There’s No Place Like Stage for This Savvy Teen Actress

Adrienne Stiefel may be all of 13 years old, but the girl from Laguna Hills who is about to debut as Starlight’s Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” tonight is already savvy to what is out there for her, show-business-wise.

“I thought it would be a good idea to go after Dorothy because there aren’t that many shows that have good parts for kids in it,” she said matter-of-factly in a phone interview from her Orange County home.

“The Wizard of Oz” runs through June 2 at the San Diego Civic Theatre. It’s Starlight’s fourth production of “The Wizard of Oz,” but the first to replicate the 1939 MGM movie version, complete with the Harold Arlen-Yip Harburg score of songs such as “Over the Rainbow” and “We’re Off to See the Wizard,” a flying witch and monkeys (by Flying by Foy of “Peter Pan” fame) and fiery pyrotechnics (by Disneyland veteran Rich Helgeson), as well as Royal Shakespeare Company scenery, costumes and revamped script.

Stiefel (pronounced Steefle) has had an agent since she was 11. But this isn’t a case of being born into a show business family or pushed by a stagedoor mama. In fact, her mother told The Times last year, the whole family likes to sing, but Adrienne is the only one who likes to perform. And her mother described her daughter’s desire to do so as “a mystery to the rest of us.”

“I was always asking my mom to let me do stuff,” recalled Adrienne, an eighth-grader at St. Margaret’s Episcopal School in San Juan Capistrano. She first got the bug when she saw “Annie” at the Shubert Theatre when she was 4.

“I sang all the songs in the show all the ride home,” she said.

Six years later, she got to sing all of Annie’s songs on a professional stage when the California Music Theatre staged a revival of the 1977 Tony-winning musical at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in December, 1990. By then, she had been working professionally since age 10, when she landed roles in “A Traditional Christmas” at Griswold’s Candlelight Pavilion and “The Sound of Music” at the Elizabeth Howard Curtain Call Theater.

Still, it was on the basis of her performance as Annie, which drew raves from the Hollywood Reporter, Daily Variety and the Los Angeles Daily News, that Don and Bonnie Ward, the artistic directors of Starlight Musical, asked her to try out for Dorothy.

The Civic Theatre is already 45% sold out, a Starlight spokeswoman said. That puts the show ahead of sales for last year’s opener, “Follies,” and about even with 1989’s “Peter Pan.”

And that’s good news for the young performer. The bigger the audience, the better.

“I love big crowds even better than small ones,” she said. “I was never shy.”

Officials at the San Diego Repertory Theatre, which as of October said the company still needed to raise $500,000 to ensure the rest of its 1991-1992 season, may be breathing easier now that “The Rocky Horror Show” seems to be a hit.

The production, which has been extended from June 1 through June 16 (with shows at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. on June 1), is selling out on weekends and selling well during the week. And why not? It may be a ridiculous sci-fi B-movie sex spoof, but it also provides a wild, raucous evening with a group of terrific singers getting the most out of a very singable score.

The stage version is pretty faithful to the movie version, which is still playing at the Ken Cinema at midnight on Fridays and Saturdays, but there’s one telling update for the ‘90s. In the Rep production, before Dr. Frank-N-Furter seduces Brad and Janet, he calls for rubbers. Yes, even “Rocky Horror,” that homage to sexual freedom, endorses safe sex.

“Breaking Legs,” the Tom Dulack play that was received warmly by audiences but cooly by the critics when it played at the Old Globe back in 1989, was savaged by the New York Times on Monday.

Critic Frank Rich, reviewing the Off Broadway production which opened Sunday at the Promenade Theatre, said the show “boasts very few laughs, and they are as widely spaced over its two hours as a half-dozen meatballs stirred into an industrial vat of spaghetti sauce.” Of the show itself, which is based in an Italian restaurant, he said “it leaves you starving for Chinese.”

Howard Kissel of the Daily News was kinder. Unlike Rich, he described the premise about a professor willing to make a deal with the Mafia to get his play financed as “promising.” But he found the humor at best “mildly amusing.” He did praise the actors, however. And he called Sue Giosa, who won a Best Supporting Actress award from the San Diego Critics Circle as a Mafioso’s daughter, as “hilarious.”

PROGRAM NOTES:

It isn’t just Starlight Musical Theatre and the Moonlight Amphitheatre getting “Evita” fever.

While the two musical theaters are doing the popular Andrew Lloyd Webber version of the Evita Peron story this summer, the Old Globe is doing its own twist on the legend with one of two one-acts that will end this season’s Play Discovery Program on June 3: “Argentine Dialogue (Evita and Victoria).” It’s about a supposed meeting between Evita and her political rival, Victoria Ocampo, in which Evita tries to enlists Ocampo’s support for the right of Argentine women to vote. The play, which will have its world premiere in Buenos Aires this month, will be read in a translation here by Old Globe multicultural program associate Raul Moncada.

The second one-act, “Tute Cabrero,” also translated by Moncada, is by Roberto Cossa, author of “The Granny,” which played here in January, 1990. In “Tute Cabrero,” the boss of three architects lets them decide which of the three will be the victim of cutbacks. The plays will be presented in staged readings at the Cassius Carter Centre Stage at 7:30 p.m. . . .

Local actor Bill Maass, a Vietnam veteran, has been cast in the role of the Vietnam veteran in “Still Life,” the San Diego Repertory Theatre production of the Emily Mann docudrama that will run June 5-29 at the Lyceum Space. Darla Cash will play the wife and Anasa Briggs Graves the mistress in this three-person play...

Four $500 performance scholarships are available to full-time college students who will perform in one or more productions at Moonlight Amphitheatre this summer. Applications are due Tuesday. Call 724-6017 for information.