Review - You Can't Take It With You - Soulpepper, Toronto

✭✭✭✩✩

by George S. Kaufman & Moss Hart, directed by Joseph Ziegler

Soulpepper Theatre Company, Yonge Centre, Toronto

April 26-June 21, 2012

“Remember all we ask is just to go along the way we are.” Grandpa Vanderhof saying grace

Soulpepper is currently presenting a very serviceable production of Kaufman and Hart’s 1936 comedy You Can Take It with You. Anyone who has seen the famous 1938 film by Frank Capra based on the play or who remembers the Shaw Festival’s fine production in 1998 (revived in 1999), will know that the play can be hysterically funny and even moving. Despite several excellent performances, the main difficulty with the Soulpepper production is that is doesn’t really catch fire until the second act and even then is never quite as funny as it could be.

The play begins by introducing us to the mad, seemingly chaotic world of the extended Sycamore family. Penny (Nancy Palk), the mother of the family is busily working away on her latest melodramatic play. Essie (Patricia Fagan), her daughter, enjoys inventing new types of candy but her real passion, obvious from her pointe-shoes and continual dancelike movements, is ballet, which she has been studying for eight years. Ed (Mike Ross), Essie’s husband, is a xylophone player who also likes to print miscellaneous quotations on his own printing press. Paul (Derek Boyes), makes fireworks in the basement with his friend Mr. De Pinna (Michael Simpson), an iceman who arrived eight years ago and just stayed on.

Presiding over the Sycamore household, and indeed over the entire play, is Martin Vanderhof (Eric Peterson), just known as “Grandpa”, who once was a Wall Street businessman who one day realized he didn’t enjoy what he was doing and walked away from his work. His personal philosophy is that life is too short not to do what you enjoy. Love and happiness are what is important. As for money and possessions, well, just note the play’s title.

We meet all these characters including the Sycamores’ maid Rheba (Sabryn Rock) and her boyfriend Donald (Andre Sills), whom the Sycamores treat as part of the family, before we meet the only “normal” member of the clan, Alice (Krystin Pellerin), who is in love with Tony Kirby (Gregory Prest), the Vice President of the company where she works as a secretary.

The strategy of the play is to make us wonder, along with Alice, how Tony’s “normal” wealthy parents will ever sanction a marriage between Alice and their only son. The difficulty with Soulpepper’s production is that the director Joseph Ziegler does not make the goings-on of the Sycamores seem all that outrageous so that the threat of the collision of the world of play of the Sycamores versus the world of work of the Kirbys is not as strong as it should be. Without this threat the play loses the sense of danger necessary to heighten comedy.

Ziegler seems torn in Act 1 on how to make the Sycamores appear both eccentric and yet contented. He errs in emphasizing their contentedness. Thus, despite their dizzying assemblage of bizarre habits, the Sycamores actually come off as rather bland and hardly seem like the barrier to marriage that Alice makes them out to be. To amp up the sense of madness in the household, Ziegler could emphasize how the characters are absorbed almost to the exclusion of everything else in their various trivial pursuits. As it is, Palk’s Penny doesn’t seem to take her writing seriously contrary to descriptions of her character, and Boyes as Paul and Simpson as De Pinna don’t treat their work with the earnestness that would make it amusing. Fagan does so well in her balletic appearances she doesn’t “stink” at it as her ballet master says she does.

At the same time, when Tony brings his parents (John Jarvis and Brenda Robins) to have dinner with the Sycamores on the wrong night, neither registers the total disgust with the Sycamores’ house, let alone its household, that they should. Mrs. Kirby should be squirming in her seat during the word-association game Penny has them play, but she does not. And Mr. Kirby’s losing at a wrestling match should be the climax of his excruciatingly uncomfortable visit rather than seeming the only thing he finds off-putting. Even in the most obvious comic event--hiding the body of an actress (Raquel Duffy) who has passed out--Ziegler does not make the Sycamore’s seem the least wary or embarrassed, thus again failing to promote the comedy of the situation.

Luckily, Eric Peterson is a genial presence as Grandpa. He relishes being contrary just to see what reaction he will get. His two prayers at table, however, reveal a sincere gratitude for all the good that has come his way and are meant to instill the same attitude in the audience. The Alice-Tony relationship that was a weak point in the Shaw Festival production is here one of the strongest features. Prest makes his love for Alice and family totally believable as Pellerin makes her competing emotions of love and fear that Kirby’s family will never accept her family. Rock and Sills are excellent, too, in depicting “normal” people who have managed to accommodate themselves to the unusual Sycamore family through a little tolerance. At the other end of the scale, Diego Matamoros as the ballet master Kolenkhov is deliberately outrageous as a comrade from the old Russia, and Maria Vacratsis as the Grand Duchess Olga Katrina, now working as a waitress, is wonderfully amusing in portraying an aristocrat who has so readily accepted her steep decline in status.

For the production Christina Poddubiuk has created probably the most highly detailed period set Soulpepper has ever used in the Baillie Theatre at the Young Centre. It’s a pleasure to look at in itself and the costumes she has created are all beautifully appropriate to each character.

Anyone who has not seen this play before will find the Soulpepper production pleasant and amusing. Anyone who saw the Shaw Festival production in 1998 or 1999 will feel that the show is strangely subdued and that Ziegler misses too many opportunities to bring out the abundant humour in the play. By the end of Act 1, I thought the production should be retitled “You Can Just Take It or Leave It”, but by the last scene of Act 2, everything finally came together. The overall problem in the production of a comedy like this with so much complex action is that it still had a mechanical quality as if everyone were still acting on cue rather than giving the illusion of spontaneity. This kind of piece takes many performances in front of an audience to find its ideal pace to create the illusion of natural action. It’s likely that this production will only improve over its run.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

For tickets, visit www.soulpepper.ca.

2012-05-03

You Can’t Take It With You