You Can't Take it with You

About the Play

The Pulitzer-Prize winning play You Can’t Take It With You was first produced on Broadway in 1936. It was made into an Academy-Award winning movie in 1938, directed by Frank Capra and starring Lionel Barrymore, Jimmy Stewart, Jean Arthur and Ann Miller (among others). It’s light-hearted humour, lovable, quirky characters and many topical references must have been a welcome diversion for a Depression-weary audience — and its “money doesn’t buy happiness” message would probably have sat well too!

Despite being firmly rooted in its era, this play has been brought back to the stage again and again in the decades that have followed. Using a familiar star-crossed lovers plot, playwrights George S. Koffman & Moss Hart present a conflict that will strike home with an audience from any era.