Remote Dinner Theater Thrives on Fresh Dramatic Fare

In many ways, the cozy little Pine Hills Dinner Theater is quintessential Julian, even if it is 3 1/2 miles southwest of the historic gold mining town.

With the exception of the tourists, everybody knows everybody in this 96-seat amateur theater nestled among the 8 acres of pine, oak and manzanita surrounding the Pine Hills Lodge. The waitress, one local fan points out, is an elementary school teacher when she isn’t serving drinks or performing on the Pine Hills stage. The boy ladling out the barbecue is the son of one of the actors who lives upstairs at the lodge. The 8-year-old who plays Thor in the show is the son of Debra Bartlett, who co-produces, coordinates and handles the costumes, set dressing, painting and sound.

Hard to believe that this 8-year-old, down-home theater not only scored the hotly sought-after Southern California premiere of Larry Shue’s Broadway hit “The Nerd” (here through June 11), but is also doing a pretty good job with it.

Particularly fine is Daniel Keil, the lodge’s big, burly food and beverage manager, who plays the title role of the nerd who comes to dinner and is too obtuse to be pushed, pulled, pried or tricked away.

The three-person management team of producer David Goodman, director Scott Kinney and co-producer Bartlett describe their winning strategy in the fight-for-rights game as “persistence.”

“If we want a show, we write every month, we send telegrams, we call,” said Bartlett.

And sometimes it pays to be off the beaten track.

The first time Pine Hills scooped the other San Diego theaters was last year with Shue’s “The Foreigner,” a coup that surprised the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre, which thought it had the exclusive rights for San Diego.

The Gaslamp did, but only within a 50-mile radius. The dinner lodge is a happy 62 miles away. And that protective distance is what essentially gives this lone theater in the middle of rustic nowhere first rights on everything.

Now it is trying for another hit, “I’m Not Rappaport.”

It would be unusually timely fare for dinner theater, which historically survives on light, recycled Neil Simon and musical extravaganzas.

That may be one of the reasons that, contrary to the general trend in dinner theater, Pine Hills is thriving.

In the past 10 years, the number of dinner theaters around the country have dwindled from 150 to 110. Of the dozen that once existed in San Diego, only three remain: Pine Hills, the Lawrence Welk Dinner Theatre in Escondido and La Casa del Zorro Dinner Theater in Borrego Springs.

Joe and Lois Stevens, who owned Spring Valley’s 10-year-old Fiesta Dinner Theatre, which closed in January, said a lack of new material was one of the chief reasons for its demise. The Fiesta, like other San Diego dinner theaters, was also hurt by competition from the surging regional theater scene.

The Pine Hills Dinner Theater, in contrast, is helped by its distance from the city competition and its role as the only live entertainment in a tourist town.

It also has the unflagging devotion of the production team to keep it going.

Goodman, one of the theater industry’s few owner-actors, created the theater in 1980 when he bought the 76-year-old lodge. For him, it is clearly a labor of love.

“Truthfully, when I look back on my life--and I’m 67 years old--if I were to point to one thing that I’ve accomplished during my lifetime, other than my children, establishing that theater is the most rewarding, because I can see the satisfaction that both the audience and cast get from its existence,” he said.

According to Goodman, a retired marketing manager for a motor company, the effort required to run a year-round resort and rising expenses led

him to put the theater up for sale last December. He got offers that came pretty close to his asking price of $945,000 before he decided not to sell.

That is when he and his wife, Donna, decided that “we just didn’t want to let it go.” Two weeks ago, he used his mail-order chaplain’s license to perform his daughter’s marriage there. Goodman saved the purple flowers from the celebration to fill the vases on the tables of the dinner theater the following weekend.

The barn-like structure that Goodman turned into the theater was originally built as a training gym for Jack Dempsey when the fighter prepared for his championship bout against Gene Tunney more than 60 years ago. In the years that followed, the space was used as a movie museum and theater, and later fors storage.

Goodman’s original vision for the theater was a plain, no-frills one. He set up long, unpainted tables, spread them with white butcher block paper and served the barbecue on paper plates with plastic utensils.

But, over the last eight years, Bartlett has prodded him--”against his judgment,” he said with a mock grumble--to invest in linen tablecloths, napkins and flatware.

At the same time, the year-round theater has grown in sophistication and appeal, something for which Goodman gives Bartlett and Kinney, his artistic director, much of the credit.

Kinney, a former Los Angeles actor who once performed at many San Diego theaters, first visited Julian in 1980 to do some carpentry during a strike by the Writers Guild of America. He met Bartlett at the Pine Hills Lodge bar, where she was working as a cocktail waitress.

“We fell in love,” Kinney recalled with a smile. “She refused to go back to L.A., so I thought, ‘What am I going to go? I’m in show business.’ We put together a revue for the theater, spent thousands of dollars, and only Dave Goodman and his wife showed up. It was the lowest point in my life.”

Then Goodman moved the revue from Sunday matinees to Friday and Saturday night performances, and it took off. He hired Kinney as the artistic director in 1981, and since then Kinney has directed every play while designing and building the sets, handling the lighting and playing coach for the community actors he casts.

In Kinney’s spare time, he writes original work for the theater, including last year’s “A Scrooge Family Christmas,” a comic update of “A Christmas Carol” that he co-wrote with Keil.

The project, he said, took him back to 1978, when he appeared in one of Douglas Jacobs’ adaptations of “A Christmas Carol” at the San Diego Repertory Theatre, along with a local actress named Karen Johnson. Johnson became much more successful a few years later under the name Whoopi Goldberg.

Although Kinney said he doesn’t expect to find the next Whoopi Goldberg among the local auditioners who come to him, “What I have found out over the years is that the local people can look as good as the professionals. And 90% of the work is done in casting. Did you see that girl (Carol Odor) who played Tansy (McGinnis)? That was her first show.”

Kinney sat behind his manually operated lighting system and gestured proudly to the stage he designed, an elaborate and elegant representation of a modern architect’s apartment, replete with interesting angles, curves, fireplace and a suggestion of square fluorescent lights from the ceiling.

“I love living up here. The air is clean, the ambiance is great, I can act, and I can write,” he said. “I have my cake and I’m eating it too.”