THEATER / THEATER BEAT

The perennial screwball appeal of “You Can’t Take It With You” dances about West Valley Playhouse. George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s 1936 Pulitzer Prize winner receives an affable revival that generally counters its community theater context.

Welcome to the Depression-era household of Martin Vanderhof (Bob Van Dusen), snake-collecting patriarch to a tribe of nonconformists. Penelope Sycamore (Denice Stradling), his daughter, writes countless plays on a mistakenly delivered typewriter, while Paul (Kenny Lombino), her husband, concocts fireworks in the basement. Essie (Alissa-Nicole Koblentz), their eldest child, incessantly butchers ballet moves to the xylophone riffs of Ed (Daniel Krause), her printing-press-addicted spouse.

Leavening the ranks is younger Sycamore daughter Alice (Chelsea Pitillo), the sole conventional family member. Her romance with wealthy Tony Kirby (David Columbo) germinates the play’s message, which emerges from the mayhem after his snobby parents (Jim Follett and Rosemary Bird) meet the prospective in-laws.

It’s an oft-done classic, too often overdone. That makes director John Barker’s light-fingered approach doubly gratifying. Designers Charles W. Hall (set) and Danny Truxaw (lighting) manage most of the authors’ specs, and, barring not dressing the Kirbys in formal wear, so does costumer Natasha Baumgardner.

Overall, the cast is professionally minded and delightful. Van Dusen conveys exactly the right flinty joviality, Stradling and Lombino merge eccentricity and sincerity, and Koblentz and Krause inhale their pixilated characters. Pitillo, initially a tad over-bright, relaxes into a fine period ingenue, sweetly paired with Columbo’s ideally earnest hero.

Among the subsidiary roles, Steve Ruggles’ gonzo dancing master, Jan Bayouth’s dipso actress, Nancy Solomons’ blintz-happy grand duchess and Michael Jay Aronovitz as the iceman who came and stayed are adroit scene stealers. Even the odd anachronistic choice, like interracially casting cook Rheba’s (Alicia Cheadle) boyfriend (Brian Bookbinder) as an Irishman, doesn’t seriously harm thematic intent. You can take its heartwarming charm with you all the way home.

-- David C. Nichols

“You Can’t Take It With You,” West Valley Playhouse, 7242 Owensmouth Ave., Canoga Park. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2:30 p.m. Sundays. No performance April 12. Ends April 26. $25. (818) 884-1907. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.

Committed cast lifts ‘Candidate’

Those familiar with “The Manchurian Candidate” only from the 1962 and 2004 films may be surprised to learn that Richard Condon’s 1959 novel has plenty of mordant humor.

Director John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film, a taut Cold War-era thriller about a brainwashed Korean War hero transformed into an on-call killing machine, captured the Cold War paranoia of the times. Frankenheimer played it straight, emphasizing suspense over satire, with superb results.

In the 1990s, esteemed theater critic John Lahr tried his hand at adapting Condon’s novel into a play, far less successfully. In the current staging of Lahr’s “The Manchurian Candidate,” presented by the Production Company at the Chandler Studio Theatre, director Robert Craig emphasizes the book’s humor and then some. And although the tactic doesn’t work as well in the play’s grim finale, Craig and his energetic cast fully commit to their material, however flawed.

Lahr’s version retains the novel’s basic characters and plot. Ersatz war hero Raymond Shaw (Michael A. Newcomer) is still an emotionally battered pawn who has been brainwashed, along with his commanding officer, Ben Marco (Beau Puckett) and the rest of his platoon. But in Lahr’s unfortunately muddled version, these men are not Korea combatants but U.N. peacekeepers whose mission and milieu are never clearly defined. Shaw’s stepfather, corrupt Sen. Johnny Iselin (Rich Skidmore), is no longer a McCarthy-esque Red-baiter but a political opportunist who has been whipping up populist frenzy against, of all things, the Japanese -- a bizarre substitute for the Red Menace of the original. Fortunately, Shaw’s mother, Eleanor (Amanda Karr), retains her crystalline menace and motivations.

