About the Play:

Light Up the Sky is a full-length comedy by Moss Hart. An idealistic playwright sees his magnum opus comically eviscerated by a series of events and clashes of artists' egos, in Moss Hart's satire. Light Up the Sky is a fast-paced, hilarious and ultimately loving look inside show business, set just before and immediately after a Broadway-bound play meets its first audience.

Light Up the Sky revolves around a group of New York theatre-folk who attend the opening of their new Broadway-bound play during its Boston tryout. The temperamental lead actress, the backer with more interest in money than art, and several others, are in seventh heaven at the prospect of a tremendous success which they hope for in the work of a young truck driver turned playwright. Gathered in a hotel room, these people go through their paces with tremendous gusto and many exhibitions of temperament. The opening of the play, which is a very earnest and experimental work, is such as to lead the cast, director and backer to believe it a flop. Instantly they turn against themselves, the production, the author and savagely proceed in what looks like an attempt to destroy themselves and all their former hopes. It turns out, however, that in spite of the curious reception by the first night audience, the play has made a deep impression, and when news spreads that the overnight reviews are on the whole favourable, they frantically try to repair the damage they did to their relationships when they thought the play had failed. But the playwright who has suffered both from the enthusiasm and pessimism of his associates has decided that he is through with the theatre, and he is captured by the backer only at the moment he is about to take a plane back home. He is persuaded to play ball with his associates, but he is so disgusted with the temperamental shenanigans of those who were presumably his friends that he turns on them and lays down the law to them.

Light Up the Sky premiered in 1949 at the Royale Theatre on Broadway in New York City. A gorgeously amusing comedy about show folks, it is a constant favourite of community theatres, colleges, and regional theatres

Cast: 4 female, 9 male

About the Playwright:

Moss Hart (1904-1961) was an American playwright and theatre director, best known for his interpretations of musical theatre on Broadway. He also succeeded in Hollywood, becoming a notable screenwriter. Among his many accolades are the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Academy Award nomination for best screenplay, and a Best Director Tony Award.