America loves the movies and in "Once in a Lifetime", George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart love to poke fun at one of America's biggest businesses.
Three down on their luck Vaudevillians decide to sell their act and set off for Hollywood to make it big. Their scheme, however, is not to become stars of the Silver Screen themselves but to become vocal coaches. Why vocal coaches you may ask? Well, it's 1927 and "The Jazz Singer", the first talkie has just been released. Our protagonists know that silent picture actors will now have to speak for the very first time and some stars have Bronx accents and squeaky voices and can barely handle the English language. By teaching these young stars the arts of elocution and projection, our three amigos will make themselves indispensable to the studios. Anyway, that's the plan. However, when our starry eyed threesome arrives in Hollywood, they find that things don't work like they do in the theatre world. For starters, studio heads run their operations with a whip and a whim, directors fail to read the scripts they are supposedly filming, and playwrights shrivel in despair, being hired to sit in rooms and not write.
It's all a delicious send-up of our love-hate relationship with Tinsel Town. The play is still funny today and highly satisfying though it is rarely done -- undoubtedly because of the size of the cast (which by today's standards is enormous). In this production 17 actors play 50 roles and there is great ensemble acting throughout.
Though in the program the character is given second billing to Jerry Hyland, the actor who masterminds their plan, I feel that it is really May Daniels' play, who is charmingly played by Mary Elizabeth Scallen. Ms. Scallen (who looks great in all her cloche hats) portrays May as intelligent and sensitive. She has great help from her compadres, David Ingram as Jerry and especially the soft-spoken Benjamin Lloyd as George, the dimmest of bulbs who ends up being the new studio head. This is a screwball comedy and director Lou Jacob has wisely had his ensemble play style, so there is a lot of chewing up the scenery which is right on the money. Performances that come to mind are: Paul Meshejian as the colorful Herman Glogauer, a Max Steiner type German director complete with jack boots and crop, Tom Teti as a lecherous gum chewing actor and a gibbering Bishop, and Mark Lazar as Kammerling, the autocratic studio boss.
James F. Pyne, Jr. has crafted wonderful, stylized sets with the feel and flavor of 20's Hollywood and New York. Upon close inspection of his movie cameras, I couldn't tell whether they were original antiques or built from scratch -- they were so great looking. The costumes by Ilona Somogyi are equally fine and evoke the era ñ especially her hats. (Though I didn't understand why May Daniels didn't have a different dress for the second act, as time has passed.)
Mr. Jacob keeps this play running at a delicious speed and seems to have added a lot of music and even a little choreography that only adds to the merriment. My only regret is that I didn't catch this play earlier in its run so that I could urge people to rush out and see it.