BWW Reviews: Theatre Harrisburg's THE PHILADELPHIA STORY Kicks Off New Season

Phillip Barry's THE PHILADELPHIA STORY is probablly best known to audiences as a Katherine Hepburn film vehicle; many if not most will have missed the fact that it originally opened on Broadway in 1939 with Hepburn in the starring role, and was then turned into the movie that cable movie channel fans know and love.

Director Tom Hostetter has it on stage at Theatre Harrisburg's Krevsky Center, where it can be viewed as originally intended, on stage. Nels Martin's sets and Paul Foltz's costumes evoke 1930s Philadelphia horse country perfectly, and the Main Line area has rarely been funnier.

There are few if any serious errors in this production; if anything, the flaw is that there's far too much attempt to replicate Kate Hepburn's not-so-Philadelphian Conneticut WASP lockjaw (her years at Bryn Mawr never quite eradicated it) not only in the lead character, Tracy Lord (Amy Burke) but in other characters' inflections as well. The cast sounds more Yale than University of Pennsylvania. Other than that, the characters are neatly realized. Burke pulls off Tracy's combination of brains, wicked humor, and distress nicely, while Uncle Williwe (Eddie Costick) is absolutely charming as the wicked uncle of the ages. Trish Baillie and Joe Carr play Liz Imbrie and Macaulay Conner, a pair of anti-Establishment reporters from New York writing a piece on the Lord clan, to the hilt, and Baillie's moments with Costik are magnificently amusing bits of elderly skirt-chasing. Pre-wedding upheavals have never been so funny.

Special note must be made of Danielle Miller as Tracy's little sister, the precocious and slightly obnoxious Dinah Lord. The seventh-grade area stage veteran grows on the audience gradually, from wanting to kill Dinah to wanting to hug her. Don't miss, however, her hysterically funny performance of "Lydia, the Tattooed Lady" (which this writer first learned from listening to entirely far too much of Groucho Marx in childhood).

Will Tracy always be a prig? Will she go through with her wedding to the pompously moral self-made coal king, George (Glen Smith)? Will she kill her slickly charming ex-husband, Dexter (Darren Riddle), who can't harass her enough? Or will the brains and writing talent of Macaulay Conner sweep her off her feet? Will her journalist cousin, Sandy Lord (Kerry Mowery) be able to kill the article about his family? What happened at the swimming pool the night before the wedding? And... are Dinah's dreams actually prophetic? It's all answered, and all loose ends tied up, at the wedding, which in true comic fashion, doesn't begin to come off anywhere close to what was planned.

Through September 14 at Theatre Harrisburg, and worth the trip for a classic comedy full of fun and entirely lacking in Bridezillas. Clean enough for kids, sophisticated enough for adults, it's a winner on all counts. For tickets, call 717-232-5501 or visit www.theatreharrisburg.com.

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