How Many People Are in a 1-Man Show? Ask Herb

Herb Cawthorne’s one-man show, “R.S.V.P. Langston,” has three people in it. The Channel 10 commentator gets grief about that.

“It’s essentially a one-man show,” Cawthorne says with a laugh. “But people do kid me about it. The people at Channel 10 keep asking me how many people are in a one-man show.”

The show, about African American poet Langston Hughes, opens Friday and runs through March 1 at the Lyceum Space. The other players, who have substantially smaller speaking parts, are Cecil Lytle, who plays piano, and Estella Snowden, who portrays Ethel Waters.

While Cawthorne is most familiar to local audiences for giving out his opinion in the “My Perspective” segment of the 11 p.m. newscast, his one-man theater shows date back roughly 18 years--to his teaching career at the University of Oregon and Portland State University.

“I’m not a trained actor, but when I began teaching, I began to read speeches (by prominent African Americans) because the students got so turned on by them,” he said in a recent interview.

He did a well-received piece on Martin Luther King Jr. for the San Diego Symphony on Jan. 19. He also has been doing Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Steven Biko, Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X for years. But the play on Hughes is new. He commissioned it from local writer/actor Victor Smith-Kervia.

Starlight Musical Theatre has made a tentative step toward developing a new musical by investing in “The Scarlet Pimpernel,” which was presented at Starlight’s Prelude Series of staged musical readings Jan. 20. Executive director Bud Franks said a full production “could happen in ’93.” But the company plans to proceed slowly.

“We’re optioning it. And we’d like to do the world premiere here in San Diego. The show has a lot of promise but it is still a long way from being a property that you’d put on the stage,” Franks said.

Don and Bonnie Ward, co-artistic directors of Starlight, discovered the property through their son, Kelly Ward, who works at Universal Studios, Franks said. Writer Dave Wollert and composer-lyricist David Shapiro, whose backgrounds are in television and film, did a reading of the show at Universal. Following that reading, Franks and the Wards put the show on the Prelude schedule.

Franks’ goal now is to bring the show far enough along to showcase it at the National Alliance of Musical Theater Producers Festival in September. If enough other theaters are impressed enough to want to co-produce the show with Starlight, that could bring production costs down to a manageable level.

Starlight also plans a reading of the musical “Gottschalk!,” a piece based on the life of composer Louis B. Gottschalk, for Feb. 28 at Starlight Rehearsal Hall.

A reader, Robert Lerner, wrote last week to praise David Chandler, theater manager of the Spreckels Theatre, for looking out for his patrons.

Lerner, a regular theatergoer from Valley Center, had purchased tickets through TicketMaster to “Solitary Confinement,” the play Stacy Keach starred in at the Spreckels through TicketMaster. But the day after he bought his seats for a price he does not now remember (the range was $22.50-$25), the producers (Normand Kurtz and the Pasadena Playhouse) lowered the price to $19.92.

Disgruntled, Lerner wrote to the box office, saying that he thought they should have told him they would be lowering the price the next day.

“But I didn’t expect to hear from them, so I just forgot about it,” he said Tuesday in a phone interview from his office. He was “stunned,” he said, when he received a letter from Chandler with a check for the difference in price between what he paid and the sale price. Especially since he knew that TicketMaster sales are generally not refundable.

Chandler’s letter, which he sent with checks to a few dozen customers who complained about being overcharged, said that he had argued with the producers about changing the ticket price.

“I went to the producers with my concerns, since it reflects on the Spreckels, and expressed our desire to satisfy any unhappy customers,” his letter said. “Their feeling was that it was like a store--example: May Co.--when an item goes on sale. With one of the producers in my office, I called May Co. and was told that if an item goes on sale that you recently purchased, you will be offered the difference back. I don’t think the producers were expecting that reaction.”

Chandler withheld funds from the box office to satisfy customers expressing dissatisfaction.

“I thought the theater was doing a remarkable thing in standing up for its customers,” Lerner said. “I’ve bought enough tickets to know that once you leave the box office it’s not refundable or exchangeable. This man deserves all the kudos you can shower on him.”

The San Diego Theatre League is bringing back two popular programs. On June 10, patrons can literally Pay What You Can for more than 30 theaters and museums as part of the Wells Fargo Bank-sponsored Bargain Arts Day. Tickets purchased on that day at the Times Arts Tix Booth will be good for several weeks in advance.

Also, Target Stores will support the second annual program of Family Theatre Days, starting this fall and lasting for a few months. Under the Family Theatre Days program, youths go free when adults buy a ticket at the Times Arts Tix booth for selected performances. Call the San Diego Theatre League, 238-0700.

PROGRAM NOTES: Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee--who, incidentally, was charged with indecent exposure after sunbathing in the nude Jan. 19 on a public Florida beach often frequented by nude sunbathers--will be represented by his play, “Finding the Sun,” as part of the San Diego State University drama department’s ninth Design, Directing and Acting Jury. Albee will help preside over the jury, which evaluates students in the performing arts in the Experimental Theatre on the SDSU campus Friday from 9 a.m.-4 p.m. . . .

Joe Orton’s “What the Butler Saw” will fill the final To Be Announced slot in the La Jolla Playhouse season July 26-Aug. 30 at the Mandell Weiss Forum. Michael Greif, a UC San Diego graduate theater alum, who is now a resident director at the New York Shakespeare Festival, will direct. . . .

Broadway, television and film actresses Marcia Rodd and Linda Hart will co-star with Jeb Brown, Stephen Caffrey, Gregory Grove and Kellie Overbey in the Old Globe’s “Bargains,” the new Jack Heifner comedy opening March 19 under the direction of artistic director Jack O’Brien. . . .

Ralph Elias, artistic director of Blackfriars Theatre, will direct a rehearsed reading of “The Man Who Killed God,” a new drama by Alann Jack Lewis for the Old Globe Play Discovery Program at the Cassius Carter Centre Stage on Monday. Tickets are $5, $4 for students and seniors.

CRITIC’S CHOICE

A STUNNING ‘PUPPETMASTER’

“Puppetmaster of Lodz” is the poignant story of one man’s struggle to conquer an unbearable reality with the powers of the imagination. Blackfriars (formerly the Bowery) Theatre presents a stunning depiction of a Jewish puppeteer who refuses to come out of hiding five years after the Nazis have been defeated. And actor Robert Zukerman is mesmerizing as the man who prefers puppets to people, using comedy, logic and anger to fend off the world--as long as he can. Performances are 8 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday, with Sunday matinees at 2, through April 12. Tickets are $14-18. At 1057 First Ave., San Diego, 232-4088.