James Earl Jones, Kristine Nielsen, Franz Kranz, Will Brill, Annaleigh Ashford, Patrick Kerr and Mark Linn-Baker in You Can’t Take It With You.

Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s You Can’t Take It With You first premiered on Broadway in late 1936, midway through FDR’s first term in office and still the Great Depression. The subject of the title – the It you can’t take with you when you die – is money. It’s a negative statement that’s actually an affirmation, a reminder to the audience that there’s more to life than work or what’s in their pockets, a message that echoes some of the popular songs and show tunes of the time, depression busters like “On the Sunny Side of the Street” (1930) and, particularly, “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries” (1931):

You work, you slave, you worry so,
But you can’t take your dough
When you go go go!

Unequivocal though the title may be, You Can’t Take It With You is less a message play than a delightful – and yes, rather slight – comedy. It’s about a house full of eccentrics and dilettantes, three generations and their friends-slash-colleagues all living under one roof, “Just around the corner from Columbia University, but don’t go looking for it.” In this house, unproduceable plays are written, kittens are used as paperweights, ballet practice is continually in session, darts are thrown, fireworks designed and detonated. Under the wing of Martin Vanderhof – or “Grandpa,” as he is mostly called – the residents live a life dedicated to the pursuit of happiness, an ideal that’s maybe not as American as the Declaration of Independence would suggest.

While politics and class issues do enter into the play,* it isn’t really a satire, though there are satirical moments, like when the IRS sends an agent to the house and it’s revealed that Grandpa owes the government twenty-four years in back taxes. Without concealing anything, he flat-out refuses to pay up, and it’s endearing the way he asks what he’d get in return: “If I go into Macy’s and buy something, there it is – I see it. What’s the government give me?” Henderson, the IRS man, doesn’t make a very strong argument against this. He neglects to mention sensible things like public education or infrastructure, only the salaries of bureaucrats and the necessity of battleships (absurd though this is made to sound in the play, fast-forwarding only a few years, battleships did prove to be pretty essential during World War II).

What drives You Can’t Take It With You more than Grandpa’s tax dodging is a classic marriage plot. Rose Byrne, great as the bitchy antagonist to Kristin Wiig’s character in Bridesmaids (2011), is wonderful in her first Broadway role as Alice Sycamore, granddaughter to Grandpa, who loves her family but is very aware of how bizarre they seem to the outside world. She worries they’ll scare off her suitor, Tony Kirby (Franz Kranz), the son of a rich and stuffy old Wall Street family – the antithesis to the Vanderhof way of life. Tony, it turns out, is charmed by her family and wants his parents to see them as they are; he “accidentally” shows up to dinner a day early, future in-laws in tow, before Alice has time to clear the house of embarrassments (pet snakes, her sister in a tutu, a drunk actress passed out on the sofa, etc.). In classic farcical tradition, à la Feydeau, everything that must not happen does.

With a cast of nineteen, You Can’t Take It With You is a true ensemble piece, and while the role of Grandpa as the presiding head of the house often features the biggest name (the great James Earl Jones, in this production), most of these characters can be termed principles. Aside from a few G-Men – or “J”-Men, as Penelope Sycamore (Kristine Nielsen) giddily refers to them in the play – most everyone who enters the Vanderhof residence has a hard time leaving, either because they are wooed by the idyllic individualism and want to join in the fun, or because they get stuck there, overwhelmed by the whirlwind of hyper-activity. There are no disappointments in the present cast, but special mention must be made to Reg Rogers as Boris Kolenkhov, a ballet tutor, who provokes some of the most uproarious laughter with his favorite phrase, the somehow very Russian: “It stinks!”

The set rotates from a frontal view of the facade of the house, to the living room where most of the play’s action occurs. It’s a beautiful set, designed by David Rockwell, with a Victorian hang of pictures and knickknacks, little figurines standing between the woodwork, an appropriately eclectic reflection of the people that live there.

