L.A. Actors Head South in Winter for Gaslamp Play

Local actors have long resigned themselves to the fact that the Old Globe Theatre and the La Jolla Playhouse travel to New York and Los Angeles to fill leading roles. Even the San Diego Repertory Theatre, which relies largely on local talent, has journeyed to Los Angeles and New York to cast for such productions as “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

The Gaslamp Quarter Theatre was always the holdout.

Until now.

The Gaslamp still doesn’t go to Los Angeles to cast, but now L.A. actors are coming here. Out of 300 actors appearing for a general audition in April, 200 were from Los Angeles. The two leads in the Gaslamp’s “I’m Not Rappaport,” which opens the season Jan. 18, are both from L.A. and stocked with Broadway credits.

James A. Strait, associate director of the Gaslamp and director of “Rappaport,” attributes interest in the production to Herb Gardner’s Tony-award winning script, which offers star turns for two mature leads.

Judd Hirsch won a Tony for playing Nat, an elderly Jewish teller of tall tales who shares a park bench with Midge, an elderly, down-to-earth black superintendent played by Cleavon Little.

Hirsch and Little, who did a national tour of the show that skipped San Diego, also have a lock on the roles for the movie version, according to the New York producer. Those are big shoes to fill.

But the play’s not the only thing that lured Don Alan Croll and Lance Roberts to San Diego to tackle Nat and Midge. San Diego is becoming an increasingly attractive place to work, in terms of critical reputation, ambiance and proximity to Los Angeles. Work crises like the recent Writer’s Guild strike and the controversy about Equity Waiver houses in Los Angeles have also provided the impetus for L.A. actors to travel south for the winter in search of jobs.

Croll’s story comes right out of “The Jazz Singer.” After making his Broadway debut in a revival of “On the Town” with Bernadette Peters in 1971, he went to Hebrew Union College to become a cantor. Unable to strain the greasepaint out of his blood, he moved to Los Angeles in 1986 and heard about San Diego’s thriving theater scene on National Public Radio.

Still a working cantor and religious instructor, he said he might find the time to assist some enterprising Hebrew scholar prepare for a Bar Mitzvah while he’s down here for “Rappaport.” Roberts played Old Deuteronomy in “Cats” in Los Angeles and sees a natural progression from playing an old cat to portraying an old man. Besides, the veteran of Broadway’s “The First” and the off-Broadway hit, “March of the Falsettos,” had two grandfathers who reminded him of Midge, one right down to the specifics of being a building superintendent in a tenement on the Lower East Side. He showed Roberts how to shovel coal into the furnace back in the latter’s younger days in 1964.

“Who knows why you get a chance to do a part?” Roberts said. “This is my first Christmas that I won’t have either grandfather. This is a nice way to have that connection with them, working on something so they’ll always be with me and I can remember all the things they taught me.”

How does the local talent pool feel about competition?

Ambivalence tinges the approval granted by Linda Libby and Nanci Hunter, two of the founding members of San Diego’s Actors Co-op.

“For me, it’s a little bit hard,” Hunter said. “The Gaslamp is one of the first groups that began hiring local actors. To keep talent alive here, they need the stimulation of bringing in outside talent, but it shouldn’t all be outside talent. There should be a balance as there hasn’t been in the Old Globe and the La Jolla Playhouse. The important thing was that it was a fair audition, that they looked at everybody. All I ever really wanted was a chance to audition and to show what I can do.”

“If they’re the best people for the roles, they should have them,” said Libby, who is still pounding the boards in “Six Women With Brain Death or Expiring Minds Want to Know.”

“But they better be good because the local people will be watching them like hawks.”

COMING AND GOING: Edward Albee, who travels annually to San Diego to work with teen-age writers involved in the California Young Playwrights Project, will be host of the CYPP production to be taped for KPBS-TV (Channel 15) during his March visit. It’s “Simply Maria, or the American Dream” by Josefina Lopez. . . . Alice McMasters, who has popped up in quite a variety of theater companies in town this year (“White Linen” at the Old Globe, “Showboat” at Starlight, “The Robber Bridegroom” at San Diego State University”) will put another musical under her vocal belt when she substitutes for Valerie Fagan in the San Diego Repertory Theatre’s “Six Women With Brain Death” next week. Fagan and Rosanna E. Coppedge, two of the show’s original eight authors, will perform in the show at the Los Angeles Theatre Center under the direction of Sam Woodhouse, the Rep’s producing director, in late February. . . . The fare is comedy at Onstage Productions in Chula Vista at 8 tonight and tomorrow, and at the new Lyceum Underground at the San Diego Repertory Theatre about two hours later. The hosts of the Onstage show, (Floyd) Harden & (Ken) Merrill of the Improv and the Comedy Store, will donate proceeds to the theater. The Underground show is free. . . . If you think your baby has the cutest little baby face, you might want to check out baby auditions for Ted Tally’s “Little Footsteps” at the North Coast Repertory Theatre Dec. 30 from 1 to 3 p.m. At least 12 tots from two to six months will be chosen to alternate in a petite part in the baby boomer play scheduled Jan. 13 through Feb. 19. . . . San Diego Playgoers will bring the Samba and the Bossa Nova to the San Diego Civic Theatre when they present Franco Fontana’s “OBA OBA” (Brazilian for “Oh Boy! Oh Boy!”) at the San Diego Civic Theatre Dec. 27 through Jan. 1 with a New Year’s Eve show beginning at 10 p.m. and playing through the midnight hour.