James Lapine's staging of Moss Hart's 'Act One'

It’s the story of Moss Hart’s lifelong love affair with the theater. And, in turn, it’s James Lapine’s own love for this story that inspired him to adapt Hart’s moving autobiography Act One into a heartwarming stage play, now filling Lincoln Center’s expansive Vivian Beaumont stage with an epic-scale love letter to the American theater.

You may be familiar with the Moss Hart rags-to-riches story — or, as Lapine calls it, “David Copperfield goes to Broadway.” Hart’s dramatic journey from impoverished origins to one of the most successful Broadway writers and director of his time (1930s-1950s) has inspired countless theater artists — including Lapine — with its purpose and passion.

For the stage adaptation, Lapine has chosen to dramatize the years from 1914 to 1930, charting young Hart’s meteoric rise from a childhood of hardship to the triumphant 1930 opening of Once in a Lifetime, the fruit of his collaboration with the legendary George S. Kaufman. A huge, impressive turnstile set — designed by the gifted Beowulf Boritt and inhabited by an ensemble of 22 actors playing multiple roles — accommodates the many scenes that unfold during those formative years. To heighten the theatricality, Lapine has an older Moss Hart narrating the poignant story as he looks back on his younger self.

We first meet young Moss (a winsome Matthew Schechter) crowded into a two-bedroom Bronx tenement with his five-member family, plus boarders who help make ends meet. Moss’s colorful Aunt Kate (a flamboyant Andrea Martin) hoards her money and sneaks off to the theater — a shameless indulgence, according to Hart’s embittered immigrant father, who struggles with odd jobs. It’s Aunt Kate who introduces the impressionable 11-year-old Moss to that magical world, providing him with a beacon of light in their dismal domesticity. “The wonderful thing about going to the theater is that the lights go out when they are supposed to,” says Aunt Kate, referring to the electric meter that they can’t always afford to feed.

Hart’s father eventually throws Kate out and forces young Moss to quit school and work for a furrier to help make ends meet. But the stage-struck Hart (now 17, played by the charming Santino Fontana) doggedly pursues his dream; he quits his job and starts working as an office boy for Augustus Pitou, a theater producer. He quickly rises to secretary to script-reader to fledgling playwright. His first effort, The Beloved Bandit, is a resounding flop; its effect is likened to “spraying ether on the audience.”

If at first . . .

“Life often imitates bad plays,” quips the older Hart. Undaunted, Hart snags a small role in Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones, then moves on to a job writing skits for the Catskill borscht belt circuit. Determined, he writes a new play, and his stage-struck confrères (the so-called “Confederation of Office Boys”) help him find a producer, who in turn sends the manuscript to George S. Kaufman, the prestigious writer/director. Kaufman agrees to co-author the script, and with a $500 advance in his pocket and the beckoning lights of Broadway above, Hart concludes Act I of Act One having achieved the first step of his dream: “To take a taxicab ride home from Broadway to the Bronx.”

Lapine, who also directs, shapes the story and sets the stage for the delights of Act II — the collaboration between Kaufman and Hart on the writing of Once in a Lifetime. The tour de force of this act is provided by the amazing Tony Shalhoub, who plays Hart’s father in Act I, as well as the narrator, and now takes on the role of George S. Kaufman, too. This virtuosic actor, at home on both stage and screen, creates three finely etched roles, with only seconds to change from the stern father to the elegant narrator to the flamboyant writer/director. Shalhoub’s obsessive/compulsive Kaufman, with his wild hair and oversized spectacles, bears many of the quirks and mannerisms of Adrian Monk, his delectable TV creation, and provides much of the hilarity of Act II.

“Collaboration is like a marriage,” says Hart’s producer. “Nothing anyone tells you is of any use.” The partnership between Hart, the Bronx-bred neophyte, and Kaufman, the sophisticated East Side eccentric, is the stuff that situation comedy is made of, and Lapine makes the most of it. (Lapine, himself a collaborator with Stephen Sondheim on Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, and Passion, knows whereof he writes). As different as they were, Kaufman and Hart persevered, and Once in a Lifetime opened on September 24, 1930 to rave reviews. They would collaborate on seven more winners, including Merrily We Roll Along (1934), You Can’t Take It With You (Pulitzer Prize, 1937), and The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939).

What a time it was

The achievement of Lapine’s Act One is that it tells a wonderful story and at the same time evokes the excitement of the era on a grand theatrical scale. The 1920s was a fabulous decade for the American theater, with Times Square at the epicenter. Vaudeville and “legit” played side by side; the Ziegfeld Follies ruled; new plays by Eugene O’Neill thrived; Ray Bolger, Fanny Brice, and W. C. Fields strode the stages. The Times had to employ five theater critics to keep up with the avalanche of new productions (267 in 1927-28 alone, in a season that boasted Show Boat and The Royal Family). What stage-struck kid wouldn’t want to be a part of it all?

The glamor of that era is epitomized in the Act II scene in which Bea Kaufman throws a cocktail party for the New York glitterati in their elegant town house. Dorothy Parker, Harpo Marx, Edna Ferber, Langston Hughes, and Alexander Wolcott mingle, while young, wide-eyed Moss looks on. After Once in a Lifetime opened, Moss Hart joined their ranks, and the rest is theater history. Hart went on to become one of the most celebrated writers/directors of his time, with credits that included the screenplay of A Star Is Born (1954) and the direction of My Fair Lady (1956), one of the most successful musicals in history. He collaborated with the best: Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Kurt Weill, Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, and Lerner and Loewe, among others.

“I want a life in this business. That’s all I’ve ever wanted,” says Hart. Lapine’s loving adaptation of Act One serves as an inspiration for any gifted “poor kid from the Bronx” (or elsewhere) who is willing to work for his dream.