Rep Season to Star Cultural Diversity

San Diego Repertory Theatre has scheduled a portion of its six-play 1992-1993 season to include a new bilingual jazz opera, inspired by Calderon de la Barca’s “Life’s a Dream” and the San Diego premiere of George C. Wolfe’s “Spunk.”

Also featured will be Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd,” S. Ansky’s “The Dybbuk” and the company’s annual production of “A Christmas Carol,” which is not part of the season package.

One of the two slots still to be decided will be filled by Culture Clash or Latins Anonymous. The other opening will be filled by the San Diego premiere of Brenda Wong Aoki’s “The Queen’s Garden” or Eugene Ionesco’s “The Chairs.”

No dates have been confirmed in the company’s 17th season, which will run from October into May. The company operates the Lyceum Stage and Lyceum Space in Horton Plaza.

Sam Woodhouse, producing director of the San Diego Rep, said the announcement was made now to promote subscription sales before the Rep’s current season ends in June. The dates, which will be firmed up in four to six weeks, will be decided by artists’ schedules.

As for the unfilled slots, “We’re still massaging the choices as to what’s the best selection from each group,” he said.

The season’s multicultural diversity “reflects our artistic commitment to presenting on our stages a dynamic variety of cultural voices that are speaking to us in Southern California,” Woodhouse said.

The season is also heavy on music. And all three shows with music--”Life’s a Dream,” “Spunk” and “Sweeney Todd”-- will be done on the Lyceum Stage.

“Life’s a Dream,” now in a workshop production at Southwestern College, will feature a live jazz octet and 13 actors-singers. Woodhouse will direct with possible co-direction by William Virchis, who is co-directing the workshop production. Julie Hebert, writer of the Rep’s recent “Ruby’s Bucket of Blood,” will co-write the script with Octavio Solis, who wrote “Man of the Flesh,” also produced at the Rep. Composer Gina Leishman will compose the score.

“Spunk,” a play with music by George C. Wolfe, previously presented Off Broadway and at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, is adapted from three stories of the pre-World War II life of blacks in America by writer Zora Neale Hurston. A director is to be announced.

Woodhouse will direct “Sweeney Todd.”

“The Dybbuk,” a 1920 play by the Russian Jewish writer S. Ansky, is a classic Yiddish play about a scholar who dies when the woman he loves is betrothed to another and returns to inhabit her body as a dybbuk (a spirit of the discontented dead). “The Dybbuk” will be directed by Todd Salovey, the Rep’s associate artistic director.

“The Queen’s Garden” is a new one-woman show in which writer-performer Aoki tells the story of growing up amid gang violence in Southern California in the 1960s and 1970s. Either “A Queen’s Garden” or “The Chairs,” to be directed by the company’s artistic director Douglas Jacobs, will be presented in the Lyceum Space.

The San Diego Rep’s production of “Latins Anonymous,” starring Los Angeles-based writers-performers Rick Najera, Armando Molina, Luisa Leschin and Diane Rodriguez, opened the Rep’s 1990 season and was extended six weeks. The Rep will present either that company’s newest work or work by the San Francisco-based Culture Clash.