Theater group to ring in the New Year by turning back the clock

The new decade of the ‘90s is about to make its appearance.

But a nonprofit theater group new to Hermosa Beach will turn the clock back to the 1940s in a New Year’s Eve party Sunday evening.

No champagne corks will pop. Rather, a cast assembled by the Theatre Arts Conservatory will perform Neil Simon’s autobiographical play, “Biloxi Blues.”

After the 8 p.m. play, there will be a buffet and dancing in light reflected by a mirrored globe until everyone welcomes 1990 at midnight. The celebration will take its cue from the play, in which embryonic writer Eugene Jerome--Neil Simon’s fictional alter ego--comes of age while undergoing the indignities of a World War II boot camp in Mississippi.

“It’ll be like a big USO party,” said Nancy L. Campbell, artistic director of the conservatory, which has turned a lofty, one-time newspaper office in the Bijou Twin Theatres building into a theater. Everyone is encouraged to wear 1940s clothes, and dancing will be to recorded big band music of the World War II era. A $15 donation will be requested.

Campbell expects that many who show up will remember her group from its theatrical wanderings around the South Bay, including stints at the Art Deco-style Warner Grand Theater in San Pedro and the one-time Princess Louise floating restaurant in Los Angeles Harbor. The group has been dormant for a year.

“We want to introduce ourselves to Hermosa Beach, to let people know we’re alive and kicking,” she said, explaining that the evening is a benefit for the new venture, which so far has been financed largely by donations from the group’s board of directors.

The low platform stage, with a long black drape as a backdrop, has that stark barracks look with metal bunks borrowed from the youth hostel at Angel’s Gate Park in San Pedro. Some of the cast members made the wooden military footlockers, and olive drab is the dominant costume color.

Daily rehearsals have been under way for three weeks, and Campbell said that by Sunday, the ensemble will be ready. “In the last week, a lot of magic happens,” she said.

The cast, most of them new to Campbell’s group, includes community theater graduates, as well as actors with credits in dinner theater, modeling, commercials and television. At 15, Janet Gassmann already is a veteran of commercials and modeling and has had roles in two miniseries and an Orange County dinner theater production of “The Sound of Music.” She plays the girl Eugene falls in love with at a USO dance in “Biloxi Blues.”

Skip Tucker, who plays the drill sergeant, calls the cast “a good ensemble. It’s a family, rather than a group rehearsing a play.”

Campbell said her performers are people addicted to theater even when making their livings doing something else: “They have a lot of pictures and resumes out.”

A native of Los Angeles, Campbell began dancing at the age of 3 and once understudied child star Deanna Durbin. She later lived in New York and worked as an actress there for many years before returning to California.

Campbell’s group has had several homes since she organized it in 1983 as a combination acting school and performing company. At the Warner Grand, the group did “Bus Stop” and had a three-month run in “Hot l Baltimore.”

When it presented dinner theater on the Princess Louise, its playhouse was the old captain’s ballroom. “The dance floor was our stage,” Campbell said. “The restaurant fed ‘em and we entertained ‘em.” The company got a nine-month run out of Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap.”

The conservatory left the ship a year ago--before it shut down as a restaurant and sank in a San Pedro shipyard, as Campbell likes to point out.

For months, she looked for new acting space--”I checked out any place that had a ‘for lease’ sign”--finally settling on the big, high-ceilinged former Easy Reader office in Hermosa Beach.

Campbell calls her New Year’s Eve bash a “sober alternative” to the customary celebrations, adding, “It’s an opportunity to get together and have a housewarming for our new place.”