THEATER REVIEW : Cast Breathes New Life Into ‘Hasty Heart’ at Knightsbridge

The Knightsbridge Theatre, which threw open its doors exactly a year ago next week, has survived to its first birthday on a promising note.

For a while it looked like the shops and watering holes of Old Pasadena were less than hospitable to a steady diet of classical and modern theater.

But co-artistic directors (and husband and wife) Joe and Barbara Stachura, while amazingly staging an alternating menu of three different plays each week, seem to be winning the box office battle.

A cynic might say it was just a case of international soccer fans pouring into Old Pasadena after a Saturday match and accidentally stumbling into the Knightsbridge because they were lost--but the Knightsbridge was jammed that day (the first full house this reviewer has experienced there) for the World War II-era comedy/drama “The Hasty Heart.”

John Patrick’s look at soldiers convalescing in a British MASH-like hospital hut in Burma in 1943 has long been a staple of small theater. It’s also gone big time: It was a movie starring Ronald Reagan and Richard Todd in 1949, and the Ahmanson Theatre staged it in 1982 with Gregory Harrison in the title role of a bitter Scotsman who is dying but doesn’t know it.

At the Knightsbridge, director Hugh Harrison and a textured ensemble cast breathe new life into a play that, while tautly written, does creak a bit in its construction and predictability. But its humor and human crucible have aged well.

A bunch of disparate military guys recovering from wounds in a bamboo medical ward are ordered to be nice to a new arrival because he’s dying from a shrapnel wound and kidney failure, although he hasn’t been told. The catch is that the new guy is impossible to like, with a chip on his shoulder as towering as the palm trees in the nearby jungle.

In the second act he undergoes what is tantamount to a spiritual conversion (“I shared a moment with kings,” he says of the guys around him) and everyone in the play is a changed character by the end.

*

The circumstances are an audience pleaser if strongly acted, and this production’s unwitting protagonist, the surly Scotsman named Lachlen, is superbly portrayed by Al Nowicki. The impressive actor also lays down a perfect Scottish accent but not so intrusive that it calls attention to itself.

The Scot’s chief rival is the lone Yank in the ward (the old Ronald Reagan role), a brash, affable type vividly captured by the appealing Bruce McKenna, who adopts the period’s wet-hair look and wire glasses. A no-nonsense nurse (played by Patricia Neal in the ’49 movie) is crisply delivered by Stephanie Moffett.

One character, a black soldier called Blossom, can’t speak, and it’s the subtle achievement of Bobby Gene Mitchell that his muteness is as touching as it is and clearly the show’s most visually expressive element.

Other characters include a New Zealander (Robert Bruce); an Aussie (Greg Fitchitt); an irritatingly shrill and self-satisfied, obese limey (the overripe Andrew Barach in the production’s singular, glaring misstep), and a stiff-upper-lip British colonel (deftly performed by stand-in Hal Edwards).

It’s the colonel who finally tells the Scotsman he’s got but weeks to live, in a dramatic scene notable for the victim’s sense of betrayal by mates he thought truly liked him--who by now actually do.

* “The Hasty Heart,” Knightsbridge Theatre, 35 S. Raymond Ave., Pasadena, 5 p.m. Saturday, 8 p.m. Sunday. Ends July 17. $15. (818) 440-0821. Running time: 2 hours.