Latest Coronado Playhouse Crisis Could Prove Fatal

Nine years ago, the Coronado Playhouse begged the City Council to allow it to move to the old Coronado Armory.

The city has recently been willing to turn over the site, but the Coronado Playhouse has given up the fight to raise the money needed to bring the building up to code. And now Councilwoman Patty Schmidt has a proposal to turn the armory into a community center.

To make matters worse, time is running out on the playhouse’s efforts to remain in its current location at 1775 Strand Way, which is scheduled to be turned into a park two years from now under the Glorietta Bay Master Plan.

“Quite frankly, we have long since had to face the fact that we would not be able to raise the funds to refurbish the site,” said playhouse treasurer Ted Craddock. “We set out with these grandiose plans. And then we realized that it would take well over a million dollars to do what we wanted to do. So we’re pulling out.”

According to Jerry Schuster, new general manager of the Coronado Playhouse, the current plan is to persuade the city to allow the theater to stay right where it is.

“Our hope is to present to the city a proposal that says we will seek pledges to renovate the current theater and make it an aesthetically desirable facility within the city limits,” Schuster said. “What we hope is that, if we can show demonstrable ability to raise funds for refurbishing, the city would reopen for discussion the Glorietta Bay Plan (so as) to afford the city of Coronado continuing live theater. If it closes the door to that, we do not see other options available to us within the city limits.”

It’s the latest and potentially most serious crisis to beset the Coronado Playhouse, which, at 43, is the second-oldest non-musically oriented theater in San Diego, after the Old Globe. (Starlight Musical Theatre was founded in 1946.) But, while the Globe slowly grew to national status under the strong and steady leadership of a continuing board and artistic director Craig Noel (now its executive producer), the Coronado Playhouse has been plagued by a succession of artistic leaders and boards that were more often at odds than in agreement with each other.

Now, the 105-seat community theater is $10,000 in debt, and several board members are named in a lawsuit by one of its former theater managers, Glenn Feist.

“We are going through a difficult time financially,” Craddock said. “We ‘ve had management problems that haven’t helped us a bit. There have been egos and infighting to deal with. A couple of years ago, we got entangled with the IRS. Once or twice we almost had to close the doors.”

Craddock and Schuster agree that the goal of the current leadership is to “keep the doors open.”

“We have no intention of giving up,” said Craddock, who, along with board President Beth McNellen, still expresses optimism about a scenario in which the playhouse might share the armory with other community organizations.

The playhouse is presenting “Our Town” through Aug. 13, to be followed by Lanford Wilson’s “The Hot L Baltimore,” starting Aug. 25.

Schuster and Craddock said one of the problems the playhouse faces is that it is taken for granted by local patrons who may not know what they’ll miss until it’s gone.

Not Judy Vereen, a longtime resident of Coronado who has run the box office for the playhouse for four years.

“It’s important to me,” Vereen said. “It’s a friendly, intimate, good theater. We have a movie theater and we have this theater, and that’s it. It would be a great loss if it closed down.”

The San Diego Repertory Theatre still hasn’t named its Oct. 22 show for the Russian-themed San Diego Arts Festival, but it does have a director: Roman Viktyuk, director of one of the two productions singled out by Time magazine writer William Henry III in an article about Soviet theater.

Viktyuk directed Jean Genet’s “The Maids” for Moscow’s Satirikon Theatre, the first time Genet had been produced in the straitlaced Soviet Union.

“The aggressive gender bending, laced with homoeroticism, brings spectators in for the scandal value, but sends them out having seen a world-class display of theatrical wit and invention,” Henry wrote in the April 10 issue of the magazine.

Sam Woodhouse, the Rep’s producing director, who also saw the work in Moscow, described it as “extravagant and flamboyant and outrageous and silly and funny and extremely controversial.” He also noted that it sells out every night.

Viktyuk will be coming to San Diego within the month to choose a play to direct.

The Gaslamp Quarter Theatre has chosen its fourth annual world premiere project, and it’s “Solid Oak,” by Los Angeles playwright Robert Mearns, to be presented Oct. 18 in the Gaslamp’s small theater. This is the first full-length play for Mearns, who won the 9th and 10th annual Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival awards for his one-acts “Now Departing” and “Senior Prom.” “Senior Prom” was also produced in Los Angeles, where Mearns earned a Dramalogue award in 1988.

The fifth world premiere will be “The Debutante,” tentatively scheduled for the summer of 1990, even though technically it will be a world premiere staged by, rather than produced by, the Gaslamp.

“Solid Oak” is not all that will be new in October. The theater will be renamed, courtesy of a benefactor whose identity is to be revealed in September.

PROGRAM NOTES: San Diego Playgoers will present Mitzi Gaynor in “Anything Goes,” the Tony award-winning revival of the Cole Porter play, coming to the San Diego Civic Theatre on Sept. 19-24. Also tentatively scheduled is “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” with Debbie Reynolds and Harve Presnell on Aug. 22-27. “Starlight Express” is still on for Dec. 26-31. . . . Sam Woodhouse, producing director of the San Diego Repertory Theatre, is taking singing lessons between rehearsals for “Thin Air,” the world premiere he is directing for the Rep on Aug. 10. Is Woodhouse planning to test his vocal cords on stage soon? “Maybe,” he said. Check out the Rep’s upcoming Elvis Presley story, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” on Sept. 6 for the answer. . . . According to the New York Times, Astor Piazzolla, the Argentine composer of tango music for the La Jolla Playhouse production of “Dangerous Games,” received a personal request from new Argentine President Carlos Saul Menem. “Stay, Astor,” Menem reportedly said to Piazzolla who once said that if Menem, a Peronist, won the election, he was going to “get on the boat” and spend Menem’s term of office outside the country. “Stay because we need you.” Piazzolla said he would stay “with all my heart.” . . . Sometimes life is just one world premiere after another. Actress Susan Berman will go straight from the La Jolla Playhouse production of “Nebraska” at the Warren Theatre to the new Lee Blessing play, “Down the Road,” at the same theater. Berman’s husband, Des McAnuff, artistic director of the playhouse, is directing the Blessing play.