STAGE : Behind Scenes Drama May Mean Changes for Starlight

In the midst of preparing the San Diego premiere of “La Cage Aux Folles,” a backstage drama is unfolding at the Starlight Musical Theatre that could leave an opening for a new executive producer as early as next week.

Less than a week after the Starlight board of trustees held a closed-door meeting, Harris Goldman, Starlight’s executive producer since October of last year, confirmed that he is discussing his contract with the board, which well meet next week. Neither Goldman nor Marshall Lucas, president of the trustees, would confirm or deny whether the board is buying out the last two years of Goldman’s contract as rumored.

Goldman, a veteran Broadway and regional theater manager, came on board after a six-month national search to help the company move toward developing original musicals. One such work, tentatively planned for the 1990 season, was “A Change in the Heir,” based on the women’s movement. But that show was canceled because booking dates at the Civic Theatre were unavailable.

No one from Goldman to Lucas to Don and Bonnie Ward, co-artistic directors of Starlight since 1982, would name the problem behind the scenes in a season where Starlight’s box office receipts have exceeded its projections by about $40,000 a show. But it has been no secret that Goldman and the Wards have been locking horns since Goldman joined the theater at the end of last season. The Wards even resigned, briefly, earlier this season before the board asked them to return.

“You can’t have two creative people at the top,” said Lucas, explaining that by two people he meant Goldman and the Wards (“Don and Bonnie are like two people in one body” he said.) “I want to have harmony on the board so we can go on. Unless you get someone who understands that you worry about this and they worry about that, it’s very difficult to work with an executive producer and a creative director. That has to be resolved.”

Lucas and the Wards all say they agree with Goldman’s goals for Starlight, but privately, some insiders suggest that Goldman may have been trying to move the organization too far too fast. After all, a theater that provoked subscriber complaints for producing shows with “bad” language like “A Chorus Line” and “Grease,” has to be judicious about alienating too much of the audience whose tickets pay for 74% of the company’s budget.

These same insiders have their fingers crossed for the success of “La Cage,” a Tony-award-winning Broadway smash of several years ago, that deals with a gay male couple who are worried about meeting the in-laws when the child they raised as a son is planning to marry--heavens!--a girl. The hit will open Thursday at the San Diego Civic Theatre,

The Starlight’s next season, its 45th, will include a mixture of shows, many of which, if not new, are new to San Diego audiences.

The five-play season will begin and end at the Civic Theatre--as last year’s did--starting with “Follies,” Starlight’s first attempt at a work with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, May 23-June 3 and ending with “Me and My Girl,” Oct. 17-28, a Broadway show that the Starlight will be one of the first regional theaters to present when the local production rights are released in August. The Starlight Bowl shows will be the San Diego premiere of “Singin’ in the Rain,” June 27-July 15; “Carousel,” a fourth time production, July 25-Aug. 12, and Starlight’s first shot at the Andrew Lloyd Webber rock musical “Jesus Christ Superstar,” Aug. 22-Sept. 9.

Lucas said it is likely that Starlight will have an original musical in its 1991 season schedule and Starlight’s future is likely to include more premieres and serious musicals (such as “A Three-Penny Opera”) in a six-play season, with a three-show winter season indoors and three in the Bowl. He said Starlight is about to embark on a fund-raising plan to raise the backing for new work.

Theater directors and teachers Jorge Huerta and William Virchis may be the next theater artists to benefit from free rent at the Kingston Hotel’s Kingston Playhouse, which has been providing a home for the Bowery Theatre for the past half-year.

Lee Julien, executive producer of the Kingston Playhouse and one of the general partners in the Kingston Hotel, declared the experiment with the Bowery “a success,” and said, “in the same way we helped the Bowery announce its first season ever, we wanted to help them (Huerta and Virchis) announce their first season ever.”

Huerta and Virchis, who once ran the Old Globe Theatre’s Teatro Meta program, have long been looking for a space in which to present a theater for Latino plays. Huerta, who began the country’s first graduate program this September in Hispanic theater at UC San Diego, most recently directed two shows in the San Diego Repertory Theatre’s Teatro Sin Fronteras program, “Burning Patience” and “Orinoco!”

“We’re interested in having the Kingston Playhouse available to numerous groups and numerous kinds of arts,” Julien said.

Julien, who also happens to be a member of the Board of Directors at the Bowery Theatre, doesn’t want to throw the Bowery out in the cold; he is helping the theater with a fund-raiser tonight to raise money to move to the Onyx Building on Fifth Avenue between E and F streets when it ends its season with “Teibele and Her Demon” at the end of March. Huerta and Virchis are scheduled to present a three-play season from June-August.

PROGRAM NOTES: The San Diego Repertory Theatre was one of eight theaters in the Western region nominated by Equity for second annual Rosetta Le Noire Award, an award given during black history month in February for exemplary efforts in the hiring of ethnic minority and female actors through affirmative action, multiracial and nontraditional casting. The timing seems especially appropriate with the theater’s “A Christmas Carol,” opening Dec. 1, which will be cast non-traditionally with a black Tiny Tim, played by 9-year-old Kory Abosada. The show, under the direction of Walter Schoen, associate producer of the Rep, takes place in a contemporary open lot where the homeless are burning books to keep warm. They come upon a copy of “A Christmas Carol,” begin to read it, and get caught up in the story, acting it out . . . Designated beneficiary Sledgehammer Theatre didn’t make anything from the concert by Vladimir Kuzmin and Dinamik, the Soviet rock band, at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art on Tuesday, but there is a consolation prize. The theater just received a $5,000 grant, which they decided to turn into a 2-to-1 challenge grant. The company now must raise $10,000 by June 1990 to get the $5,000 from the Southwestern Bell Foundation’s Arts Partnership Program. Two other theaters to receive the grant are the Bowery and the Sushi Performance Gallery. . . . Also giving out money was the National Endowment for the Arts, which this week awarded the Old Globe Theatre $180,000, La Jolla Playhouse $85,000, San Diego Repertory Theatre $35,000 and $15,000 to San Diego writer Oana-Maria Hock, author of “The Man Who Had No Story” for the Playhouse’s Performance Outreach Project.