A co-worker who’s directing You Can’t Take it With You for the local community theater has asked me to step in to play the role of Mr. Kirby. I’m familiar with the basic plot of the play: wildly eccentric family tries to mix with straight family and hilarity ensues. I’m told that Kirby is a Frasier Crane like character (type casting) whose son is engaged to the daughter of the family. I’m away from home now and so I don’t have access to a script and I haven’t made a commitment yet.
So, if you’ve seen the play or read it, is it funny (i.e. does it still hold its comic value 70 years after it premiered)? Do you know anything of the Kirby character (i.e. room for comedic potential, etc.).
It is a very funny play. You might catch the video; IIRC, James Stewart played the young Mr. Kirby. I think it has held on to its comic potential through the years. Izzybella played the ditzy mother when her high school put this on some years ago, and based the character on our own lovely wonderfully ditzy mother.
It definitely still resonates and Mr. Kirby is a fun role. I don’t know that I’d call him a Frasier Crane character, though I suppose that’s one way of interpreting it. It’s pretty much what you’ve already been spoiled on–eccentric family meets upper class blue-nose family and then wackiness ensues. It’s a rather large cast. Don’t know if that appeals to you and there are a number of sub-plots. If you decide to do it, best to you. Good show.
oh, sorry…more info on Kirby–he grows orchids and is obsessed with them; he’s extremely conservative; kind of a stuffed shirt. There is definitely comic potential there.
You, Mr. Kirby, are the only character in the play with absolutely NO comic potential. You are the stereotypical Stick-Up-the-Butt Country-Club Republican Banker, the great gray yardstick against which the members of the Sycamore family may measure their free-wheeling zaniness.
By the end of the play you will have learned to let your hair down somewhat. You will have allowed your son to marry into this nest of oddballs SO LONG AS HE KEEPS WORKING AT THE BANK. And your wife will have let on that you still hold onto your old college saxophone, hidden away in a closet.
Is it still funny? Ahhhh…I liked it when I read it as a teenager. But it’s aged fairly poorly, especially since the 1960s and the “Do Your Own Thing” mindset. You see it today and the first thought is, “Well…YEAH. You should try to do the things that make you happy.”
IMO, it’s not as amusing as the Kaufman/Hart masterwork, The Man Who Came to Dinner.