Broadway Revival of You Can't Take It with You Postponed Until Spring 2011

By Andrew Gans
02 Sep 2010

Anna Shapiro
Anna Shapiro
Photo by Aubrey Reuben

The Broadway revival of Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman's You Can't Take It with You, which had been scheduled to open on Broadway in November, has been postponed until spring 2011, according to the New York Times.

Anna Shapiro, who won a Tony Award for her direction of August: Osage County, will direct. Producers are Elizabeth Ireland McCann and Joey Parnes.

The production had been scheduled to originate at Boston's Huntington Theatre Company, but that staging was canceled. When the Huntington production fell through, director Shapiro took on other projects that make a fall Broadway arrival for You Can't Take It with You impossible.

Producer McCann also told the Times that casting has been difficult. "Everyone wants a star in their production, a great actor who will sell tickets, a Jane Fonda or Al Pacino or Hugh Jackman," McCann said. "But it's not easily done. And for my money, we shouldn't leave behind Franny Sternhagen and other great theater actresses. So we've been having a little trouble on casting, yes."

Moss and Kaufman's play, according to press notes, "portrays the colorful, freethinking Sycamore family and the mayhem that ensues when their daughter's fiancé brings his conservative, straight-laced parents to the Sycamore residence for dinner on the wrong night. Literal and figurative fireworks erupt over the course of the evening in a household that appears to be a madhouse but proves, in fact, to be the opposite: a sanctuary from the lunacies of the outside world."

You Can't Take It with You received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1937. The play was last seen on Broadway in 1983.

Anna Shapiro won the Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Award for August: Osage County, having directed the play's premiere at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre. Her numerous other credits include Iron at Manhattan Theatre Club, Jon Robin Baitz's A Fair Country at the Huntington Theatre Company and Bruce Norris' The Pain and the Itch at Steppenwolf.