Theater Review—

‘Moonlight and Magnolias’ A Nutty Opportunity For Veteran Actors, One That Will Keep You Laughing

By Julie Stern

NEW MILFORD — The promos for Ron Hutchinson’s Moonlight and Magnolias carry a warning that people with a severe nut allergy should avoid the play at all costs. On a literal level this is true. the characters are locked in a room for five days with no food except bananas and peanuts; when they get tired of eating them they toss them at each other, and after all, TheatreWorks New Milford is housed in a small venue.

On another level, you could say that people who don’t enjoy slapstick should stay away as well, because under Sonnie Osborne’s deft direction, this production is “the nuts!”

Of course the opening night audience clearly loved it, based on the number of folks who were doubled up with laughter from early in the first scene until the closing moments.

Like this year’s season-opening one-woman show about Katherine Hepburn, Moonlight and Magnolias also deals with the Hollywood and its secret truths, but while Tea at Five was a tour de force character study, Moonlight provides an opportunity for a quartet of TheatreWorks veterans to ham it up in comic exaggeration: Tom Libonate, Glenn Couture, Jonathan Ross and Missy Slaymaker-Hanlon (as Selznick’s loyal secretary) are up there having a ball.

The story is based on producer David Selznick’s frantic effort back in 1939 to turn Margaret Mitchell’s best-selling Gone With The Wind into a movie. When Victor Fleming came on to take over the job of directing (after Selznick fired George Cukor), he threw out the existing script and demanded a new one. Selznick’s old friend Ben Hecht was brought in to do the rewrite.

All production has to be shut down for 17 days while the new team puts the project together. Unfortunately, Hecht confesses that he has never actually read the book and does not know the story.

No problem. Selznick and Fleming will tell it to him. All he has to do is write 52 scenes worth, and to make sure that Hecht remains focused on the task at hand, Selznick decrees that the three of them will be locked into his office for the next five days. No meals, no sleep, no showers, no change of clothes — just the aforementioned peanuts and bananas for sustenance.

As the politically conscious newsman Hecht, Glen Couture frets over the idea of a movie about the Civil War, at a time when Hitler and Mussolini are starting to take over Europe. He especially doesn’t like the idea of a story told from the viewpoint of the South, waxing nostalgic about the good old days of slavery, and a heroine who demonstrates her courage by shooting a Union soldier.

The public doesn’t want a Moonlight and Magnolias bodice-ripper, he argues. Nonsense, declares Tom Libonate as Selznick, and, with the help of Jonathan Ross as Fleming, he proceeds to act out the story              

This is a perfect vehicle for Libonate’s comic talents as he flounces about the room in double-time, morphing from a simpering Scarlett to an aristocratic Ashley and then even into a reckless Rhett Butler.

A wonderful second scene opens with him crouching over a supine Ross (as the pregnant Melanie) bellowing “PUSHHHH.” Ross then pops up to become Butterfly McQueen in the infamous scene where, to Hecht’s outrage, Scarlett slaps the slave girl because she doesn’t know how to deliver a baby.

The interplay of characters is reminiscent of a successful sitcom. The pacing and comic exaggeration brings to mind Zero Mostel in The Producers. If you want to be entertained without having to think too much, this is a show that will keep you laughing.

(Performances continue, and the peanuts will fly, through May 10 with curtain Friday and Saturday evenings at 8 pm. There is also a matinee scheduled for Sunday, May 4, at 2 pm.

Tickets are $20. Call 860-350-6863 for reservations or other information.)