Arts

Production dates changed for upcoming shows at Actors Theatre Playhouse

Actors Theatre Playhouse has moved up the dates for its next two productions.

Ron Hutchinson's Moonlight and Magnolias has moved their 12 performance dates to Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays for four weeks Aug. 15 through Sept. 7, while Alan Ayckbourn's Time of My Life will now perform on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, Sept. 12 thru Sept. 28.

Moonlight and Magnolias is based on the true story of the making of the film Gone with the Wind. It's five weeks into filming, and Scarlett O'Hara has been cast.

The problem is there is no workable script and George Cukor, the director, has been fired by legendary film producer David O. Selznick, who seems to have a big white elephant on his hands and only five days to save the production from failure.

Desperate, Selznick recruits the formidable Victor Fleming to take over as director, and famed screenwriter Ben Hecht to rewrite the script. The only problem is that Hecht has not read the book and the clock is ticking.

With shades drawn, phone calls unanswered, and a diet of peanuts and bananas, Selznick and Fleming frantically re-enact for Hecht all the scenes we have come to know and love, birthing and all, with hilarious results.

The Playhouse's season finale is Alan Ayckbourn's family classic, The Time of My Life.

Do we ever really know when we are truly happy? That is the question beneath this fast-paced comedy of the well-to-do Stratton family. The setting is the family's favorite restaurant, where life's events have been celebrated for decades despite the restaurant's less-than-stellar service.

Scenes shift between three different tables, allowing Ayckbourn to have fun with time and space, flipping from the present to the past to the future and back to the present, over and over again, all in the same restaurant.

This seemingly normal family's pronounced judgments on each other, the family infidelities, and their disappointing children are exposed in awkward fits, situational misconceptions, and flailing arguments that explode the family foibles and poke holes in all their self-serving existences. It's “family” as only Alan Acykbourn can define it.

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