Worthy of a Ballyhoo

On the surface, “The Last Night of Ballyhoo,” the Conejo Players’ current production, deals with whether the mousy daughter in a well-to-do Atlanta family will have a date for an important social event. Playwright Alfred Uhry, best-known for “Driving Miss Daisy,” doesn’t let the audience know what he’s really up to until well into the play, which won the 1997 Tony Award for best drama.

The few remaining members of the Freitag and Levy families share a large home: Adolph Freitag and his wife, Reba; Beulah “Boo” Levy, the widow of Adolph’s brother and business partner; and her daughter, Lala. Shy and not brimful of social graces, Lala has returned from an aborted stay at a university and can’t figure out what to do with herself. But she is looking forward to Ballyhoo, an annual society ball, if only Peachy Weil will come up from Louisiana to escort her.

In the meantime, Adolph has hired Joe Farkas, a brash New Yorker, to help with the business. And the Freitags’ bright and poised daughter, Sunny, is coming home from her rather more successful stay at an Eastern university. And oh, yes, it’s 1939, and “Gone with the Wind” is about to have its world premiere, also in Atlanta.

All this moves along nicely, pretty much as one might expect, until one of the daughters recalls the day she wound up at a restricted (did I mention that the families are Jewish?) social club. And that’s where Uhry’s story begins, although it’s not about discrimination against Jews, but something perhaps even more sinister. When that comes into play, the story becomes consistently, and rewardingly, meatier than the basic plot would suggest.

Director Jere Rae-Mansfield has assembled a strong cast, with most members--Beth Folart (Lala), David Silverstein (Joe), Kiah Gordon (Sunny) and Michael Muser (Peachy)--making welcome Conejo Players debuts. Old-timers, so to speak, are Christine Scholle (Reba), Lady Jan Faulkner (Boo) and Scott Mansfield--the director’s husband--in an especially noteworthy performance as Adolph, who provides both common sense and comic relief.

The women, except Gordon, tend to screech a lot, in heavy-handed attempts at Southern accents, which may be Uhry’s notion. On the one hand, they’re certainly easy to hear; on the other, they’re sometimes hard to understand.

DETAILS

“The Last Night of Ballyhoo” continues Thursday-Saturday at 8 p.m. through Feb. 10 at the Conejo Players Theater, 351 S. Moorpark Road in Moorpark. Tickets are $10 Thursdays, $12 Fridays, $14 Saturdays. For reservations or further information, call 495-3715.

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Word has reached this desk that three local companies--the Rubicon, the Cabrillo Music Theater and Gold Coast Plays--have received multiple nominations for the 24th annual Robby Awards. Having somehow missed the first 23, we checked in with Rob Stevens, the Los Angeles-based theater critic who single-handedly decides both the nominations and ultimate winners, which will be announced at a ceremony in Hollywood on Feb. 12.

Stevens says he sees “about 150 shows a year, sometimes as far north as Sacramento,” adding that although some categories have more than 15 nominations, “there certainly aren’t 150 shows nominated.” His reviews, formerly distributed in a number of limited-circulation magazines, now appear online at https://www.showmag.com.

A couple of years after the awards began, Stevens said, “We tried having the ceremony at the Pasadena Playhouse, but people thought it was too classy.” The show was first held at a former bus station in Hollywood, commemorated by the current trophy: a broken-down bus with comedy and tragedy masks on top.

The Robbys are now presented at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel’s Blossom Room, site of the first Academy Awards, which seems about right.

Stevens, whose self-effacing manner confirms that he’s well aware of a certain amount of ludicrousness that comes with a one-man awards ceremony, is held in respect by many in the Southern California theater community, aware of the dedication it takes to see so many shows. And, he admitted, “I have lots of entertainment [at the ceremony] like they used to do at the Tonys, and give our awards in between. At times, it becomes almost a roast of me.”

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Todd Everett can be reached at teverett@concentric.net.