The Laughing Stock Theatre Company will have audiences rolling in laughter when it presents Moss Hart's "Light Up the Sky." The play will have a preview on Wednesday, May 28, and will continue through Sunday, June 1, at the nexStage Theatre in Ketchum. All shows begin at 7 p.m. Tickets for Wednesday, May 28, preview are $10. All other performances are $20. For tickets and details, call 726-4tks.
"Light Up the Sky" is a 1940s retro dark comedy about the out-of-town tryout of a play called "The Time Is Now." Savvy dialogue plus nostalgia for a bygone theatrical era is played out in big and over-the-top performances.
"It has period costumes, and they are bright, showy and flashy," said Ketchum's Mackenzie Harbaugh, who plays Peter Sloan, a novice playwright. "The set will be very period with an Art Deco look. Guys will be in penguin suits and the audience will get that old-school, Broadway, staying-at-The-Ritz-type feeling. New Yorkers will love it."
The entire play takes place in a Ritz-Carlton hotel room in Boston, while the Shriners are in town and everyone is misbehaving. There is lots of drinking and drama.
Played by Patsy Wygle, Irene, the star of the "The Time is Now" is whom everyone else circles. A veteran of the stage, she is a viper in a boa who is putting her career on the line with this show. Everyone has much to lose if Sloan's play is not a success.
"What the hell is this play about?" one character says about the play that Sidney Black (Dean Cerutti) is producing, and Carleton Fitzgerald (Steve D'Smith) is directing. The play is so dark the characters opt to call it an allegory, but of course even they don't really know what it means.
Yet, the play's purpose reveals itself as an allegory for the loss of innocence for Harbaugh's character, Sloan. "Light Up the Sky" is about theater people and all their dysfunctional unions during a production. It is a family of sorts with Stella Livingston as the mother figure, played by Page Klune, Sidney Black as the father figure, the star child played by Wygle and all the rest of the bickering, co-dependent family members.
The play opened in 1948 on Broadway. Its post-World War II sensibility illustrates the sentiments of the time. Director Keith Moore has given the actors a great deal of room to explore their characters and created a hilarious rendition of one of Moss Hart's rare solo-outing straight plays.
Hart is known for his many hits including "You Can't Take It With You," "The Man who Came to Dinner" and "My Fair Lady."
"Light Up the Sky" Playbill
Directed by Keith Moore
Charlotte Hemmings............. Miss Lowell
Steve D'Smith.......................... Carleton Fitzgerald
Dana DuGan.............................. Frances Black
Page Klune................................ Stella Livingston
Mackenzie Harbaugh.............. Peter Sloan
Ben Shepps............................... Owen Turner
Dean Cerutti............................. Sidney Black
Patsy Wygle.............................. Irene Livingston
Doug Neff.................................. Sven/Shriner
Bard Widmer............................ Tyler Rayburn
Steve Pruitt............................. William H. Gallegher
Michael Godfrey...................... Shriner
Cop.............................................. Jamey Reynolds
"Light Up the Sky" cast members reading their review are, from left to right, Dana DuGan, Page Klune, Dean Cerutti and Patsy Wygle.
Photo by Sabina Dana Plasse
