Pasadena Playhouse Sets ‘88-89 Season; ATLAS Shrugs, Equity Waiver War Goes On

The Pasadena Playhouse will produce a new play by Rupert Holmes of “Drood” fame and four West Coast premieres in its 1988-89 season.

In announcing the season, artistic director Susan Dietz also served notice that she’s now in undisputed command of artistic matters at the historic old theater. Her former co-director, Stephen Rothman, will not be replaced, she said. Rothman resigned last week after being replaced as director of the Playhouse’s “Born Yesterday,” actions that followed the departures of two successive leading men from the cast.

The Playhouse will now “run in the traditional way,” said Dietz, “with one artistic director and one managing director.” The latter job has been filled by Lars Hansen, who had been a management consultant at the theater and is now “being vested,” Dietz said.

The season will open Sept. 25 with Robert Harling’s Off-Broadway hit “Steel Magnolias,” set in a small-town beauty parlor in Louisiana. Dana Hill and Pasadena Playhouse alumna Barbara Rush will star.

Next up, on Nov. 13, is Jules Feiffer’s “Carnal Knowledge,” the stage version of the story that became a controversial movie in 1971. Ted Swindley, who recently staged the world premiere of this 17-year-old play in Houston, will also direct it here.

The new Rupert Holmes thriller, “Accomplice,” will open Feb. 5. Holmes wrote it in Pasadena’s Huntington Hotel, when he was here for the recent California Music Theater production of “Drood.” Hansen, the Playhouse’s new managing director, was managing director of the music theater at that time and introduced Dietz to Holmes.

Sandy Duncan will star in “Stepping Out,” a British “play with dancing” by Richard Harris, about a tap class that meets each week in a church basement, opening March 19. Don Amendolia, who appeared in the play’s only male role when it played Broadway for two months in 1987, will re-create his role and also direct (he also replaced Rothman as director of “Born Yesterday,” scheduled to open June 26).

Tom Griffin’s “The Boys Next Door,” about four retarded men and the man who looks after them, will open May 14--a week after the same production closes at the Cleveland (Ohio) Play House, which will co-produce it. Cleveland’s Josephine R. Abady, who staged the play in its initial engagement at the Berkshire Theatre Festival, will direct. “The Boys” recently netted a Drama Desk award for its Off-Broadway run.

“The Boys Next Door” is one of three co-productions on the Playhouse season. “Steel Magnolias” will be produced with Kyle Renick of the W.P.A. Theatre in New York and Charles H. Duggan of the Marines Memorial Theatre in San Francisco; Duggan may move it on to his theater.

And “Carnal Knowledge” will be co-produced with Roger Berlind and Franklin R. Levy of the locally based Catalina Production Group, who will then have the option of taking it elsewhere. The Playhouse will retain a percentage of the gross and profits if these shows move on.

No local playwrights are represented in the season. But Dietz said she hopes to rectify that in the 120-seat Balcony Theatre, also a part of the Playhouse complex. She would like to present an entire season “of riskier work” there.

But before that can happen, the Balcony must be renovated. “There is an electrical overload when we use both theaters,” she said. The show that played the Balcony earlier this year, “Down an Alley Filled With Cats,” required “minimal lighting; anything more complicated needs more power.” Don’t expect the Balcony to operate before 1989.

Also at the Pasadena Playhouse: a memorial service for George Rose, the late star of “Drood” at Pasadena and on Broadway, on June 29 at 11 a.m. Information: (213)-470-0230.

EWTOC BECOMES ATLAS: The Equity Waiver Theater Operators Committee has changed its name to ATLAS, an acronym for Associated Theatres of Los Angeles, and is preparing its own 99-Seat Theater Plan as an alternative to the Actors Equity plan that was adopted in a controversial referendum April 4. The plan will include payments for actors--”we are willing and want to pay actors,” said Tom Ormeny of ATLAS.

The plan probably will be presented at the next general meeting of ATLAS, scheduled for June 27 at the Cast Theatre. Ormeny said that more than 65 theaters and producers are members of ATLAS, which is chaired by Laura Zucker of the Back Alley Theatre.

LBCLO NEWS: Long Beach Civic Light Opera has announced its 1988-89 season: “La Cage aux Folles” (Oct. 6-23), “The Student Prince” (Feb. 23-March 12), Debbie Reynolds and Harve Presnell re-creating their 1964 movie roles in “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” (May 4-21) and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Cinderella” (Aug. 3-20, 1989).

Conspicuously missing from the list: “Grover’s Corners,” the Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt musicalization of “Our Town.” Last year the Long Beach group contributed money to an effort by the National Alliance of Musical Theatre Producers to get “Grover’s Corners” off the ground, and announced that it would be staged in Long Beach in the fall of 1988--if all went according to plan.

All did not go according to plan, said Civic Light Opera managing director Pegge Logefeil: “Everyone is extremely interested in it, but it’s not ready yet. It has been put away for more rewrites. We’ll probably do it the season after next.”

DEFENSE POLICY: Actors for Themselves has announced its annual production at the Matrix: “Self Defense,” a play about a public defender. Author Joe Cacaci will direct for a July 23 opening.