Warm ‘River’ Runs Through NoHo

Featuring more hearty invocations of “famiglia!” than the entire Olive Garden ad campaign, Joe DiPietro’s “Over the River and Through the Woods” made its West Coast premiere Friday as part of another, related premiere.

The occasion: The opening of North Hollywood’s El Portal Center for the Arts. The popular DiPietro comedy, a certifiable cheek-pincher that wants your laughter and wants your tears, welcomed patrons to El Portal’s ambitious three-stage facility on Lankershim Boulevard, an anchor of the NoHo theater district.

El Portal’s flexible 94-seat “black box” facility will be completed in the coming weeks. A 43-seat storefront space has been in use for some time. But the center’s main attractions are the 390-seat mainstage proscenium, and, for the run of “Over the River and Through the Woods,” the top-billed, highly companionable presence of Carol Lawrence and Joseph Campanella and some equally savvy cohorts.

The building itself, which dates back to the “The Jazz Singer,” originally served up vaudeville, silents and talkies. Its mainstage seating area has been cut down and reconfigured from the original 1,400-seat capacity. The 73-year-old proscenium arch framing the stage remains intact.

The stage itself is huge. Huge. It’ll no doubt present tricky design and staging challenges, as would any stage this wide, this broad, this tall.

Passing through the spacious and cleverly updated lobby areas, you enter the mainstage auditorium and you’re struck by the heft and scale of the stage, and of all that space surrounding it. The auditorium’s new seats keep you (or me, anyway) pitched at a slight forward tilt, leaning toward a stage that’s looming on top of you to begin with.

Despite that, a single visit to El Portal suggests a qualified success. Spatially and acoustically some improvements must be made. Body mikes aren’t the preferred way to solve any problem in a 400-seat house. But the “miracle on Lankershim” has indeed opened its doors on schedule. Artistic director Jeremiah Morris has laid out encouraging programming plans to mix mainstream and off-center fare, percolating on two or three stages, often on the same night.

“Over the River and Through the Woods” comes from the co-author of the musical revue “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change.” A newer work by DiPietro, “The Kiss at City Hall,” made its West Coast premiere over the weekend at the Pasadena Playhouse. He’s a middlebrow commercial theater force. “Over the River,” a simple story of a guy and his grandparents, is about to get a million or so productions nationwide.

Every Sunday in Hoboken, N.J., marketing executive Nick Cristano (Stuart Fratkin) eats dinner with his grandparents: Frank and Aida Gianelli (played by Joseph Cardinale and Erica Yohn) and the Cristanos, Nunzio and Emma (Joseph Campanella and Carol Lawrence). One Sunday Nick informs them he has been offered a job in Seattle. The grandparents don’t like it. On a subsequent Sunday, Emma invites the niece (Shannon O’Hurley) of her canasta partner to dinner, with the hope that Nick will marry and stay put.

Much of DiPietro’s material gravitates toward food. (Grandson tells grandmother he’s not hungry; grandmother says, “Fine, I’ll make you a sandwich.”) Nick is a dangerously unsympathetic character in the early going, a condescending butt-head--until he connects with his better familial instincts, that is.

It’s all patently formulaic and patently comforting--and in the right hands, it plays. Lawrence and Campanella look great, finesse the material just so and in general prove that a relaxed touch never hurt anyone. (Campanella in particular is a Zen master of onstage relaxation. He’s Mister Relaxation.) Cardinale and Yohn display pinpoint timing, and jerk a fair share of tears as well. Fratkin’s Nick finds a comfortable level of deadpan irritability, and in the paper-thin role of the Romantic Complication, O’Hurley more than holds her own.

Everyone covers a lot of ground up there, literally. Director Asaad Kelada and scenic designer D. Martyn Bookwalter do what they can to concentrate our visual attention, though placing the unseen front door downstage requires long, distracting entrances and exits along the lip of the stage. Bookwalter is forced to fill things out scenically with wallpapered panels depicting a paradox: an enormous cozy Hoboken house. The play’s title could be changed to “Over the River and Through the Woods to Grandmother’s Really Wide Ranch House We Go.”

But director Kelada’s ensemble warms things up for us. Tengo famiglia, we keep hearing in DiPietro’s play. By not foisting too much on a play that does the work for you, and them, these seasoned, flavorsome performers flatter it throughout.

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* “Over the River and Through the Woods,” El Portal Center for the Arts, 5269 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. Tuesdays-Wednesdays, 7 p.m.; Thursdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends Feb. 6. $35-$42. (800) 233-3123 or (818) 508-4200. Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes.

Stuart Fratkin: Nick Cristano

Joseph Cardinale: Frank Gianelli

Erica Yohn: Aida Gianelli

Joseph Campanella: Nunzio Cristano

Carol Lawrence: Emma Cristano

Shannon O’Hurley: Caitlin O’Hare

Written by Joe DiPietro. Directed by Asaad Kelada. Set and lighting by D. Martyn Bookwalter. Costumes by Diane Ross. Sound by Steve Shaw. Production stage manager Dana Craig.