ahmanson Theatre in 1987. He moved here about that time, hoping to segue into television. He and a pair of producing partners shopped around an idea for a television series based on “You Can’t Take It With You,” and he became an executive producer of that syndicated show, which updated the Kaufman & Hart play to the present. It ran for just one season on NBC stations, in 1987-88.

In 1991, he took up play directing when West Coast Ensemble invited him to stage “The Man Who Came to Dinner.” The production was well received, as was his 1992 staging of “Light Up the Sky” for West Coast Ensemble and, a few months later, for Cal State Long Beach’s California Repertory Company. Since then, he has co-written and directed the plays “Teeing Off,” a comedy about men, women and golf, and “Swifty,” about his dad’s agent, Irving “Swifty” Lazar.

He is set to direct “Once in a Lifetime” at West Coast Ensemble next summer, and a New York production of “Swifty” is being studied. Meanwhile, in hopes of making a transition into television directing, Hart has been observing other directors’ work, which is often the first step toward an assignment.

His staging for Actors Co-op is his first attempt at directing “You Can’t Take It With You,” perhaps the best-loved and most enduring of Kaufman & Hart’s plays.

It’s a story of “ambition, career, the rat race versus family and human values,” he says, and of having “the ability to chuck it all in order to live some kind of profitable inner life.”

The play’s set serves as his backdrop while he talks. He sits at a dining table, which is the heart of the Vanderhof-Sycamore household. It’s where Grandpa--who long ago abandoned a promising business career so that he could follow his bliss--and his free-spirited progeny gather each evening for prayer and sustenance.

The family’s happy-go-lucky lifestyle comes into question when young Alice Sycamore falls in love with her boss’ son. Though she adores her family, she is nervous about having her prospective in-laws--who are wealthy and socially conscious--visit her home, where the basement is a fireworks factory and the dining room is a combination playwriting office, ballet studio, candy kitchen, print shop and zoo.

As the fateful meeting spins wildly out of control, the absurdities of both approaches to life--endless fun versus a rigid sense of responsibility--are amply conveyed. Still, it’s pretty clear which side we’re meant to root for.

As Grandpa Vanderhof says, gently chiding the other family’s patriarch: “What do you think you get your indigestion from? Happiness? No, sir. You get it because most of your time is spent in doing things you don’t want to do.”

So, which family would the authors themselves have felt more at home in? Hart smiles. “They definitely were on Grandpa’s side,” he says. “They subscribed to that philosophy and, on the other hand, lived the overachiever’s life.”

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“YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU,” Actors Co-op at the Crossley Theatre, on the campus of First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood, 1760 N. Gower St., Hollywood. Dates: Thursdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2:30 p.m.; also Oct. 30, Nov. 27, 2:30 p.m. Dark Nov. 26. Thursday performances end Nov. 4. Ends Dec. 12. Price: $17. Phone: (323) 462-8460.