Bad Break Was the Start of a Fortuitous Friendship

Usually, directors of small theaters bitterly resent having their rights to a play gobbled up by the bigger houses. For 29-year-old Bartlett Sher, making his Off-Broadway directing debut at the Perry Street Theatre in New York’s Greenwich Village (Feb. 16-March 5), getting his production of “A Man’s a Man” crushed by the La Jolla Playhouse turned out to be nothing less than a major break.

“I called Alan Levey (La Jolla Playhouse managing director) after my project fell apart,” Sher said over coffee at Glasnost, a Russian cafe around the corner from the 99-seat theater. “I told him I had done all this research” on “A Man’s a Man.” “He suggested I get together with Robert Woodruff, who was directing the play. We got together once a week to talk about it, and, before the show opened, he suggested I come on as dramaturge.”

Sher’s ensuing friendship with the critically acclaimed director led to more work at the Playhouse. Most recently, he worked as an assistant director under Woodruff on Sam Shepherd’s “A Lie of the Mind” at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, as director of Woye Soyinka’s “Madmen and Specialists” at San Diego State University and of Soyinka’s “The Strong Breed,” a project of Sher’s Plus Fire Theatre Group. That one played at Installation Gallery in downtown San Diego.

It was Woodruff, too, who helped land Sher one of three coveted director spots in an annual competition that draws as many as 225 applicants.

“The first thing that brought him to my attention was Robert Woodruff, who said he would be sending a letter of recommendation but he would be late,” said James C. Nicola, the artistic director of the New York Theatre Workshop.

Sher’s choice for the workshop, Franz Xaver Kroetz’s “The Nest,” translated by Roger Downey, reflects the socially conscious attitudes that permeate all of Sher’s work. “The Nest” is the story of a working-class man who takes a job dumping toxic wastes to support his wife and baby, only to find, to his horror, that the wastes are affecting the health of his child.

Sher said he picked it partly as a response to the upper-class yuppie plays now flooding New York--Broadway’s “Eastern Standard” and “The Heidi Chronicles,” Wendy Wasserstein’s work at Playwrights Horizons that moves to Broadway in March.

“It just bores me,” Sher said of these critical and commercial hits. “And it’s political. When you are seeing ‘The Heidi Chronicles’ and all the characters are white and of the same class, what is being reflected is that the only people who are going to see theater are the only people who can afford to see theater.”

Then there’s the issue of family.

Having a child made him sensitive to the question the play poses as to the kind of world this generation will hand to the next. Because of his concern about his own family, he turned down his first offer of a professional directing job--the opportunity to stage “A Christmas Carol” at the San Diego Repertory Theatre last December.

“I decided it was more important to spend time with my wife and daughter and work in a restaurant. Let’s just say we had a better Christmas because I didn’t do it.”

Pia Zadora, Lorna Luft and Melba Moore are checking out “Suds” at the San Diego Repertory Theatre next week, with an eye toward signing up for a national tour. Bryan Scott, one of the co-creators and co-producers of the show, said he put out a star call because “we feel that ‘Suds’ has a limited shelf life, and the best way to get a national tour is with a star package.”

Meanwhile, “Suds” has been extended at the Rep through March 5, but that will be the last extension, according to Scott, as “Greater Tuna” moves to the main stage March 6.

Scott said the original “Suds” troupe may also do part of a national tour, but that will have to happen between other projects. Melinda Gilb, another co-creator who plays the naughty guardian angel Marge, is leaving “Suds” Feb. 12 to write. She will understudy Susan Mosher, who plays the nice guardian angel, Dede, through the end of the run. (Gilb already filled in for Mosher this week while Mosher was out with the flu, and Gilb’s understudy, Jeanine Morick, stepped in for Gilb.)

As for Mosher, she will start rehearsals in early April for Joan Micklin Silver’s “A . . . My Name Is Alice” at the Old Globe Theatre, opening April 29. Mosher auditioned in New York for the show’s director, Julianne Boyd, when Mosher was playing in “Suds” Off-Broadway.

PROGRAM NOTES: Larry Linville, who played the sniveling Frank Burns on TV’s “M*A*S*H” series, replaced Ken Howard as the would-be state senator in the cast of Neil Simon’s “Rumors” at the Broadhurst Theatre on Dec. 26. Linville delivers the quips with scowls where Howard provided smiles. . . . The face of the phantom in “The Phantom of the Opera,” opening in May in Los Angeles, may be a mystery, but there will be one familiar visage to San Diego Civic Light Opera (Starlight) fans; Elisabeth Stringer, who played Chava in last summer’s production of “Fiddler on the Roof,” will portray heroine Christine Daae’s confidante. . . . The talk about the Broadway musical, “Romance Romance,” heading for a national tour after it completes its Old Globe run Feb. 19, turned out to be just talk. The show, which opened here to blistering reviews, closed on Broadway with no new production in sight.