'The Man Who Came' to Sunset Playhouse

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Before the curtain rises a snippet of music is heard—the theme from the 1942 screwball comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner. But before it was a movie, The Man was a play by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman. Sunset Playhouse returns to the source for its production of The Man Who Came to Dinner, yet memories of the movie can’t help but set expectations.

Wisely, Sunset avoided the potential tangle of trying to update the story. Instead, director Brian Zelinski orchestrates the antics of a large cast in orbit around the play’s center, Sheridan Whiteside. The acerbic radio star-lecturer-writer is the sort of public intellectual rare nowadays; in the movie he was played with magnificently overweening disdain by the incomparable Monty Woolley and at Sunset with bellowing hauteur by Hal Erickson. Whiteside keeps busy by belittling the denizens of the middle-class Ohio home where is confined after slipping on the ice at their doorstep. He unleashes a torrent of witty sarcasm but occasionally reveals a sympathetic side.

On film and onstage, Whiteside puts the supporting cast into the shade. Even the movie’s costar Bette Davis paled. At Sunset, those supporting roles include the family’s star-struck teenagers (played by Declan Swayne and Emma Losey) and their harrumphing Babbitt of a dad (Thomas Van Gilder) alongside Whiteside’s curt and capable secretary (Tanya Tranberg) and the small-town journalist with whom she falls in love (Matt Zembrowski). The performances are earnest and the action is capably confined to a well-designed set representing the wallpapered domesticity of the family’s living room—“that moldy mausoleum” as Whiteside calls it. Much of the humor is topical—many younger people might not recognize the names dropped by the name-dropping Whiteside—but the radio star’s irascibility shines through in Erickson’s performance.