Perhaps if Lahr had written his work after the Sept. 11 attacks, it would have had more focus and immediacy. Yet Craig and his spirited performers keep the lid rattling on Lahr’s potboiler. Puckett’s Marco is convincingly staunch, Skidmore’s Iselin is a comically nefarious buffoon, and Newcomer’s tortured, muted Shaw balances the proceedings with real emotional depth. However, it is the terrific Karr who stands out as the monstrous Eleanor. Daringly over-the-top, Karr would surely twirl her mustache if she had one. Her advanced tutorial in histrionics is a real treat.

-- F. Kathleen Foley

“The Manchurian Candidate,” Chandler Studio Theatre, 12443 Chandler Blvd., North Hollywood. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays. Ends May 2. $22. Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes. (800) 838-3006 or www.theprodco.com.

Calamity: cosmic and individual

Playwright Murray Mednick is a veteran innovator who, some 30-plus years into his career, remains dedicated to shaking up the theatrical format. Much of Mednick’s work (“Joe and Betty,” “Mrs. Feuerstein”) tries to bridge the chasm between savagery and creativity -- Beethoven and Nazism. That preoccupation, in recent years, has led Mednick into a pointed exploration of the Jewish identity, the existential angst of a people who have often tumbled into the gap between civilization and barbarism.

Those themes are very much at the forefront of “New Works by Murray Mednick” at downtown’s Art Share L.A. Produced by Padua Playwrights, the experimental theater group founded by Mednick more than 30 years ago. “The Destruction of the 4th World” and “Clown Show for Bruno” are vastly dissimilar works linked by common calamity -- in one case cosmic, in the other harrowingly individual. (The series also includes “Girl on a Bed,” the filmed adaptation of an earlier Mednick work.)

“World” centers on a dysfunctional family. Adolescent agoraphobic Bernie (gifted Mike Lion) is prepping for the apocalypse with the help of Coyote (Kelly Van Kirk) -- tellingly, the same sage Hopi trickster featured in Mednick’s late ‘70s play series, “The Coyote Cycle.”

Bernie’s relatives are all troubled seekers. Bernie’s father, Caleb (Michael Shamus Wiles), can’t decide whether his son is a visionary or a lunatic. Bernie’s brother David (Scott Victor Nelson) struggles to reconcile his Jewish faith with his atheistic doubts. David’s convert wife, Chrystal (Kim Fitzgerald), refuses to reproduce in such uncertain times. Bernie’s grandma Rosie (feisty, fine Laura James), a senile Holocaust survivor, believes she is currently living in Brazil. Meanwhile, Bernie’s dead mother, Sarah (danced by Yvette Wulff), wafts through the action as yet another indication that the tattered veil between the living and the dead is about to rip asunder.

Buoyed by innovative design elements, in particular Dan Reed’s lighting, directors Kristi Schultz and Brian Frette make elementary mistakes in their occasionally self-conscious staging but wisely stress the piece’s playfulness. Still, there’s a lot of information here, arguably too much. The characters’ circular conversations sound like the musings of Talmudic scholars trapped in a Sartrean hell. Although frustratingly discursive, “World” bristles with raw urgency, as if Mednick had tried to get all his unresolved questions down on paper before the atomic clock reached midnight.

By contrast, “Clown Show for Bruno” initially plays like pure burlesque. In the play, three mimes/clowns, Emilio (Daniel A. Stein), Jacko (Bill Celentano) and Cleo (Kali Quinn, alternating with Dana Wieluns), reenact the true story of Bruno Schulz, a Polish writer and artist killed by the Nazis. In Guy Zimmerman’s perfectly syncopated staging, the gifted performers cavort like commedia players at a street festival. But the mood soon shifts from the frantic to the funereal. It’s a cunning setup intended to take us off guard and make us experience the horror afresh. It works.

-- F. Kathleen Foley

“New Works by Murray Mednick,” Art Share L.A., 801 E. 4th Place, Los Angeles. “The Destruction of the 4th World,” 8 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays, 5 p.m. Saturdays. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes. “Clown Show for Bruno,” 8 p.m. Saturdays and Sun- days. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes. Series ends April 19. (213) 625-1766. www.paduaplaywrights.net.

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