Still, it does have its moments, and the outstanding cast assembled for the Cape Playhouse production makes the most of them.
We find David O. Selznick (the magnificent Broadway actor Brad Oscar, barking orders like an imperious seal) in a bind. Shooting on ``GWTW" has already begun, and Selznick, having yanked George Cukor as director, is bleeding money. He wants stunt driver-turned-director Victor Fleming (Mark Zimmerman) to take a break from a little project called ``The Wizard of Oz" and take over: he's hopeful Fleming's rep as a tough-guy charmer (much is made of the rumor that he slapped Judy Garland) will settle ruffled feathers on the set.
As for his rewrite man, no one will do but Ben Hecht (a subdued Dan Butler, all but unrecognizable as the rabid ``Bulldog" from the TV series Frasier). This former newspaper columnist is a pro, having already secretly doctored scores of scripts (including some of the Marx Brothers' work, whose antic stage business Hutchinson enjoys emulating).
There's just one snag: Hecht, unlike millions of his fellow Americans, has read only page one of the 1,037-page tome. (His assessment? ``Feh.") So Selznick and Fleming, fueled solely on bananas and peanuts (the producer has some crackpot theories as to what constitutes ``brain food"), set about reenacting it for him.
It's great fun to watch this group reconstruct the florid tale. One finger dimpling his cheek, Oscar makes an especially fetching Scarlett, that ``little brat" given to spouting `` fiddle - dee - dees. "
The action flags, though, once Hutchinson yields to the urge to have Hecht infuse the proceedings with ``substance"-- alluding heavy-handedly, for instance, to the anti-Semitism not just surging abroad, but implicit in the Hollywood hierarchy.
Hecht has already expressed outrage that ``Gone With the Wind," as ``an elegy for the Old South," glorifies the practice of slavery, so what's his major problem when the time comes to script the slap that Scarlett inflicts on the maid Prissy? Far worse, indeed horrific treatment was common before and well after the Civil War. The manifesto Hecht would have Prissy deliver is so much empty air: it falls flat as a joke, as do the rewrite team's Three Stooges-like serial stagings of the blow in question.
Instead, it's the odd little elements that captivate and delight: Daniel Meeker's Deco-inflected set, the perfect movie-mogul lair, and Kathel Carlson's sporadic appearances as Selznick's increasingly frazzled secretary. Of the leads, Oscar-as-Selznick carries the play, driving home the message that it's ``all those Joe Blows and Jane Does" out there who wield the real power in Hollywood: their yeas or nays that determine whether a film soars or tanks.
The same holds for theater. It's up to the Joes and Janes who attend ``Moonlight and Magnolias" to decide whether a well-chosen cast and skillful production make up for the shortcomings of the play itself.
