Noel Coward's last play! A secret is revealed. Is it Coward or is it fiction? See the WEST COAST PREMIERE of this characteristically witty Coward ... but a Coward who is equally poignant and insightful in this behind-the-scenes look at fame, sexual preference, wealth and privilege. Stars an incomparable combination of Orson Bean (AWAKE AND SING), Alley Mills and Laurie O'Brien (MARY BARNES and TIMES LIKE THESE).

A Note from the Director
In 1974, I saw Maggie Smith, Brian Bedford, Marti Maraden, and Nicholas Pennell play in Private Lives at the Stratford Festival Theatre, and was for the first time swept up into the magic world of Noël Coward, a world in which people say and do stunning and powerful things to try, sometimes desperately, to change a world that puts them in a tight corner or up a dangerously high tree. Sometimes they have gotten themselves into that corner. Or perhaps planted that tree, watered it for years, watched it grow irretrievably tall, and THEN climbed it. And now they are stuck there.

And it matters. It matters a lot. Because it's real. Real things are at stake; things are going to get broken; and people are going to get hurt.

And along the way, Coward gives us that flowing, sharp, twisty, skipping river of words: all those people in his plays, musicals, and films, using words to try to bend their lives into something that can work for them. And all those wonderful words keep jarring and surprising us into laughter. Lots of laughter, about real things, and grownup people.

In 1965 Coward wrote A Song At Twilight to be both his return and farewell to the stage, on which he'd begun as a child performer in the era of limelight and greasepaint. By the 60s Coward, a cutting-edge innovator his entire working life, was considered a bit "old fashioned," and so it was largely on the strength of his own commitment to appear in the play himself, after many years away from the legitimate theatre, that it was produced in London.

Where it became an immense surprise hit. Illness two years later kept him from bringing the play to America, where this original version has still rarely been seen, and never on Broadway.

And just a few years ago, it received its first major revival in London, and was once again a big "surprise" hit. But why a surprise, really? It just goes to show that "The Master" could still do what he'd always done -- something new, something unexpected and just a bit dangerous, using words like nobody else's, to move us and make us laugh about real things that matter.

–James Glossman, January 16, 2010