You Can't Take it with You postponed until Spring 2011

The NY Times reports that the Broadway revival of Moss Hart's and George S. Kaufman's Pulitzer Prize-winning play You Can't Take It With You, to be directed by Anna Shapiro, has postponed its opening on Broadway.

The comedy, which was scheduled to open on 10 Nov 2010 at a theatre to be announced, now plans to bow in the Spring of 2011.

You Can't Take It With You was to have had a pre-Broadway run at the Huntington Theater Company in Boston from 24 Sep to 24 Oct 2010, but that was cancelled in the Spring2010. The Huntingdon Theatre Company told the NY Times that they cancelled the show "because Ms. McCann and her producing partners were not able to finalize the deal with enough lead time for the Huntington."

Producer Elizabeth I. McCann said that with the cancellation of the Huntington run of You Can't Take It With You, the show's director Anna Shapiro had now taken on other work, which means she will not be free until the fall to re-assume work on the production.

McCann also told the NY Times that casting the show "has been a challenge." They had hoped that Martin Sheen would star, but he has turned down the offer, and so the search continues for a big name. "Everyone wants a star in their production, a great actor who will sell tickets, a Jane Fonda or Al Pacino or Hugh Jackman," McCann old the paper. "But it's not easily done."

The producer also said that while a big name will help to sell tickets for the show, it is also important to her not to leave out great theatre actors - of which she named Franny Sternhagen as an example.

Not seen on Broadway in 27 years, You Can't Take It With You 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.

The revival of You Can't Take It With You will see director Anna Shapiro return to the Great White Way after making her debut helming 'August O'Sage County' for which she won a Tony Award.

A critical and popular success when it debuted at the Booth Theatre in 1936, You Can't Take It With You was last seen on Broadway over a quarter century ago in 1983. The play received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1937.