All the Gaslamp Theatre Needs Now Is the $50,000

What do you do when you want to commission a play and your theater doesn’t have the development money to finance it? If you’re Kit Goldman, managing producer of the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre, you set up an independent limited partnership to raise the money and switch your theater’s role from co-producer to location site.

So far, Goldman has lined up the star, Cleavon Little (“Blazing Saddles”), the writer, Elmo Terry-Morgan (artistic director of the National Black Theatre in Harlem) and the director, Oz Scott (“For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Sucide/When the Rainbow is Enuf”).

She has the story: a black retelling of the Pygmalion myth in turn-of-the-century Philadelphia, where a community of black intellectuals flourished after the Civil War.

Now all she needs is the $50,000, which she hopes to start raising at an Oct. 8 luncheon at Copley Alley. She has already lined up the support of local investors Morrie Slayen and David Lloyd.

Goldman said the idea for the project came to her two years ago after seeing Little in the Broadway hit “I’m Not Rappaport.”

“I began talking to him and said: ‘You know whom I see when I look at you? Henry Higgins.’ ” Goldman recalled. “Then I began to think about how to translate that story into black history.”

But the dream of working with the San Diego-born Little dates even further back, to when a star-struck prop girl watched Little play the African student Asagai in the Old Globe production of “A Raisin in the Sun.” Now, 26 years later, the former prop girl--Goldman-- hopes to welcome Little back home in a theater of her own.

Bart Sher, one of the three people chosen by the New York Theater Workshop to direct his first Equity Off-Broadway play, has made his play selection: Franz Xavier Kroetz’s “The Nest.”

Written in 1974, the play tells the story of a husband who, in struggling to support his wife and small child, takes on the job of dumping bad wine in a lake only to discover that his wife has bathed their child in those same waters.

Sher said he thought the play would be particularly relevant to New Yorkers because of the increasing problems of waste, including needles and vials of blood--some tainted with the AIDS virus--washing up on the shores of Long Island beaches.

It is a problem he said he has thought about more since he became a parent to his now 8-year-old stepdaughter, Megan.

“When we were in England, (the nuclear accident at) Chernobyl happened. All the milk and vegetables had to be cleaned. If it had just been me it would have been one thing. But because Megan was involved, I began to worry about this being a time bomb.”

“The Nest” will be cast in New York in December, rehearse in January and open in February at the Perry Street Theatre. It is being translated from the German by Robert Downey, who served the same function for the La Jolla Playhouse productions of “Lulu” and “Figaro Gets a Divorce.”

Closer to home, Sher will direct “Madmen and Specialists” at the San Diego State University Experimental Theatre tonight through Sept. 24. Written by the Nigerian and Nobel-prize-winning writer Wole Soyinka, it is based on Soyinka’s experiences as a political prisoner during the Biafran war.

Patricia Elmore met James C. Manley nine years ago in the cast of “Funeral March for a One-Man Band” at the San Diego Repertory Theatre. Now the artistic director of the San Diego Actors’ Theatre is planning a tribute to her recently deceased associate director, who also worked around town as an actor, singer, choreographer and writer.

According to a family member, Manley died at home Sept. 7 from a brain virus. He was 37.

The program will feature scenes from the shows Manley has directed and the murder mysteries he wrote. It is scheduled for 8 p.m. Oct. 10 at the Rep’s Sixth Avenue Playhouse, where Manley strode the boards as a regular in the theater’s annual “A Christmas Carol.”

The mood should be “very up,” Elmore said. “Lots of toasting and roasting.”

Manley’s name can still be seen on the upcoming Gilbert and Sullivan schedule.

“He’s on our brochure for next spring,” said Hollace Koman, artistic director of the Gilbert & Sullivan Company. “He was supposed to direct ‘Trial by Jury’ for us. I personally miss him very much. Everybody who worked with him enjoyed him immensely. He went at things with a tremendous amount of energy. He was a very popular actor’s director who always did his best to look at a show with new eyes.”

Memorial contributions can be made to the James C. Manley Scholarship Fund, which will distribute money to actors and directors working with the San Diego Actors Theater at 3718 Belford St., San Diego 92111.

In the early days, before they had a budget or a sizable stage, Will Simpson and Robert Earl had to provide the requisite elegance for their Noel Coward shows with a mixture of ingenuity and their own furniture.

Now Simpson, artistic director of the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre, and Robert Earl, his resident designer, are introducing the Gaslamp’s Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre to its first and their 14th collective Coward play: “Private Lives,” through Nov. 11.

For Earl, this means, at long last, maneuvering room for multiple sets. For Simpson, it is another welcome opportunity to show off the work of the witty writer and performer who created elegant settings only to make fun of them, and was the probable father of the screwball comedies of the 1930s and ‘40s.

One of Simpson’s favorite anecdotes about Coward is the one in which Coward was asked what he would describe as the perfect life and responded, “Mine.” When asked how he would respond to the same question, Simpson laughed and said: “I’d probably say Mr. Coward’s, too.”