What happens in an established industry when a new technology changes all of the rules?  When that industry is the motion picture business, and the innovation is sound movies, the answer is a Once In A Lifetime opportunity for satire and hilarious entertainment!

Atholton High School’s award-winning theatre department is producing the uproarious Once In A Lifetime by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, by special arrangement with Dramatists Play Service. Performances of this delightful comedy will be Thursday through Saturday, November 13-15, 2008 at 7:00 PM, with a Sunday matinee on November 16 at 3:00 PM.  Atholton High School is located in Columbia, at 6520 Freetown Road, between Cedar Lane and Route 29.

Set in 1927 just moments after the success of the first talking picture, Once In A Lifetime tells the story of three small-time vaudeville actors who talk their way into big jobs in Hollywood.  They figure out that Hollywood will be in a panic due to the explosive public reaction to the talkies, and take hilarious advantage of the situation! Over eighty Atholton students in the cast and crew bring to life the first collaboration from the authors of You Can’t Take It With You, The Man Who Came To Dinner, and many of the best Marx Brothers movies.  It’s your Once In A Lifetime opportunity to see this classic comedy!  Call 410-313-7065 for more information, or visit http://www.atholtonboosters.org/drama/index.htm

About Once in a Lifetime

Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s Once in a Lifetime was one of the pair’s best collaborations, the first of eight they wrote together in the 1930s. Inspired by the rise of the talkies—movies with sound—and the excess of Hollywood, the play is a wisecracking satire, though not particularly mean or bitter.  Once in a Lifetime opened on September 24, 1930, at the Music Box in New York City. It ran for 406 performances and won the Roi Cooper Megrue Prize for comedy in 1930. The play was very popular with both critics and audiences, giving them something to think about other than the growing economic depression. Since its original production, Once in a Lifetime was revived regularly through years, both on and off Broadway, as well as regionally and in Europe.  As the New York Times’ Howard Taubman wrote in a 1962 review ‘‘Once in a Lifetime is still pertinent and funny. The film industry has been through more upheavals than an old-time banana republic, but the more it changes the more some of its foibles remain the same.’’