Fast Talk, Even Faster Action

Prohibition. New York. Backstage at a speak-easy (that’s “nightclub” to you, pal) called the Paradise. Regarding “a mighty nifty little trick” they’re both sappy about, the hoofer says to the gangster:

“I been knocking around cabarets, dance clubs, vaudeville, everything, for a long time, and what I can’t get through my head is this--why is it that all the guys like you are never satisfied with the hundreds of janes that will do anything you want--all the rummies and bums you can have, and by God--you’ll quit ‘em all to go after one girl that you know is good--why is that, huh?”

Well, there’s the despoilment angle, of course, if you’re a diamond-toting cad. And there’d be no play otherwise.

“Broadway,” the 1926 Philip Dunning-George Abbott melodrama, has returned in a ripping Actors’ Gang production staged up, down and sideways by David Schweizer. Anything less than a fully inhabited rendition would lie there like a lox. “Broadway” isn’t a wisecracking comedy in the George S. Kaufman vein; it’s all attitude and very few actual jokes. Nor does it have the epic momentum of the Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur classic “The Front Page,” which came along two years after Abbott revised Dunning’s script and staged the “Broadway” premiere.

In the right hands, however, it’s an atmospheric gold mine. Schweizer takes a hoary but pungent relic of the commercial stage and activates it.

“Broadway” was one of the plays that taught the movies how to talk. Dunning and Abbott blended backstage romance with bootlegging melodrama, and the combination practically dared movie technology to catch up with the stage, to match live theater’s ability to capture the sound of hard-boiled gab.

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The central triangle involves Roy Lane (Brent Hinkley), Paradise song-and-dance man, in love with his prospective vaudeville partner, Billie Moore (Tordy Clark), who has another suitor, bootlegger Steve Crandall (Jason Reed). Crandall’s uptown business rival, Scar Edwards (Lee Arenberg), tries to get Crandall to back off his action. He gets bumped off for his trouble, attracting the attention of homicide cop Dan McCorn (Kirk Ward).

As he did for so many plays and musicals throughout the century, co-author Abbott slammed this concoction home, and kept it moving. Schweizer does the same, with his own edge. He’s encouraged his performers to push the characterizations to extremes, and there’s an operatic quality to the big confrontations. Other scenes he distills to their stripped-down, ironic essence; when McCorn interrogates one of the chorines, Mazie (Dina Platias), the encounter becomes a lesson in how to use cigarettes--this production uses up a lot of them--as gesture and punctuation.

In adapting the text, Schweizer brings the (as scripted) offstage cabaret numbers onstage, the Gershwins’ “Clap Yo’ Hands” among them. To insinuating, dreamlike effect, he deploys a second-level playing space atop scenic designer Steve Mitchell’s backstage area as the chorus line’s dressing room. Without busting the play at its seams, Schweizer gives it some of the Expressionistic zap favored by more avant ‘20s items, such as Sophie Treadwell’s “Machinal” or Eugene O’Neill’s “Hairy Ape.”

It’s too bad the Actors’ Gang ensemble doesn’t have at least one snazzy musical-theater type. As played, in predictable Mae West mode, by Andrea Stein, songstress Lil Rice doesn’t bring much to the party. Nor does Hinkley’s Lane, conceived as a Bert Lahr-brand comic schlep. He’s funny, and the role’s not supposed to be a star-in-the-making or anything, but Hinkley’s working too hard every minute. He could take a cue from Steven M. Porter’s Porky who, as one of bootlegger Crandall’s flunkies, comes through with a great, sly combination of fawning, muttering and besotted pratfalls.

Even with an uneven cast, there’s enough interpretive panache afoot here to make a viable go of “Broadway.” In 1987, at the age of 100, co-author Abbott staged a Broadway revival of the play, which proved to be a four-performance flop. Foolproof it isn’t. Even in a zingy production, the play remains stubbornly of its time. The trick, as Schweizer knows, is listening to the sounds of that time, the crackle and hum of the talk.

* “Broadway,” Actors’ Gang Theater, 6209 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Thursdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends April 3. $15-$20. (323) 660-TIXS. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.