Not a Banner Year--but Not Bad

As usual, Los Angeles saw at least 400 shows last year that had some claim to being considered professional. That is, some 400 shows were produced. It’s not known how many people actually saw them.

For example, I recently attended a late-night performance of a show called “Sinatra” at the Las Palmas Theatre. It was a one-man show with a one-man audience: me. Did this mean that the bottom had dropped out of L.A. theater or that the word had gone out on “Sinatra”?

Probably the latter. It wasn’t a banner year at the box office, but most houses had at least one hit: “Mail” at the Pasadena Playhouse, “Burn This” and “Roza” at the Taper, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, “Master Class” at the Odyssey, “Daddy’s Dyin’ (Who’s Got the Will)” at Theatre/Theater, “Savage in Limbo” and “Oct. 22, 4004 B.C. Saturday” at the Cast, “Sand Mountain” at the Back Alley, “Bent” at the Coast Playhouse, “Almost Perfect” at the Santa Monica Playhouse, “The Baron in the Trees” at the Ensemble Studio Theatre, “Checkmates” at the Westwood (it started at Inner City), and so on.

The Ahmanson had a miserable year at the box office, and it deserved to have one with such timid revivals as “Light Up the Sky” and “The Best Man.” The Shuberts showed better taste in keeping their house in Century City dark all year, pending a show they could really get behind. That approach wouldn’t do at the Music Center, of course--not with another building about to go up. But it was clear that the Ahmanson had become a theater that didn’t know what it was for, or whom it was for.

The Mark Taper Forum gave itself a splendid weeklong 20th anniversary party in April and offered two splendid Joe Orton revivals, “Loot” and “Entertaining Mr. Sloane” in July. Otherwise it wasn’t a headline-making year. The Ahmanson’s financial problems have made its junior partner leery about taking risks. The Taper does know what it’s for: original work. It just can’t afford to do it.

(Suggestion: The Taper and the Ahmanson should either cut the cord, so that the big ship doesn’t drag the little one to the bottom, or they should unite under one artistic director, preferably the person who has led the Taper and watched the Ahmanson from the inside for the last 20 years: Gordon Davidson. It’s hard to believe the Center Theatre Group board has never considered this. Maybe they’re afraid Davidson would say yes.)

Money isn’t everything, of course. The Los Angeles Theatre Center is even closer to the edge than Center Theatre Group. Yet under Bill Bushnell’s leadership, the work plunges on--if not always ahead.

LATC had its dogs in ‘87, particularly in the last quarter. But it gave us the most literate new play of the year, Robin Lee Baitz’s “The Film Society,” and also the play with the widest social reverberations, Vladimir Gubaryev’s “Sarcophagus.”

This last did make the headlines, the same kind that Mikhail Gorbachev was making. As a message play, “Sarcophagus” was cut and dried. As a protest play from a hitherto muffled theater, it was extraordinary.

LATC also continued an unrewarding relationship with the Norwegian director Stein Winge. A new partnership with the English actor-director Simon Callow was much more promising. Callow staged an exemplary production of Milos Kundera’s “Jacques and His Master,” spoken with English zest but in three or four different American accents. Callow, not Winge, should have staged LATC’s “King Lear.”

The handsomest classical revival of the year, by all accounts, was South Coast Repertory’s “Misalliance.” My favorite SCR show in ’87 was its very first one, “Three Postcards,” in which playwright Craig Lucas and composer Craig Carnelia eavesdropped on three women friends having dinner in a drop-dead restaurant. The New York critics found this show superficial. They were superficial.

A musical that should have done better was “She Loves Me,” a charming import from Santa Barbara at the Ahmanson that was a victim of the summer doldrums. The failure of “Leave It To Jane” and “The Boys From Syracuse” at the Doolittle Theatre could be similarly ascribed, but the fault was in the productions themselves, especially “The Boys From Syracuse.” Between them, these shows were said to have cost $1 million. Money isn’t everything.

Labor Day brought the Los Angeles Arts Festival--Le Cirque du Soleil, “The Mahabharata,” Ingmar Bergman’s “Miss Julie,” the Wooster Group, “Bopha” from South Africa and much more. It was as rich a theatrical feast as the Olympic Arts Festival had been in ‘84, and again there was indigestion. Local theater people complained that it hurt their gate all the way to the Christmas holidays.

(Suggestion: Let Los Angeles theater take a month off after the next festival, during which the public’s appetite for theater can come back naturally. Why does theater in Los Angeles have to be absolutely year-round? Most of our actors are unpaid and most artistic directors and staffs are close to burnout. Why not have a month when everybody recharges?

Strangely, it was a radio show that ended the autumn drought. A couple of years ago, Susan Loewenberg and Judith Auberjonois had started a group called L.A. Classic Theatre Works, a spinoff of Loewenberg’s L.A. Theatre Works.

The members included such top-dollar actors as Ed Asner, Marsha Mason and Richard Dreyfuss. The aim was to build up a genuine Hollywood-based acting company , as distinct from the well-known Hollywood acting pool . It was something the Taper had talked about doing for years, but hadn’t been able to deliver on. (That budget again.)

These actors would literally “pay their dues”--$3,000 a year. And the work would be as cheaply done as possible, without getting enmeshed in the machinery of resident theater--dramaturgs and all that.

Why not start with a radio show? So the group did a live reading of “Once in a Lifetime.” Then they taped every word of Sinclair Lewis’ “Babbitt” for KCRW, with Asner and Nan Martin as the Babbitts, and staged by Gordon Hunt. The last was so good, so funny and so American that the BBC bought it. What’s hopeful about this project is that it’s moving at its own pace, without press releases.

Los Angeles in the ‘80s is short of small acting groups, the equivalent of the old Company Theatre. Tim Robbins and the Actors Gang is about all we have. They made a real breakthrough--into my consciousness, anyway--in “Carnage: Final Assembly” at the Museum of Contemporary Art. This concerned a Bible Belt evangelist whose ghost can’t get to heaven, and it was as eerie as it was hairy.

Paul Linke grew up with the Company Theatre. He was a brash Hollywood kid who knew exactly where he was going. He didn’t expect to be a widower with three small children. Linke’s “Time Flies While You’re Alive” at the Tiffany came almost too close to the bone as it described how he and his wife, Francesca, went through her dying. This was not a show thrown in to please the subscribers.

Down south, the La Jolla Playhouse had a summer success with “A Walk in the Woods,” prefiguring the winter’s disarmament talks. The San Diego Repertory Company had two hits: a pocket version of Dickens’ “Hard Times” and a production of Romulus Linney’s “Holy Ghosts,” another play about that old-time religion, here, a snake cult. The New York critics liked this one.

Not a banner year, but not a bad one. There were, of course, the usual individual misdemeanors. We’ll get to those next week.