This review has been reposted courtesy of the League of Cincinnati Theatres. For more LCT reviews click here to visit their reviews page.
Prepare to have the “Theme from Tara” playing in your head for a few days after you see Moonlight and Magnolias, the latest production of Mad Anthony Theatre Company at the Fitton Center in Hamilton. Director Patricia Ganz uses the familiar music to good effect in the play, which provides a true back story to the making of the movie Gone with the Wind.
The play’s setup is that famed producer David O. Selznick has started shooting Gone with the Wind when he realizes the script is terrible and he fires the director. He takes director Victor Fleming off the almost-finished Wizard of Oz and cajoles screenwriter Ben Hecht to rewrite the script.
The three movie men have five days, locked in an office, to produce a new script so filming can start again.
The play’s humor starts immediately with screenwriter Hecht’s admission that he has not read the famous novel. So Selznick and Fleming “act out” scenes from the book while Hecht furiously types.
Moonlight and Magnolias is mostly fun, and Mad Anthony’s production is in the capable hands of veteran director Ganz and the small cast led by Henry Cepluch as Hecht. Playwright Ron Hutchinson has given Hecht the best lines – “Does the movie have to be set in the Civil War?” and “Isn’t it obvious that tomorrow is another day?” Cepluch plays the role with an understated dry wit.
The role of Hecht here also has a social conscience that broadens his character. He is the one concerned about the portrayal of the slaves in “Gone with the Wind” and also about the current (1939) discrimination against Jews – Hecht and Selznick are both Jewish.
But the insertion of social issues into what is mostly a farce in some ways feels like “filler,” because the audience has been set up to laugh, and that’s what we wanted. And each of the actors are saddled with long monologues pontificating on the roles of the producer, director and writer of a movie. Appreciated are Selznick’s lines about everyday people, the audiences of movies, being the true determination of success.
Bob McClain as Selznick and Steve Tunning as Fleming are at their comedic best play-acting scenes from Gone with the Wind–Melanie giving birth and Scarlett fiddle-dee-deeing. A good laugh when Selznick finally comes up with the iconic line, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
There is good use of sound effects when McClain as Selznick gives a fast-track synopsis of the novel – a baby crying, the saw mill whirring.
It is great fun for the audience to know what these struggling movie men don’t yet know – that “Gone with the Wind” will win many Oscars and become the highest-grossing film of the 20th century. Meanwhile, thanks to this play, we now know the movie’s shaky start.
Moonlight and Magnolias runs through May 3.
For more information on the production, click here.
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