Edwin Lester, Civic Light Opera Founder, Dies

Edwin Lester, the undisputed doyen of West Coast musicals and the founder and longtime director of Los Angeles’ Civic Light Opera, has died. He was 95.

Lester died Thursday night of cardiac arrest at his Beverly Hills home. He had been in failing health for several months.

Four of Lester’s more than nine decades were spent bringing to Los Angeles and then San Francisco thousands of the most melodious hours in the American musical theater.

Between 1938 and 1977, when he retired, he offered a minimum of four musicals a year in settings ranging from a church stage, where scenery could not be hung or lighting set until after the final singing of the doxology, to the Music Center, where Lester’s productions helped ensure the financial stability of the then-infant cultural arena.

In those 40 years, the Civic Light Opera had offered more than 160 productions, 90 of them produced by Lester.

They included Mary Martin in “Peter Pan,” Paul Robeson in “Show Boat,” Ethel Merman in “Gypsy” and Katharine Hepburn in “Coco.”

In 1943, he even lured Rudolf Friml to appear as himself at the piano in a staging of the composer’s “Firefly.”

Five of Lester’s shows (“Song of Norway,” “Kismet,” “Magdalena,” “Gigi” and “Peter Pan”) went from Los Angeles to Broadway at a time when the rivers of musical drama normally flowed in the opposite direction.

In his initial season alone, he featured an established operatic star, John Charles Thomas, in the light opera, “Blossom Time”; cast a young singer named Stanley Morner who later became better known as Dennis Morgan in “Student Prince,” and hired a neophyte comedian named Bob Hope to make his theatrical debut in “Roberta.”

He also helped launch the stage careers of John Raitt, Gwen Verdon, Carole Landis, Jerome Hines and George London.

But if Lester’s stars and shows were legion his business practices were legendary.

At his retirement he had compiled one of the most sophisticated and successful subscription lists in the history of American theater. Ninety-five percent of all Civic Light Opera seats were sold in advance to subscribers, many of whose parents and grandparents were in the 1938 opening-night audience.

When he moved the Civic Light Opera to the Music Center in 1965--after deciding against purchasing the Pantages Theater for $1 million--he brought with him 1,000 guarantors. Ninety-six percent of those guarantors, who got favored seating in exchange for financial support, had renewed their pledges from previous seasons. It was believed to be largest theatrical support crowd in the world and those guarantors helped solidify the Music Center’s base as it first opened and then began to expand.

The impresario who thought of himself as a “sounding board” for artists and an “editor” of his productions, was himself a budding musician at age 10, playing the piano and singing in Providence, R. I., where he was raised the son of a retail merchant.

Lester billed himself as “The Great Boy Baritone,” although he was really an alto, in Rhode Island pubs and later in vaudeville. He performed his vaudeville act on the old Pantages circuit after a brief stay in officers’ training school near the close of World War I.

But when his voice changed, his career goals had to follow suit. So he began to sell musical instruments, then moved to Los Angeles and Universal Pictures as sales manager when the Depression sharply curtailed the sale of band instruments.

Lester found studio life frustrating (“I didn’t like all that haggling”) and became agent, manager and adviser for “all the really first class singers in L. A.”--Nelson Eddy among them.

By now, however, movies were “singing,” too, and the rash of musicals coming out of Hollywood sound stages was cutting sharply into live entertainment ticket sales.

By 1935 he decided to not just manage his stable of singers but employ them as well. He borrowed $500 each from 10 friends and somehow managed to launch Los Angeles’ first light opera festival. He not only made it through 1935 but 1936 and 1937 as well.

The following year the Civic Light Opera was officially begun on a budget of $100,000 for four shows, the number of productions that marked most of Lester’s subsequent seasons.

He lured John Charles Thomas from the opera stage to the Temple Baptist Church’s Philharmonic Auditorium at a then-unheard-of $7,500 a week.

Thomas lent the same dignity and legitimacy to the Civic Light Opera that Enrico Caruso had brought to phonograph recordings 30 years earlier.

The rest, as the cliche goes, was history.

In 1939, Thomas returned, this time in the American premiere of “Gypsy Baron,” and in 1940, Paul Robeson was wildly acclaimed in “Show Boat.” “Savoy Serenade,” the first of the Civic Light Opera originals, also graced the 1940 season as did Helen Morgan, Verdon, Hines and Raitt.

Lester had wanted to bring “Porgy and Bess” to Los Angeles in 1941, but when negotiations stalled he imported the first of his Broadway successes, “Cabin in the Sky,” the black spiritual-musical. In it he put Ethel Waters, the dancer Katherine Dunham and a young actor named Dooley Wilson who was to become “Sam,” the pianist and philosopher who touched film audiences with “As Time Goes By” in the movie “Casablanca.”

In 1943, Lester first involved San Francisco in his productions when he asked for some financial assistance for “Lady in the Dark,” the collaboration of Moss Hart, Ira Gershwin and Kurt Weill that had become Gertrude Lawrence’s signature on Broadway. That musical about the woman editor torn between her career and three suitors was seen that year in both Los Angeles and San Francisco, marking the beginning of an affiliation that has lasted four decades and added 100,000 subscribers to the 150,000 already pledged here.

He basically stuck to his four shows each season over the years, but occasionally would add a fifth as an added inducement for his growing list of customers.

And, as is often the case, as the scope of his endeavor grew, so did his critics.

He was chastised often for “over-popularizing” in the interpretations of some operettas, using less talented film stars in roles better suited to established stage actors and taken to task for not offering more original or imaginative material.

Lester, a longtime widower who was childless, is survived by two cousins, Mary Greenebaum, of Louisville, and Ann Meranus, of Cincinnati. At Lester’s insistence, there will be no services. The family has requested that any memorial contributions be made to the Actors’ Fund.

Lester had established a tradition of personally responding to individual complaints from patrons. He adapted that technique to his media critics, and editors found that his ripostes often ran to greater length than the original critiques.

One of his standard and proudest responses to critics over the decades might well serve as the engraving on a future monument to him:

“I don’t ever remember a single time when people asked for their money back.”

REMEMBERING LESTER: An appreciation by Sylvie Drake. F5