3 Area Groups Join to ‘Strike Up the Band’

In an unprecedented move, the California Music Theatre, the Music Center Operating Co. (with Associated Presentations) and Orange County Performing Arts Center are putting on a show--and they’re doing it together .

The three organizations have formed an alliance to “Strike Up the Band.” Jointly, they’re investing close to $2 million in a carefully reconstituted revival of the original (1927) version of the George and Ira Gershwin musical.

It will be physically produced by California Music Theatre but play all three venues: Pasadena Civic Auditorium (home of CMT, Aug. 4-14), the Orange County Performing Arts Center (Aug. 17-24) and the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (Aug. 26-Sept. 11).

“What we and the Music Center Operating Co. are doing,” said Thomas Kendrick, president of the Orange County Performing Arts Center, “is making a guarantee to CMT to help them produce. In return we’ll have an investment on a pro rata share of the show, based on the number of performances it plays at each institution.”

“(We got involved) mainly because we know that the constituency at the Music Center wants musical theater,” explained Sandra A. Kimberling, president of the Music Center Operating Co., “and it’s the one thing we miss now that (Los Angeles) Civic Light Opera is no longer here.”

Whose idea was this anyway?

“We always had as a goal the creating of a network,” said CMT artistic director Gary Davis. “(Kendrick and Kimberling) came to see our work. We talked. . . . “

But the collaboration wouldn’t have happened with just any show. The attraction for Kendrick and Kimberling was the uniqueness of the project. Researching, finding and reassembling elements of the 1927 score, going back to the original book, the original lyrics of the much-altered title march (which, among other things, was rewritten to become UCLA’s football song), has been a painstaking labor of love. It was spearheaded by Tommy Krasker, historian of the Gershwin estate, and dates back to the 1984 Philadelphia American Music Theatre Festival.

There’s poetic justice in that. While “Strike Up the Band” originally opened in Long Branch, N.J., Aug. 29, 1927, it quickly moved to Philadelphia where it couldn’t find an audience and died in two weeks. Super-satirist George S. Kaufman had written a book that skewered politicians, bureaucracy, greed and the follies of war. The show was doomed by this sendup of jingoism in an intensely jingoistic period.

When it was revived on Broadway in 1930, the musical had been systematically defanged. It had become a crowd pleaser, with a new, much tamer book by Morrie Ryskind and a much more conventional half-rewritten score.

Krasker (who’ll be on hand during rehearsals) and CMT have now finished the complex job of reconstruction. For the first time in more than 60 years, we’ll get to see the real “Strike Up the Band.”

“The thing I like about Tommy,” Davis said, “is that he has a real honesty to the intention of the project and, at the same time, he knows that some things that worked in 1927 won’t necessarily work in 1988. The result is very true to the original and yet will seem fresh to our VCR mentality.”

No one, however, will say if this one-time collaboration might blossom into an ongoing relationship.

“It’s very unusual for three regional Southern California institutions to get together as we have,” Kendrick said. “It’s also difficult. But the situation for touring musicals has grown worse and worse. We need to find quality product.

“This is the first show we’re playing an investment role in. It’s an opportunity to get a musical off the ground--and at more than one site--and it’s a project of unusual merit. It’s also a risk--no question about it.”

HAPPY BIRTHDAY EQUITY: You haven’t heard much about it in these parts, but today is the 75th birthday of Actors’ Equity Assn., the union of stage actors and stage managers.

Former Equity council member Jean Stapleton and Ralph Bellamy, a past president of Equity, accepted a proclamation Tuesday in L.A. City Council chambers from Councilman Joel Wachs declaring the week of May 23 as Actors’ Equity Week.

But that is all. While they are partying a lot in New York, local Equity’s low profile reinforces the notion that this is a movie town. It could also be due to the union’s contretemps with some of its members over the way it went about rescinding the 16-year-old Equity Waiver Plan (whereby the Equity “waives” certain rules in theaters of fewer than 100 seats).

The Waiver was voted out by a countywide referendum in March in a set of maneuvers perceived as devious by those who favor the Waiver and as long overdue by those who don’t. A new and intricate (some say unworkable) Actors’ 99-seat Theatre Plan will replace the Waiver Oct. 3. It is guaranteed to change the face of Los Angeles theater as radically as the Waiver changed it in 1972.

It has also left Equity members philosophically divided. Times change and the irony is inescapable. In 1913 actors banded together to create a union that would defend their rights. In 1988 Los Angeles, union members are banding together to keep their union from defending some of their rights.

The issues are complex and, current disputes notwithstanding, the union has looked out for its own since it was founded. It has protected members from discrimination and exploitation and created medical, pension and welfare plans and a credit union that helps actors borrow and save like normal people (not always possible before).

Here’s wishing Equity a more pluralistic ride to the year 100.

PIECES AND BITS: Watch for Shashin Desai, artistic director of the International City Theatre which has produced such hits as “Distant Fires” and “West Memphis Mojo,” to move into the Long Beach Convention Center’s Center Theatre in the fall.