James Stewart and Jean Arthur in Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take It With You (1938)

By the way: You Can’t Take It With You was made into a major motion picture by Frank Capra in 1938, and Film Forum recently screened a new 4K restoration of the film in coordination with the Broadway production and as part of their larger retrospective on Capra’s career. This is one of my favorite adaptations of a play and not because it is faithful. The film isn’t as centered on the Vanderhof residence and the roles of Alice and Tony are made into vehicles for the movie’s stars, Jean Arthur and James Stewart. Capra also adds to the weight of the story’s conflicts: in the play, the central problem is whether the families will resolve their differences so that Alice and Tony may get married; in the film, this is combined with Mr. Kirby’s sinister efforts to buy up the neighborhood where the Vanderhofs live, part of a monopolistic plot to put a munitions competitor out of business. Heavy-handed though this may be in comparison to the more subtle treatment of Mr. Kirby in the original text (square, but amiable enough), it does allow the film to get into much darker territory. The third act is so defeatist it’s oppressive, the more so because it’s such a different tone from the rest of the film, which is otherwise just as jolly and light-hearted as the play, if not more so. The effect is the same, reversed, as what’s done in Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964), in which the viewer is starved of color, only to be given a glut of it all at once – a more literal change of tone – in a dream sequence shot on the naturally over-saturated coast of Sardinia. Capra’s subsequent resolving of the conflicts is masterful in its pacing. Slowly and for the most part silently, the Vanderhof clan comes out of its depression (and we out of ours): Grandpa plays the harmonica with a newly enlightened Mr. Kirby, Ed returns to his xylophone, Essie resumes her awful dancing… Tony and Alice embrace.

Hart and Kaufman’s heirs were present for a Q&A after the screening I attended. Unfortunately, Anne Kaufman immediately professed to hating the film, which made for a rather awkward and disappointing discussion, however well-moderated by actor Allen Lewis Rickman, who had a lot of interesting trivia to throw out there. (Did you know: This is Lionel Barrymore’s first film in which his handicap is shown. He plays Grandpa and walks on crutches, explained in the movie as the result of trying to slide down the banister of the house, goaded on by his grandchildren. Really, this was because of complications due to the actor’s arthritis; later, he would lose his ability to walk altogether. By the time It’s A Wonderful Life was made in 1947, Barrymore was confined to a wheelchair.) Asked to elaborate on why she did not like the film, Ms. Kaufman called it “dated.” This is a criticism I’ve also heard made of the current production on Broadway, usually dismissed with a reference to the Great Recession, which I do expect was at least part of the genesis of this latest revival; likewise, the early 1980s recession probably had something to do with the 1983-84 production, with Jason Robards.

Of course, the film is dated: it’s dated 1938 and the play is dated 1936 and that doesn’t make either less enjoyable to audiences today. At both the Longacre and Film Forum, You Can’t Take It With You got a lot of laughs. The only aspect of the play or the film that could be perceived as dated in a negative sense are some of the laughs we’re meant to get from the black characters, the Vanderhofs’ servant Rheba and her dole-collecting husband Donald** – not nearly as bad as, say, Mammy in Gone with the Wind, but of the same tradition – a criticism that the current production doesn’t entirely make void with its post-racial casting of James Earl Jones as grandfather to a family of whites. (Ironically, during the Film Forum Q&A, we learned that Anne Kaufman played a blackface version of Donald in a girls school production – that, I will agree, is dated.)

What makes You Can’t Take It With You such a popular play, both when it was first produced in 1936-8 (it ran over 800 performances) and today, when it’s one of the top grossing non-musicals on Broadway, is less to do with its topical subject matter and more to do with the fact that it is very funny. You Can’t Take It With You is a stick-it-to-the-man play, but it’s also a lighthearted one.

– – – –

* Though perhaps less than this production would care for us to think. In an interview for Roundabout’s guide to the production, James Earl Jones promises “a battle of the classes.” But the Vanderhofs are landed gentry. They have an old Dutch name and because of their properties, they don’t have to work for a living. They can afford to do what they want to do. Really, they’re more aristocratic than impoverished; the Kirbys more bourgeois than “upper class.”

** Actually, in the film version, these characters were seen as being treated with too much equality by the Production Code Administrator’s director, Joseph Breen. From the AFI (by way of TCM): “[When] showing the negro characters Reba [sic] and Donald, care should be taken to avoid objection in the Southern sections of this country where the showing of negroes in association with whites has sometimes been subjected to criticism by the public generally and to deletion by political censor boards. Such criticism has been based on the feeling that negroes in pictures have been shown on terms too familiar and of ‘social equality.’”