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A trip to Pittsburgh last weekend made me realize what an eccentric and wonderful city I once inhabited. Sure, it's not high on the hipster scale, and people say things like yinz, and there are too many mullets, and the bar for good taste is, like, ankle-level with most cities — but there's also something refreshingly simple and friendly about the 'Burgh. It's a place where I never locked my door. It's just that kind of city.

Similarly, You Can't Take It With You is just that kind of play. Set in 1930s New York, it centers on the Sycamore clan, an eccentric, Addams Family-type group who take in everyone from a drunken chorus girl to displaced members of the Russian aristocracy. They also make fireworks in the basement, all play musical instruments and have strange pets running around their cluttered apartment.

The play opens tonight at the Stage Theatre in the Denver Performing Arts Complex. Watch as worlds collide when the Sycamores' daughter invites her fiancé's affluent parents to the craziest dinner party of their lives. According to Chris Wiger, publicity and public-relations manager for the Denver Center Theatre Company, "What's great about this play is that it's a total escape from the 9/11 era to a time when people didn't lock the door. It's an escape from the tensions and fear of today, back to a time when neighbors were neighbors and you just walked over to a house and said, 'Hey, I'm here.'"

For showtimes and tickets, $31 to $36, call 303-893-4100 or go to www.denvercenter.org.
Sept. 21-Oct. 20, 2007