“Frankly, my dear, this is one funny play … a rip-roaring farce”  That is how the NY Daily News summed up “Moonlight & Magnolias,” the screwball comedy presented at BRAVO! Theatre in Riberas del Pilar, a few doors west of S&S Auto.

It is 1939, and the filming of “Gone With The Wind” had to be quickly shutdown because producer David O. Selznick decided the script was awful.  But the shutdown was costing a fortune.  So he decided to make the 1,037-page novel into a brand new script in only five days.  To help, he enlisted Marx Brothers’ writer Ben Hecht and Wizard of Oz director Victor Fleming.

“Moonlight & Magnolias” is a fictionalization (or is it?) of this madcap five-day period, with no food and no sleep, compounded by the fact that Selznick wants to stay loyal to the book, and the one person responsible for writing the script, Hecht, never read the novel.

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