SOLVING MALAISE OF MUSICAL THEATER

With “Cats” closed, the Shubert empty, the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera effectively bounced from the Music Center after 1987, and more and more of the fewer and fewer musicals that go on tour closing down before they reach Southern California, something’s going to have to change.

But what? The malaise in the Broadway musical theater has been brewing a long time and is just now manifesting problems that have been percolating for years. Though interrelated and complex, these problems can be oversimplified as spiraling production costs that raise the level of risk and narrow creative margins. Fewer people (in the arenas of money and talent) are willing or able to take on the odds.

The result is a dearth of strong musicals and a lackluster field of half-hits into which life has not so much been breathed as huffed and puffed, causing them to die en route to wherever they were going.

One solution may be moving more musical production into the nonprofit sector. That’s the idea behind the opening in February of the nonprofit California Music Theatre at the 2,965-seat Pasadena Civic Auditorium. And it’s not new. Edwin Lester thought of it 50 years ago, when he founded his Civic Light Opera, producing the shows locally himself.

Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine recognized the nonprofit advantage when they revived “Merrily We Roll Along” at the La Jolla Playhouse last year.

Now they’re trying out Sondheim’s “Into the Woods,” not in Boston but at the San Diego Old Globe. Even the less dependable Long Beach Civic Light Opera proved it could fill a gap when it produced a first-class “Sunday in the Park With George” in October.

Armed with a $2-million budget and gambling that strong local productions can pick up audiences left in the lurch by the touring nonshows, California Music Theatre artistic director Gary Davis and managing director Lars Hansen are planning a first season of four shows carefully spread over the year, with runs of just 11 performances each.

“Our goals are to present pieces that will entertain the audience,” Hansen said, “and still maintain a sense of adventure--mostly by doing the work we can do very well.”

The season, wisely, is semi-conservative, kicking off Feb. 19 with John Raitt in “The Most Happy Fella” (also featuring Lawrence Guittard, Linda Michele and Wayne Bryan), followed May 7 by JoAnne Worley and Giorgio Tozzi in “Call Me Madam,” Oct. 8 by Sigmund Romberg’s “The Desert Song” and Dec. 10, as a holiday treat, “She Loves Me” by Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock.

“We have a total of 32,615 seats to sell,”Hansen explained, multiplying the seats by the number of performances. “We hope to subscribe one-third before we open the first show, (dispose of) a sixth in group sales and another sixth in single tickets. If we meet our projections, we should be able to make it 90% on box office.”

Subscriptions have been selling nicely. They topped 8,000 Monday “and our major push,” Hansen said, “won’t come until after the first of the year. Edwin Lester told us: You subscribe it a week at a time.

“Since we’re producing here, we don’t have to rely on fragile touring schedules and shows promised but not delivered. It’s what we’re trying to overcome. Musicals need that sort of attention.”

WESTWOOD “FRENZY”: Anyone who remembers the Low Moan Spectacular’s “Bullshot Crummond” and “El Grande de Coca-Cola” may look forward to a zany new entry Jan. 20 at the Westwood Playhouse by this San Francisco-based band of looneys.

As a group, they’ve been splintered in recent years and absent from the local scene. Their coming venture at the Westwood is a revival of their bumbling backstage comedy, “Footlight Frenzy,” a sort of American “Noises Off” (though it actually preceded “Noises Off,” dating back to 1981) and a sign, perhaps, that the gang’s back together again. If the show is not so new, it’s new to us. “Frenzy’s” been on cable, but it’s never played live in Los Angeles.

Our recollection is that there were still a few kinks in the version seen at San Francisco’s Alcazar in 1981--not all of them part of the plot. Has “Frenzy” been streamlined over the past five years?

“It has a bigger climax at the end,” volunteered the group’s spokesman, Alan Shearman.

PIECES AND BITS: An open forum will follow Sunday’s hourlong 8 p.m. performance of Andrew Buckland’s and Paul Van Zyl’s “Stillborn” at the Skylight Theatre. The anti-apartheid play deals with the dilemma of white South Africans required to join the army and fight blacks . . . . . Frank Condon will direct “True West” opening Jan. 17 at the Grove Theatre Company’s GEM Theatre . . . . . While Sills & Company are in New York, the Spolin Game Players have taken over Sills headquarters (660 N. Heliotrope Ave.), renamed the Heliotrope Theatre. This outfit of new, young comedy improvisers are guided by none other than Paul Sills’ celebrated mother, Viola Spolin, mother to the Spolin Theater Games.