Theater review | "You Can't Take It With You" is well-done but dated

Something funny happens to Seattle Repertory Theatre's "You Can't Take It With You" at the top of the second act.

Sporting a ludicrous mop of copper-red ringlets, belting back hooch and weaving unsteadily around the parlor of the Sycamore family, Suzy Hunt fires off a welcome bolt of buffoonish electricity into the Rep's stately revival of the 1936 comedy.

Hunt's snazzy bit as a booze-sodden, grade-C actress wins the first deep-seated belly laugh of the production. And while the show yields other pleasures, you wish there were more as delicious as Hunt's turn — and that of another boisterous scene-stealer, Frank Corrado, who plays a zealous White Russian balletmaster with a penchant for the phrase: "It stinks!"

The Rep's staging of "You Can't Take It With You," under the guidance of director Warner Shook, treats this much-celebrated American play with respect and nostalgic affection. But a Pulitzer Prize-winning script that was a fresh comic breeze in 1936 (when it debuted on Broadway) now has a whiff of quaint gentility when played straight. One can admire its craft and the skill of the adroit Seattle actors tackling the seminal wacky-American-family farce. However, by today's standards, the Sycamore clan's idiosyncrasies seem mildly eccentric rather than outrageous. (They eat cornflakes for dinner! Hey, doesn't everyone?)

And it's not until the homestead is invaded by some alien forces — Hunt, Corrado, the starchy upper-crust types Mr. and Mrs. Kirby (played to uppity perfection by Mark Chamberlin and Kimberly King) — that some comic sparks fly. A more reckless approach than the mild, straight-ahead one Shook has adopted would jazz up the proceedings faster.

The Sycamore's New York City living room, an attractive playpen designed by Michael Ganio, is perhaps too neatly stocked with evidence of the clan's many hobbies: a box of snakes on a table, various musical instruments hanging on the wall.

There's also a typewriter for lovable matriarch Penny Sycamore (Anne Allgood) to dash off bad novels and plays on and a xylophone Penny's son-in-law Ed (Bradford Farwell) bangs on to accompany the clumsy ballet moves of his dizzy wife Essie (Annette Toutonghi).

Every so often, Penny's hubby, Paul (R. Hamilton Wright), dashes in with his pal Mr. DePinna (Allen Galli) to show off new fireworks they're cooking up in the basement. And the black family maid Rheba (Khatt Taylor) and her boyfriend Donald (Cecil Luellen) hang out to comment on the zaniness (in a way that can seem racially stereotyped now but was quite progressive by a 1930s Broadway standard).

Calmly residing over the whimsical goings-on is Grandpa Vanderhof (the superbly droll Michael Winters), who dropped out of the rat race decades earlier to, well, be a happy, libertarian layabout — the leader of a clan content "just to go along and be happy in our kind of way."

His kind of way means not paying income taxes (a more defensible stand before the onset of World War II) and supporting his extended clan's low-cost subsistence on watermelon, franks and artistic amateurism.

It's a fond pipe dream that champions cherished notions of individualism and nonconformity that America has embraced (or fantasized) since the founding of the republic.

Yet one of the most enjoyable, least glib things in this "You Can't Take It With You" is the love scene between Sycamore's "normal" daughter Alice (Elise Karolina Hunt) and Tony (Ben Hollandsworth), the son of Alice's financier boss, Mr. Kirby.

Hollandsworth and Hunt are adorable together. And as they dance to the radio, declare their feelings and seal their engagement, their giddy infatuation charms.

The single conflict in "You Can't Take It With You" is the crisis that ensues when Tony's stuffy parents drop in on the Sycamores.

The clash of classes and lifestyles heats up in Kaufman and Hart's most cleverly wrought, consistently amusing scene. It peaks with a semi-risque parlor game (that reveals how much in need of slacker therapy the elder Kirbys are) and a police bust that gets everyone hauled off to the pokey.

All of this is handled, as is the entire play, with impeccable clarity and taste at the Rep. But the production makes the case for "You Can't Take it With You" as a faintly musty valentine, not as a durable romp with lasting punch.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com