‘You Can’t Take It With You’ at the OCP
By David Williams
“Let’s play oddball!”
With these words, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann introduces a segment on the “news of the weird” each evening on “Countdown.”
The Sycamore family could provide Olbermann with a year’s worth of crazy material if he would only visit the Omaha Community Playhouse for the hilarious Pulitzer Prize and Best Picture Oscar-winning “You Can’t Take It With You.”
The Sycamores, that snake-breeding, ballet-dancing, fireworks-making, Trotsky-reading, xylophone-playing, play-writing, stamp-collecting family circus of a clan make for a madcap mélange, and you quickly get the feeling that almost anything can happen at any given moment (and it usually does).
Just when you think that things can’t become any zanier, Alice, the only “normal” family member (played beautifully by the equally beautiful Laura Beeghly) brings us down to earth as she observes “There’s a certain nobility about them.” Think of the Marilynn character on “The Munsters” and you can imagine the eccentric world that swirls around the only socially adjusted member of this loony crowd.
Alice’s engagement to Tony Kirby (Seth Fox), scion of a Wall Street empire and son of a snobby father and sour-pussed mother, sets up the inevitable family get-together where the fireworks are both literal as well as figurative as one side-splitting disaster after another culminates with the nuptials being called off and with the entire lot of them being thrown in the pokey.
Beeghly and Fox make for a charming and believable couple of sweethearts and you won’t be able to resist rooting for them. And no one should be surprised that this fast-paced farce is on an express train to the proverbial happy ending and even the grouchiest of audience members (whom this show is surely aimed at) can’t do a darn thing about it.
Beeghly and Fox are utterly delightful, but my eye was also drawn to a couple of other performances of particular note.
Nora Vetter is just a hoot as the ditzy, ballet-dancing Essie and is, like those Super Balls of my youth that seemed to bounce forever, a study in perpetual motion as she clumsily (and riotously) ricochets all over the stage as if life where nothing but a Diagalev-choreographed pas de deux… make that pas de une.
“She stinks!” erupts the wacky, White Russian ballet instructor Boris Kolenkhov (marvelously played by Michael McCandless) as the family nods knowingly. Eight years of lessons seem to have had little effect on Essie, and she remains nothing more than a graceless jumble of elbows and knees. No matter. Dancing, it seems, like life itself, is a state of mind.
And then there is the granddaddy of all performances in this show, the granddad played by Dennis Collins. As the Zen-like patriarch of the family, Collins is as gripping as he is funny when his homespun philosophy is revealed to the audience. That is, when you can hear his lines over all of that laughter from out there in the dark.
Besides being a comic masterpiece, “You Can’t Take It With You” is also a touching tale of the importance of family and the effervescent joys of living life to the fullest.
Perhaps Grandpa says it best when he notes, “Life’s kinda beautiful if you just let it come to you.”
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