Ahmanson’s Backstage Key to ‘Miss Saigon’ Deal

When plans to reconfigure the Ahmanson Theatre were first announced a few years ago, the project was described as an attempt to make the seating capacity inside the auditorium more flexible, allowing the cavernous hall to accommodate more intimate shows.

So it’s ironic that the first production to play there after the renovations will be one of the biggest shows ever, “Miss Saigon.” It will use the maximum seating capacity in the newly reconfigured hall--around 2,000 seats. That’s about as many as were in use at the Ahmanson during the last four-plus years, when “The Phantom of the Opera” haunted the hall.

However, a few weeks before last week’s announcement of the January, 1995, opening of “Saigon”, additional elements of the reconfiguration were disclosed, boosting its price tag to $17 million. One of these new elements, an expanded backstage area, will get a rigorous workout during “Saigon.”

Did “Saigon” producer Cameron Mackintosh play a role in adding a bigger backstage to the list of things-to-reconfigure? “A very simple role,” Mackintosh said. “I told them, ‘If you don’t do it, we couldn’t bring “Saigon” there.’ ”

This is like the position taken by Mackintosh’s sometime colleague Andrew Lloyd Webber when he persuaded the Shubert Organization to re-do the balcony of the Shubert in order to accommodate “Sunset Boulevard.”

Gordon Davidson, who runs the theater, acknowledged Mackintosh’s role: “If we couldn’t have figured out how to afford” the additional renovations, “we wouldn’t have done ‘Miss Saigon.’ ” But he said the “Saigon” revenues will help pay for the additional renovations, just as “Phantom” revenues helped pay for Center Theatre Group’s share of the bulk of the reconfiguration. And he “guaranteed” that the expanded backstage will be used for many shows after “Saigon” is long gone. The previous lack of space, offstage left, “has been an enormous problem for 25 years.”

L.A.’s “Miss Saigon” will be part of the current national tour. Mackintosh said it would be too expensive to mount a separate “Miss Saigon” just for L.A. It cost $11-$12 million to mount the “Miss Saigon” tour, in contrast with the $9 million that was spent to mount “Phantom” in L.A. in 1989, and the length of the “Saigon” stay here (and therefore the potential take) is limited by the necessity to return the hall to its original use by its subscribers at the end of 1995.

APRES McANUFF: The image of La Jolla Playhouse, since its revival in 1983, has been that of a theater that lets its chosen artists do--more or less--whatever they want. The key, of course, is getting chosen in the first place, and the man who does the choosing has been Des McAnuff.

Now McAnuff has announced that next season will be his last as La Jolla Playhouse artistic director. Will the chosen artists remain allied with La Jolla after McAnuff departs?

Playwright Lee Blessing (“A Walk in the Woods,” “Down the Road”) said that he had “a wonderful experience with the theater and the community” as well as with McAnuff personally. But he pointed out that new artistic directors frequently bring in new blood, and “it may not be a bad thing for La Jolla.”

“My association has been with Des, but I’m very fond of a lot of other people there,” said playwright/director James Lapine (“Merrily We Roll Along,” “Luck, Pluck and Virtue”). He said he’d be happy to see associate artistic director Robert Blacker take over, but, natch, “whoever comes in will have their own coterie.”

Lapine had planned to do his and Stephen Sondheim’s next musical, based on the Italian novel “Fosca,” at the end of the last La Jolla season, “but it was wishful thinking that we would be ready,” he said. The musical could still play La Jolla next summer before moving to Broadway next fall, he said--if rights to the material aren’t secured in time to allow a Broadway opening next spring.