BRINGING BACK THE ‘50s

The secret of success? Spot a need and fill it. So say the purveyors of success formulae. Enter Dennis Deal. “Nostalgia works in 30-year cycles,” says Deal. “In the ‘50s it was the Flappers. In the ‘60s it was Busby Berkeley. In the ‘70s it was the Andrews Sisters.” So what is it now? You guessed it--back to the ‘50s.

Deal has accommodated us with the creation (along with his longtime collaborator, Albert Evans) of “Nite Club Confidential,” which after running for eight months Off Broadway has its West Coast premiere Friday at the Tiffany.

“In general, it’s a spoof of the sophisticated side of the ‘50s,” he said. “On one level it’s about a young singing group meeting up with an appreciably older chanteuse, your basic B-movie 23-A plot. On another it recalls the pop music of the Eisenhower era, from Lambert, Hendricks & Ross to Mel Torme, Rosemary Clooney, Peggy Lee, the coffee-house scene and a few movie musicals--all in the format of Bill Holden-narrated film noir .”

Deal, 36, was a member of the ‘60s flower generation (he even did his undergraduate work at Kent State) and went to New York to work as an actor. Shunted aside into industrial projects and cabaret work, he pined for the theater--” ’I’ve got to get back,’ I said.” Hence the birth of “Nite Club Confidential.” “The ‘50s was the only fresh thing I could deal with,” he says. “We don’t need another padded-shoulders ‘40s musical.”

Deal doesn’t share the opinion of some that the ‘50s was the apotheosis of kitsch. “I certainly appreciate a lot of things about my generation, but the ‘50s was absolutely the last decade when dressing up for the evening was a way of life, when wit and rhyme were still valued in music. The show draws good response from people. The kids like what they think is old-fashioned stuff, and the adults over 45, well, it’s real music to them.

“Fay DeWitt, who was around at the time and stars in ‘Nite Club Confidential,’ said the clubs weren’t like that. But so what? It’s not Broadway. It’s sleek and cool, a movie-eye view, which makes me curious to see how it goes over in L.A.”

Half the musical material in the show is original, incidentally. The other half, according to Deal, consists of “known or unknown standards. After all, nothing I or my collaborator could write would ever match the ambiance of Johnny Mercer’s ‘Somethin’s Gotta Give.’ ”

Another provocative blast from the past comes from the oeuvre of the satirical songwriter Tom Lehrer, who also had a ‘50s cachet that stretched into the ‘60s as well. “Tomfoolery” is the name of his collection of songs, and the revue has its Los Angeles premiere Wednesday at the Burbage Theatre Ensemble.

Lehrer has been lying low these past few years, having taught at MIT and UC Santa Cruz (“I teach math in the spring and musical theater in the winter,” he said; “I tell them what the old musicals were, because we’ll never see them again”). Of the inception of “Tomfoolery,” he says, “Cameron MacIntosh, the guy who did ‘Cats,’ got the idea to put together an evening of my songs. They’d done it for Sondheim, Eubie Blake and everyone else--I guess I was the only one left. I said, ‘It’s your money.’ It opened in London in 1980 and has played New York and San Francisco. Like herpes, it’s just spread.

“Life was simpler when I did those songs, though I didn’t perform that much (he does not perform in ‘Tomfoolery’). Even light cues were simpler. That’s because all I did was sit at the piano. The songs you’ll hear include ‘When You’re Old and Gray,’ ‘The Vatican Rag,’ ‘Pollution’ (the most commercially successful) and ‘We’ll All Go Together When We Go,’ which is about the pointlessness of the nuclear race. When I wrote it in ‘57, I didn’t think the world could be destroyed. Now it’s more chilling.”

“I went from altar boy to comic in my search for God.” Now there’s an opener, right up there with another: “The only serious philosophical problem is suicide.” The latter is the first sentence of Albert Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus,” the former is John Medici’s summation of part of his life. Both figure in Medici’s solo work, “Dread,” opening Wednesday at Theatre East.

“It’s peopled with everyone in my life--my mother, father, sister, neighborhood pals, priests and nightclub comics,” Medici said. “It begins in grammar school and goes right on through my grown-up years. It’s based on the questions raised in Camus’ ‘Sisyphus’ in search of existential authenticity. I first did it as part of the Writers Lab of Theatre East.

“Wanna hear the subtitle? It’s ‘The Journey of an Italian-American Renaissance Prince From East Harlem to the Borscht Belt and Beyond.’ I am in the beyond.”

Who’d argue with that?