‘85 LEAPS IN ON LITTLE ‘CATS’ FEET

New year, new projects.

If 1984 ended on some disappointing notes, 1985 promises to be, at the beginning at least, extremely busy.

Take this month. The highlights:

The event of the month, clearly, is the coming of “Cats” to the Shubert (Jan. 11). This expensive (to you, too) megabuck fantasy is based on T. S. Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” which provides lyrics and--mmm--book. It has music by Andrew Lloyd Webber (“Evita”), direction by Trevor Nunn (“Nicholas Nickleby”) and costumes, makeup and environmental superset by John Napier (a fascinatingly scaled- up garbage dump). Bread and circuses, maybe--but stylishhhhhhh.

A few days later, Spalding Gray brings his “Swimming to Cambodia, Parts I and II” to the Taper, Too. As usual with this unconventional conversationalist, this is a homophony of humorous and highly subjective observations--this time mostly on the absurdities of movie making, gathered while Gray was acting in the film “The Killing Fields” in Thailand.

Be prepared for a fast history of Cambodia, comments on uncommon local sexual practices, accounts of Gray’s search for the “perfect moment”--and the perfect Hollywood agent. Part I begins Jan. 15, Part II Jan. 16. No need to see them in sequential order. Gray’s thoughts don’t come in sequential or any other order.

Later, on the Taper’s main stage (Jan. 24), Marsha Norman’s “Traveler in the Dark” gets its first outing since its initial production at Cambridge’s (Mass.) American Repertory Theatre last spring. Gordon Davidson (who staged Norman’s “Getting Out”) directs Claude Akins, Len Cariou, Scott Grimes and Deborah May in this tale of a brilliant and obsessive surgeon who finds that he can handle anything except his life.

The Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre introduces British satirist Jonathan Falla to its Main Stage audience on Jan. 31. Falla’s “Topokana Martyrs’ Day” is described as a savage send-up of Western liberalism set in an African famine-relief outpost.

Topical, too.

Going from famine to feast, the L.A. Public Theatre gives us the overdue L.A. premiere of A. R. Gurney’s “The Dining-Room,” a sort of generational “La Ronde,” opening Jan. 18. And Craig Lucas, a playwright who’s made waves back East but isn’t widely known here, will be represented by “Reckless,” starting Jan. 25 on South Coast Repertory’s Second Stage. The play is a comic nightmare about a housewife into whose perfect life a lot of sudden chaos falls.

For the rest, here’s a week-by-week glance, random and incomplete, at items of potential interest:

THIS WEEK:

Friday: John Steppling’s “The Shaper” reopens at the MET Theatre, new home of the L.A. Theatre Works’ Night House (where “The Shaper” originated), and “Enemy!” reopens at the Cast.

At the Beverly Hills Playhouse, meanwhile, a bust of Tennessee Williams (by Richard Ellis) will be unveiled as actor Ray Stricklyn remembers the late playwright in four performances of his one-man “Confessions of a Nightingale.”

WEEK TWO:

Monday: Timothy Mason’s “In a Northern Landscape,” a 1983 contestant at the Actors’ Theatre of Louisville’s festival of new plays, opens at the Cast-at-the-Circle.

Tuesday: Ron Boussom struts his stuff in George Kelly’s “The Show-Off” at South Coast Repertory. Martin Landau takes on “Dracula” at Royce Hall. And the Group Repertory tries early Sondheim with “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.”

Jan. 11: “Tracy,” Michael Druxman’s one-man portrait of actor Spencer Tracy, inaugurates Theater 40’s new downtown lab space, Room for Theatre opens Philip Barry’s “Holiday” and “The Sponsor” reopens at the Off Ramp.

WEEK THREE:

Jan. 15: Fay De Witt comes to the Backlot’s Studio One in the musical “Nite Club Confidential.”

Jan. 16: Alan Bowne’s “Forty Deuce” opens at the Pan Andreas. This one shoots down two targets: It’s an excursion into the world of male prostitution and a simultaneous attack on American consumerism. Or so we’re told. . . .

WEEK FOUR:

Jan. 22: Simon MacCorkindale brings Michael MacLiammoir’s “The Importance of Being Oscar” to the Westwood Playhouse; Jon Robin Baitz takes on tax-shelter swindlers in “Mizlansky/Zilinsky,” L.A. Theatre Works at the MET.

Jan. 25: Dana Elcar directs John Hopkins’ “This Story of Yours” at the Victory Theatre. The “Story” is that of the mutual catharsis experienced by a police detective and the child molester he interrogates. The high-powered cast consists of Raymond Bieri, Philip Baker Hall, Kiva Lawrence and Mitch Ryan. Director Milton Katselas offers his concept of “Romeo and Juliet” at the Skylight Theatre. And those San Francisco zanies, “The Duck’s Breath Mystery Theatre,” return to My Place in Santa Monica.

Jan. 26: A Theatre 40 revival of “Sticks and Bones” will be staged by Flora Plumb, while San Diego’s Old Globe presents “Stage Struck,” a work new to the West Coast, by one of the Globe’s perennial favorites, Britisher Simon Gray.

WEEK FIVE:

Jan. 29: Hankering for the Yiddish theater? “Oy Mama, Am I in Love!” comes to the Beverly Theater--in Yiddish with computerized English translation to each side of the stage. Book is by Moshe Blum, music and lyrics by Yakov Alper and Ed Linderman. It features Mary Soreanu and runs two weeks before running off to Miami. (This company, by the way, operates under a Hebrew Actors’ Union contract--oldest in the country.)

Jan. 31: Tom Stoppard’s “On the Razzle” gets a West Coast Ensemble L.A. premiere at the Richmond Shepard Studios.

How’s that for a start?

HAVE PLAY, WILL TRAVEL: The Mark Taper Forum’s Taper, Too production of “In the Belly of the Beast” is going to Australia’s Festival of Sydney, Wednesday through Jan. 26. This wrenching self-examination by convicted murderer John Henry Abbott, adapted for the stage by Trinity Square’s Adrian Hall and improved by director Robert Woodruff, will again feature the astonishing Andrew Robinson as Abbott.

Australia notwithstanding, how about a return engagement in Los Angeles for this highlight of 1984?

NOT-SO-SOLO-FLIGHTS: Brooke Bundy will alternate with Jennifer Parker in “Second Lady,” second item on the Zephyr Theatre’s “Solo Flights.” And Harry Hart Browne “becomes” Emmett Foster in the first item: “Emmett: A One-Mormon Show,” now directed by Michael Kearns.

HAPPY NEW YEAR (And then some): The three companies of glitzy “La Cage aux Folles” (Los Angeles, Miami, New York) set an all-time-anywhere record last week with grosses--count ‘em--totaling close to $1.6 million.

And that’s at regular prices and not including New Year’s Eve.