Harlequin’s Plans to Change Its Format Fail at 11th Hour

A deal to drop Broadway-style musicals at the Harlequin Dinner Playhouse in favor of lighter revues and occasional pop music concerts fell through at the 11th hour Thursday, a spokesman said.

Al and Barbara Hampton, owners of the 450-seat theater in Santa Ana, had decided to abandon musical productions in a bid to attract a larger audience. They were negotiating a long-term contract with the Young American Song and Dance Company, a troupe that performs and waits tables.

But Harlequin spokesman James Fox said that “the deal is off” and that previous plans to stage “Across the River,” an original musical about Huckleberry Finn by Los Angeles writer Tom Babbas, will go ahead. He said “Across the River” will open in September.

Ron Friedman, the New York consultant who was negotiating for Young American, had said Thursday that if the contract was signed--over the weekend, as both parties had hoped--the first revue (“Jubilee”) would open Aug. 12 for a six-week run.

“If, in fact, arrangements are made,” Friedman said, “it would be for an open-ended contract that we hope would last a long time. The Young American performers would be employees working for the Hamptons.”

As late as noon Thursday, Fox was maintaining that the format change was a certainty. “This is all 99.9% sure,” he said, cautioning, however, that “we haven’t crossed the t’s and dotted the i’s.”

Shortly thereafter, Fox said the decision to change formats had been reversed. He gave no reason for the turnabout.

The theater’s current offering, “Annie Get Your Gun,” was scheduled to close Sunday. But, Fox said, it will now continue into September.

The Hamptons ended a money-losing theatrical operation last September at the Southampton Dinner Theatre in San Clemente, which they also own, turning the 325-seat house into a banquet facility.