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REVIEW: "Moonlight and Magnolias" by Playhouse Tulsa
Published: 7/22/2011 11:28 AM
Last Modified: 7/22/2011 11:28 AM


Tony Schneider, Chris Crawford and Matt Bittner as director Victor Fleming, producer David O. Selznick and writer Ben Hecht in "Moonlight and Magnolias."

Who knew “Gone with the Wind” could be so funny?

But it is – when it’s being acted out and argued about by a trio of increasingly crazed men, locked for five days in a room with nothing but bananas and peanuts to eat, and determined in one way or another to condense Margaret Mitchell’s mountainous melodrama into a 130-page film script.

Playhouse Tulsa opened its production of Ron Hutchinson’s “Moonlight and Magnolias” Thursday at the Tulsa PAC, as the company’s entry in this year’s Summerstage festival.

Hutchinson’s play takes a sliver of Hollywood history – producer David O. Selznick shutting down production on “Gone with the Wind,” firing the original director and bringing in script doctor Ben Hecht to rework the film’s scenario – and turns it into a surprisingly raucous comedy.

It’s also loaded with moments that evoke classic film comedies of the past, from the rapid-fire dialogue of screwball comedies like “His Girl Friday” to a face-slapping session that wouldn’t be out of place in a Three Stooges episode.

But the play also deals with some weightier matters. It is, after all, 1939, when the world is on the brink of war, and the politically aware Hecht (Matt Bittner) can’t understand why anyone – especially a fellow Jew like David O. Selznick (Chris Crawford) – would want to invest so much time, money and effort into a story that seems to glorify one group of people oppressing another.

He’s maybe the most horrified by the scene in which Scarlett O’Hara slaps the girl Prissy. “Our adulterous, two-timing, slave-driving heroine is now about to add child abuse to her resume,” Hecht wails.

Selznick, on the other hand, knows that audiences don’t want to “look this country’s ugly mug in the face,” as Hecht puts it. Audiences are looking for escape – from the domestic woes of the Depression, from the frightening news coming out of Europe.

Besides, Selznick said, when it comes to movies, “In the beginning was the deal.” No story – whether trivial or momentous – is going to get told on the screen until some producer is willing to raise the money needed to finance a film.

“It’s only in the movies where the dead can walk,” Selznick says. “You have any other way to live forever?”

The film’s new director, Victor Fleming (Tony Schneider), could care less about politics and race – all he wants is a script he can start shooting come Monday morning.

The problem: Hecht is one of the few people in Hollywood – maybe in America – who has not read “Gone with the Wind.” So Selznick and Fleming begin to act out the story, and Hecht can then write up the scenes.

As the days go on and the script pages slowly start to pile up, the men’s nerves and sanity start to crumble a bit, as Selznick’s posh studio office becomes strewn with banana peels and peanut shells and the men create little fortresses of solitude among the chaos.

This mix of slapstick and speechifying could easily disintegrate into tedium. But director Courtneay Sanders has crafted the action with a marvelous attention to detail. The pacing is perfectly calibrated, the hysteria kept at just the right level to be completely believable and completely hilarious.

Schneider, who was serves as the company’s master carpenter in creating Shawn Irish’s stunning set designs, is wonderful as the volatile Fleming, a man of action and “Action!” whose frustrations with the process of writing erupt in explosions of comic anger.

Kara Staiger is very good as Selznick's secretary, Miss Poppenghul, who deals with her boss's excesses in a perpetually puzzled but always good-humored way.

Hecht is maybe the most problematic character, as he’s the one who keeps interjecting the “serious” content into the show. Bittner manages to make Hecht sound sincere without becoming strident, although the confrontations between Hecht and Fleming could have benefited from a little more venom from the man who wrote “The Front Page.”

Crawford, however, is perfect as Selznick, the detail-obsessed, adrenaline-fueled producer whose career and family life are all in jeopardy if he can’t get this movie made.

Crawford’s Selznick charms and cajoles, blusters and beseeches, declaims and dances about -- often in the space of a single speech. Yet you are always conscious of the actor being in absolute control of what he’s doing, so that a single wordless gesture can get more laughs than some of Hutchinson’s most antic dialogue.

“Moonlight and Magnolias” runs through Sunday, with performances at 7:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday, in the Williams Theatre of the Tulsa PAC, 110 E. Second St.

Tickets are $20 – and if you’re in the mood to laugh, they’re worth every penny. Call 918-596-7111 or online at tulsaworld.com/mytix.





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ARTS

James D. Watts Jr. has lived in Oklahoma for most his life, even though he still has people saying to him, "Don't sound like you're from around these parts." A University of Oklahoma Phi Beta Kappa graduate, Watts has received the Governor Arts Award, Harwelden Award and the National Conference of Christians and Jews Beth Macklin Award for his writing. Before coming to the Tulsa World, Watts worked for the Tulsa Tribune.

Contact him at (918) 581-8478.

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