Review: Moonlight and Magnolias by Penfold Theatre Company
by David Glen Robinson

Moonlight and Magnolias by Ron Hutchinson is a romp and a challenge for comedic actors.  Penfold Theatre Company is giving it a go in the City Theatre behind the Shell station on Airport Boulevard, exciting the audience members who actually manage to find the venue.

  

Ryan Crowder (image: Kimberley Mead)The play is relatively new, published in 2004, but it is set in Hollywood, 1939, specifically in the the executive office of Producer David O. Selznick (Ryan Crowder). Shooting of Gone With The Wind (GWTW) has started, but Selznick still does not have a filmable screenplay.

 

 

In absolute desperation he summons newspaperman/script doctor Ben Hecht, who hasn't even read the novel.  Selznick locks himself, Hecht (Dave Buckman) and director Victor Fleming (Jay Fraley) in his office with an immense, heavy 1930s typewriter and a supply of bananas and peanuts.  Selznick and Fleming act out the scenes to an incredulous Hecht. Selznick gives them all five days to produce the screenplay on which the fortunes of the entire studio are riding.

 

Apparently this scenario is literally true, a verified episode of GWTW lore. Playwright Ron Hutchinson, a Hollywood insider himself, came across this dramatic gem, thought, “Look, a comedy!” and loaded in a play’s worth of Hollywood trivia and gossip and a few heavier social themes. Voila, Moonlight and Magnolias.

 

Penfold Theatre took full advantage of the play’s comedic potential. The set, props and costumes were period and accurate down to the early twentieth century copy of Life magazine and other magazines on the coffee table. The rear projection image of Tara kept us on-theme throughout, and the video of excerpted scenes from GWTW was a lagniappe.

 

 

 


'Push, Miss Melanie, push!' Ryan Crowder, Jay Fraley (image: Kimberly Mead)

 

 

 

Minor pickiness: the upstage office wall needed bracing.  It shook as though about to fall when a door was slammed a couple of times, and by opening night the seams of the paneling were beginning to show.  An executive office needs to appear more substantial.  The large picture window stage right needed a backdrop, as the black-painted concrete blocks of the theatre wall were too close to the window to be invisible.  They didn’t read “outdoors.”  This was disconcerting when a character gazed out of the window and described a street scene.

 

 

Ryan Crowder, Dave Buckman, Jay Fraley (image: Kimberley Mead)The progress of the play was fast-paced and funny. Director Robert Faires was inventive in his blocking and scrupulous in keeping clear sight lines and audible diction.  Everyone on stage had something to do, internally and externally. The cast rose to his standards and gave lapidary performances. True, opening night jitters took their toll, but these things smooth out in the run. Director Faires and the entire cast and crew get full credit for the cleverness of the extreme transitions of the set from sparkling executive office to trash-strewn crib of creation five days gone.  The transitions have to be seen to be appreciated.

 

 

The play deals seriously with the “Jews in Hollywood” issue of the 20's and 30's, today of importance to nobody except Mel Gibson.  As used in Moonlight and Magnolias, however, the issue looks strongly like a cloak of self-justification around Jewish characters, themselves members of an oppressed minority, who were disturbed by 1930s Jim Crow stereotypes regarding African-Americans.  So the characters chewed around ethnic issues in dialogue enough times—I have to say it—to become a little tiresome, finishing it off with an act of checkbook charity. And Prissie gets slapped in the movie anyway.

 

The best dramatic moment of the play is Selznick’s monologue, more like a peroration, on the true value of cinematic art in the world. Here is full value for the ticket price; Ryan Crowder delivered the speech marvelously and with poise after nearly an hour and a half of rolling and tumbling on stage. Audiences may treasure and remember moments such as these.

 

And indeed, the principal challenge for the cast of Moonlight and Magnolias was physical. The staging of this version of the play requires actors who are also fairly well conditioned athletes. Opening night somehow confers immense nervous and muscular energy on a cast, and this cast clearly rode that energy majestically early on, culminating in a well-timed slap fight that literally had audience members whispering “The Three Stooges” to each other in the darkened house around me. Were these belly laughs an homage or merely derivative?  Who cares, they worked.

 

Aidnan Sullivan (image: Kimberley Mead)

 

 

This shiningly wrought action did not carry through to the end of the second act. One could tell that the actors were tired, yet they continued through their paces of climbing the set and tumbling the furniture, just not as crisply as they had in Act I. And here the opening night stumbles and fumbles became more pronounced. After one such bobble, Ryan Crowder made a memorable save in an ad-libbed line to screenwriter Ben Hecht (Dave Buckman): “That’s not in the movie!” The audience roared.

 

 

The exception to the issue of stamina is the performance of Aidan Sullivan, “just relocated from New York City” to quote her bio in the program. She played Miss Poppenghul, the gum-popping, over-done secretary to Producer Selznick; and she performed feats of weightlifting and acrobatics at the most surprising and unusual points in the play. These sequences were in silence, with no lines over them, and this gave her every straining move great emphasis, so much so that it seemed to distill the funny to its essence. I suspect that because these bits were not tied to the spoken text of the play that they may have been created in a collusion or collaboration between the director and the cast. I have not read the text of the play, so I cannot say for sure, but Ms Sullivan’s athletic turns contributed to the many surprises and delights of this production.

 

 

Through its ups and downs, Penfold Theatre’s Moonlight and Magnolias is well rewarding of its audience’s attention and worth the price of the ticket. More than that, it sets something of a benchmark for high-intensity comedies, one that challenges other comedy-producing companies in the Austin region. We certainly look forward to the rest of Penfold’s fifth anniversary season.

 

 

Review by Cate Blouke for the Statesman's Austin360.com Seeing Things blog, October 9

Review by Jeff Davis for www.austin.broadwayworld.com, October15

 

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Moonlight and Magnolias
by Ron Hutchinson
Penfold Theatre Company

October 04 - October 21, 2012
City Theatre
3823 Airport Boulevard
Austin, TX, 78722