SUMMER THEATER : ‘GOOD’ AND ‘ANDERSEN’ EXCEL

‘We’re dedicated to balance and variety,” explains Theaterfest artistic director Jack Shouse in the summer season program.

No kidding.

At the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts, this is the season of “Good,” a blistering demonstration of how easy it was in ‘30s Germany to descend from banality to evil. Yet it’s also the season of “Hans Christian Andersen,” a gentle fantasy based on the Hollywood movie about the great Dane.

The two productions have one thing in common: They’re superb. They’re both presented with passion as well as with the utmost professionalism. Looking at them, one realizes again that the PCPA theaters in Solvang and Santa Maria are essential landmarks on the theatrical map.

A couple of other productions sampled last weekend, “Kiss Me Kate” and “The Foreigner,” evinced the same commitment to excellence, if not the same excellence as “Good” and “Hans.”

The visit confirmed another of Shouse’s comments in the program: “The original vision (of PCPA) is intact”--despite the departure of founder Donovan Marley in 1983 and the coming and going of two other artistic directors in between Marley and Shouse. If the programming was buffeted by the turnover, it’s not apparent in the shows I saw.

“Good” was the centerpiece of the weekend. C.P. Taylor’s story of one German academic’s slide into the S.S. is a marvelously showy piece. John C. Fletcher staged it with no holds barred.

Halder, that ostensibly “good” man, is besieged by distractions. His senile mother, his shlumpy wife, his shining blonde mistress, his Jewish friend--all of them demand his attention. Then there are these strange passages of music that keep flitting through his head--and across Fletcher’s stage. The music, expertly directed by Milcho Leviev, mesmerizes him in the same way that television mesmerizes many Americans.

With all this going on in his head, who has time to worry about the Nazis? And when the Nazis offer Halder a chance for professional advancement (as well as a chance to rationalize his own darkest attitudes toward his mother), he sees no point in resisting. Maybe he’ll be able to humanize the thugs.

Halder’s fall is the stuff of comedy; he hasn’t the stature for tragedy. He thinks of himself as a good man, but it’s a vain and meaningless thought.

Fletcher understands the comedy in “Good”--and how sad and cutting that comedy is. Hence the circus clown who drifts through Halder’s reveries, the clip from Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator,” and one savagely funny moment when Halder sends his whining mother’s wheelchair careening down an embankment. These are all Fletcher’s handiwork.

But he also understands the horror in “Good.” The blood is brutally graphic, and “Shoah” and “Triumph of the Will” play on TV screens during intermission.

Finally, by casting Lawrence Hecht as Halder, Fletcher made Halder hard to dismiss, despite his evasive spinelessness. Hecht is a big man with a gift for affability--not a comic grotesque. He makes Halder’s complaints sound almost reasonable.

Shouse himself designed the starkly forbidding set for “Good,” leaving plenty of room for Halder’s fantasies, and Robert Jared lit it with style, particularly in one nightmarish scene that takes place behind a screen.

It’s also fascinating to watch Steve Johnson as Hitler and Philip Brotherton as a Nazi bully in “Good” one night after seeing them play Ku Klux Klansmen in “The Foreigner.” The conjunction of the two plays endows “The Foreigner” with a significance that it otherwise lacks; watching how a group of Georgians reacts to the presence of an unintelligible “foreigner” (actually an Englishman who feigns his unintelligibility out of a profound shyness), you can compare it to the way the Germans reacted to the Jews, or to the way English-only Americans have reacted to the current wave of aliens.

“The Foreigner” needs all the imported intellectual justification it can get, for its situation is awfully contrived and many of its jokes are shamelessly low-brow. Still, the production on John Dexter’s beautifully cluttered set in Solvang got more than its share of laughter the other night. The cast, which has been working together since last winter, has mastered nearly every split second of this play.

True, Kathleen Brady-Garvin is too young as the fishing lodge owner. And in one crucial scene, when the title character decides to go incognito, most of the audience can’t see his face. Blame director Sandy McCallum’s blocking.

This is especially unfortunate, as Jonathan Gillard Daly’s face, with its protruding nose and lopsided mouth, is ideal for this kind of comedy. And for other kinds of comedy, too--watch Daly, as the title character in “Hans Christian Andersen,” enchant the children of Copenhagen. Then watch Daly’s mouth sag when Hans realizes that the beautiful ballerina Doro really loves her husband after all.

It might seem incredible that PCPA has never presented “Hans.” Solvang, after all, is Copenhagen West, the home of Hans Christian Andersen Park. Yet the stage version of “Hans” is relatively young; its U.S. premiere was in St. Louis in 1981, starring Larry Kert.

The lilting Frank Loesser score was lifted from the movie almost intact. It includes an irresistible waltz (“Wonderful Copenhagen”), a charmingly upbeat love duet (“No Two People”), a lush bit of romantic introspection (“Anywhere I Wander”), one of the snappiest songs ever created from a fairy tale (“The Ugly Duckling”), and a miniature ballet (“The Little Mermaid”). Musical directors Richard C. Wall and Hampton F. King Jr. treat it with the care it deserves, and choreographer Kathleen Fitz-gerald McHugh has used it to create dances of remarkable fluidity, especially considering the size of the stage and the number of people who tread on it.

Grumpy adults may find the book (by John Fearnley, Beverley Cross and Tommy Steele) a little thin, but children and open-minded grown-ups should eat it up. And certainly anyone should appreciate the sumptuous look of this show, exemplified in the intricate “Little Mermaid” backdrop designed by Carol Russell and in Mary Fleming’s storybook costumes.

And who could resist Riette Burdick? This gifted performer melts hearts and dances dreamy ballet in “Hans,” then turns around and heats up “Kiss Me Kate” as the brassy, jazzy Lois Lane, the theatrical novice who plays Bianca in the show’s musicalization of “The Taming of the Shrew.”

Burdick is the one to watch in “Kate.” Michael X. Martin and Alice Lynn go at each other with gusto as the show’s two leads, but their quarrels--the heart of the book by Sam and Bella Spewack--have not aged well. And Lynn doesn’t quite have the voice to make magic out of that peerless Cole Porter tune, “So in Love.”

There’s plenty of snazzy dancing, though (choreographer: Carolyn Shouse), and Wall’s direction of his backstage band is crisp.

Also playing this summer are Fletcher’s staging of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “The Gin Game,” and Wall’s revue, “Gershwin: An American Genius.” Tickets: $7.50-$13.50; (800) 221-9469.