LA JOLLA TO JAZZ IT UP AND ‘SHOUT’

The La Jolla Playhouse has announced an expanded season and an eclectic mix of plays and performers for its fourth summer in the Mandell Weiss Center for the Performing Arts and Warren Theater on the UC San Diego campus.

Artistic director Des McAnuff will open the season June 1, staging the world premiere of the musical “Shout Up a Morning,” which features a jazz score written and recorded by the late Julian (Cannonball) Adderley and his brother, Nat, in the mid-’70s. Paul Avila Mayer and George W. George are developing the book, with lyrics by Diane Lampert and Peter Farrow.

The season, expanded to five plays, will include actor-clown Bill Irwin playing Harlequin in “The Three Cuckolds”; Robert Woodruff directing the American premiere of Odon von Horvath’s “Figaro Gets a Divorce,” and “Gillette,” a comedy by William Hauptman to be directed by McAnuff. The closing work, a classic, will be announced at a later date.

“Shout Up a Morning” is set in the American Reconstruction era and based on the legend of John Henry and his efforts to win passage for his people to the Promised Land.

With a cast of 30, McAnuff said the musical “will be the largest production we’ve attempted to mount. I think it’s a pertinent story in that it’s about what happened after the war, after slaves were supposed to be free. I do think it’s an important part of the story of black America.

“We hope to have some of the leading black actors in the country congregating together in La Jolla this summer.”

“The Three Cuckolds,” adapted by Leon Katz from a classic commedia dell’arte satire, will open July 6. It will mark Irwin’s second summer at the playhouse, where he won a San Diego Theatre Critics Circle award for his work in Bertolt Brecht’s “A Man’s a Man.”

Woodruff also is returning for a second season, after winning directorial honors in San Diego for the Brecht piece. His interpretation of “Figaro Gets a Divorce” will open July 20.

“Odon von Horvath is one of the major writers of the century,” McAnuff said. “His work is really just starting to have an impact in this country, but we’re excited about the chance to premiere a Von Horvath play under Woodruff’s direction. It’s quite a brilliant piece. It really took place when Von Horvath was in exile from Austria. He was writing to some extent about his own experience.”

Although the comedy, translated by Roger Downey, is something of a sequel to “The Marriage of Figaro,” McAnuff sees it as being “very much about events in this century. It involves revolution and exile and a lot of themes and issues that I think are important in the 1980s.”

“Gillette” will open Aug. 17 on the small stage of the Warren Theatre. McAnuff describes it as representing a “completely different side of the American experience” from “Shout Up a Morning,” centering on a pair of blue-collar workers in Gillette, Wyo.

“It involves some important American themes, like going West and seeking your fortune--get rich quick,” he said. “We’ll be using a lot of rockabilly music.