STAGE REVIEWS : REGIONAL THEATER HAS A NEW LOOK

Though the Pacific Conservatory for the Performing Arts (PCPA) advertises 1985 as its 21st season, PCPA has a new look.

Vincent Dowling, a veteran of the Abbey Theatre in Ireland and the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival, is now the producing artistic director. But as we saw when artistic co-directors David Emmes and Martin Benson took a step up from a converted storefront into the next stage of the South Coast Repertory, a big regional theater is like an ocean liner: It isn’t designed to make zippy turns or quick shifts of direction. Its inertia is awesome.

Eight plays are on PCPA’s summer roster (“Hamlet,” with David Birney, opens in September). Most are proven commercial successes, an indication of Dowling’s attempt to test the waters of his new environment. Here’s a report on four of them:

“Amadeus” was best attended of the weekend productions your correspondent saw. Peter Shaffer’s stage version offers a fuller Salieri than the movie (Murray Abraham’s Oscar-winning performance notwithstanding), and Robert Elliot is adroit at what the movie missed--Salieri’s bone-deep Italian appreciation of intrigue and his sardonic view of the vagaries of human fate, even while knowing he’s swept up in them.

The movie gave us a latent aesthetic demagogue in Salieri, a man outraged and vengeful--but guilty for the Machiavellian steps he has successfully taken to keep that ninny and prodigious genius, Mozart, out of favor with the court (even while he embraces Mozart).

Elliott here has the martyred, sullen face of someone perpetually aggrieved, and the suave exigency of a man comfortably used to having his own way. But he shows us the artist’s awe of beauty--the brotherhood of recognition for the real thing--and the wry Italian appreciation for a bit of skulduggery well done (he also has a genteel disdain for the stupidos that surround him).

It’s a strong, rounded performance, and Dan Monahan’s manic Mozart is often touching too, though too much energized toward the end. It’s a performance indebted to Tom Hulce, the film Mozart, so much so, in fact, that our younger and succeeding generations may never be able to dissociate Mozart the artist’s exquisite music from the pop depiction of the little man’s peals of donkey-like laughter.

Tina Marie Goff shows us the pretentiousness of an uncertain woman as Costanza, Mozart’s wife, while sacrificing nothing of Costanza’s dutifulness and decency--Goff’s most adept at the transition from early sexy flirtatiousness to the bone-weary torpor that poverty engenders. Darrell Sandeen makes a delightfully blank emperor, and D. Martyn Bookwalter’s lights and set feature a post-rococo old gold look.

Cash Baxter directs.

C. P. Taylor’s “And a Nightingale Sang” incorporates some of the British songs of World War II with the remembrance of a girl named Helen who saw her family through it all and grew to womanhood in the process. It’s a dangerously sentimental piece, but with the exception of Sandy McCallum’s grandfather--a performance that makes us conscious of the old geezer as a “character”--the players fit their roles around themselves like sweat-oiled old gloves.

Robin Leary as the capriciously vain younger sister, Joyce--a potentially hateful and shallow character--shows us caprice as a manifestation of confusion as much as unconscious cruelty and self-centeredness. Clive Rosengren is an impressively big bluffer as Da, someone who would have been happy as a musician had not working-class pressures intervened.

Gale Fury Childs is an appropriately suffering and fussy mother; Jonathan Gillard is the likable lunk who marries and puts up with Joyce, and Colm Meaney as Norman, Helen’s army boyfriend who decides (with considerable pain) to go back to the missus and the kid, has the look and character down so well that he suggests every supernumerary who took orders from Harry Andrews in a British war movie.

Bairbre Dowling plays Helen with uncommon subtlety and technical assurance. She never gets out in front of the ensemble, but there’s a distinctive inwardness to her just the same. Dowling’s Helen wins out in the end by coming to grips, but it’s not an “I Did It My Way” declaration. She reminds us that people’s triumphs aren’t expressed in manifestoes as much as they are in a new-found lightness of stride or the confident angle of a face glancing skyward over the heads of a crowd.

Bernard Kates directs, and the fine set and costumes are by John Dexter and Calaramarie Verheyen.

Kates, incidentally, appears as the senescent father in Tina Howe’s “Painting Churches,” the story of a young portrait artist who wants to paint her aging parents. The production is problematic. The quality of the writing is spotty and Howe has painted her artist into the corner of someone who looks without seeing well. Gale Fury Childs as the daughter doesn’t do much to transcend that limit, but Diana Douglas is very fine as the difficult mother, and Kates’ recitations of Wallace Stevens are an actor’s and audience’s dream--the syllables hang in the air like ravishing music.

PCPA’s budget limitations, more restrictive than in the past, are apparent in “Gypsy.” A tiny orchestra plays out of sight in a small shell in the house, and John Bonard Wilson’s set for the most part is minimal. This is the least confident-looking of the productions your reviewer saw (the dancing is especially uncertain). Still, there’s no denying its power as one of the greatest American musicals ever written.

When Kathy Brady-Garvin as Rose gets angry, she doesn’t get angry enough (Rose is somebody you’d never want to cross), and she’s young for the role. But she’s also hefty enough, and inventive (she wrings her hands only once, and it’s telling). You can see why her Rose is both formidable and someone who could never make it. Riette Burdick’s Louise is facially inert and the performance on the whole is so taciturn that when her metamorphosis into Gypsy occurs it’s unbelievable. Still, once arrived, she makes a panther-sleek beauty, a shrewd model. Rose’s girl made good.

Jack Shouse directs.

POSTSCRIPT: Vincent Dowling was asking about the credentials of a Los Angeles theater spokeswoman, whose political dexterity has outweighed her artistic merit. Dowling wanted to know only one thing: “Is she a poet?” he asked.

He deserves watching.