Shaw Festival’s Light Up The Sky is a Mixed Bag

 

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. — Moss Hart’s 1948 stage success, Light Up The Sky, needs tender, loving care in performance. The last thing it needs is an overkill approach.

It’s a backstage comedy of sorts — except that its turbulent events occur in Boston in the leading lady’s swanky Ritz-Carlton Hotel suite on the opening day of the pre-Broadway try-out of a new play.

The performance turns into a disaster, and the early bonhomie we’ve witnessed turns into a cat fight in which tempers flare, egos further inflate and the blame game runs rampant.

The ingredients are familiar. So are the essentially stock characters that range from the terribly sincere novice playwright to the volatile diva to the show’s blustering financial backer. Moss Hart was writing about a world he knew intimately; he was also desperately trying to prove that he was capable of going it alone as a playwright instead of relying on the wit and guidance of George S. Kaufman, his writing partner in such evergreen triumphs as You Can’t Take It With You and The Man Who Came To Dinner.

The resulting play is inferior to Hart’s great collaborations, but he still succeeded in writing something that could work on stage — an affectionately barbed valentine to a world he loved. The fact that he modelled his characters on real-life contemporaries like director Guthrie McClintic and actress Gertrude Lawrence is irrelevant today, and audiences can enjoy Light Up The Sky without any knowledge of the in-jokes that Hart was imposing on the play some 65 years ago.

It’s the sort of light entertainment that the Shaw Festival does very well, but there were times opening night when the play was in danger of perishing in a din of over-acting.

Director Blair Williams, who has been capable of subtlety in his previous work at the festival, fails to maintain an adequate leash on some of his key players — particularly Thom Marriott, whose portrayal of a coarse and crass producer carries the bombast factor to intolerable lengths, and the usually dependable Kelli Fox, distinctly uncomfortable in her strident portrayal of Marriott’s wife.

Steven Sutcliffe’s gift for beautifully nuanced comedy is on full display in his early scenes as a neurotic, self-dramatizing director — but even he starts going over the top in the second act when it appears that opening night has been an unmitigated calamity.

Laurie Paton, who plays the leading lady’s saucy and savvy mother is a special case. When she makes her first excessively mannered appearance, she is almost unbearable until you start realizing that a genuine character is taking shape — a character who is abrasive, overbearing and painfully honest in her own way. You suddenly find yourself enjoying Paton because she’s become believable as a human being. And she manages the script’s barbed humour more adroitly than some of her colleagues.

As for Claire Jullien, sometimes it seems that she’s all fluttering sleeves and nothing else in the striking gowns supplied her by designer William Schmuck. But that’s part of her appeal. She’s Irene Livingston, the new play’s leading lady. She’s been assigned the necessary diva role, and the script doesn’t give her much to work with. But Jullien moves beautifully on stage as though she’s floating through another sphere — and that constitutes something of a performance statement. She finesses Irene’s emotional modulations with great skill, predictable though they may seem. She has allure, maddening though it may be. And she does seduce us with her sense of self: despite those meltdowns, she is unmistakably a star.

But the most civilized performances come from the characters who are most able to behave like civilized people. Charlie Gallant is entirely credible as the gauche and painfully honest young playwright who asserts his own moral fibre before the evening ends. And in a role that Hart probably based on himself, Graeme Somerville is a fount of quiet wisdom as a veteran playwright who has seen it all. There’s also a lovely performance from Fiona Byrne as an unflappable secretary.

(Light Up The Sky continues to Oct. 11. Ticket information at 1 800 511 SHAW or shawfest.com)