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The Wonderful World of Theater: Moss Hart Revived
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14496 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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3 / 1988 |
1,927 Words |
| Author
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Cynthia Grenier
Cynthia Grenier is contributing editor to the Arts section of
The World & I. |
The Broadway theater season of 1948-49 had some really big hits. It you never saw them on stage, you certainly caught some of them on film, or at least on late night television. Death of a Salesman; Anne of a Thousand Days; The Madwoman of Chaillot; Detective Story; Edward, My Son; Life with Mother: Remember them? But how about Light Up the Sky? Moss Hart wrote it--you remember him, didn't you?
It wasn't that long ago that Moss Hart was often described as being synonymous with the American theater. Alone, and with George S. Kaufman, he wrote some of the most successful American plays of the thirties and forties: Lady in the Dark, You Can't Take It with You, and The Man Who Came to Dinner. Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Kurt Weill, and Ira Gershwin composed the scores for his musicals. Light Up the Sky had a respectable run in the 1948-49 season; it made the Burns Mantle list of the ten best plays of its season, but it was not to be revived until 1985 by the Old Vic in London. Impressed by its success, Hart's son, Christopher (to whom the play is dedicated), launched a production at the Ahmanson in Los Angeles early the following year. Encouraged by the reaction to the West Coast run, the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., decided to mount it at the end of 1987.
Based on Experience
Hart wrote Light Up the Sky out of very long and genuine experience with the problems of having a play open out of town. The setting is a suite in the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Boston whose windows face out toward the Colonial Theater. The first act takes place at 5:30 in the afternoon before opening night of a new play at the Colonial; the second at 11:45 that evening
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