A New ‘Mancha’ : Taking the Familiar and Making It Different Is What Musical Company Is All About

Think “musical-theater company,” and--in Orange County at least--you’re really thinking “civic light opera.” The county has a small handful of CLOs of wildly varying quality, nearly all of them offering safe titles from the American musical past in large and not always friendly confines.

But there are other ways to run a musical-company railroad, and Beth Hansen and George Quick believe they have found one. Quietly amassing experience since the late ‘80s in various venues and with the Saddleback College’s summer stock company, Quick, Hansen and third partner Nancy Staiger have founded their succinctly named Musical Theatre Company.

Incorporated last year and making a modest entry at the Gem Theatre with Stephen Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music” last summer and later with “The Christmas Show With Sal and Amanda” (Hansen’s and Quick’s lounge-lizard stage couple), Musical Theatre Company is really just now making things truly formal.

Now a full-fledged member of the Grove Theatre Center’s consortium of performing companies, the troupe opens its production of Dale Wasserman’s “Man of La Mancha,” tonight at the Gem.

One year ago, “We were just a tenant and didn’t necessarily know what was going to happen next,” said Hansen. Now, as residents, they share office space and a theater facility with the consortium’s leading partner, Grove Theatre Company.

“Here’s our office,” quipped Quick, pointing to their cubicle space next to a conference room. “We call it ‘Suite 1.’ ” Sure enough, there’s a numeral “1” posted on the cubicle wall.

They’ve also taken over the roomy adjacent rehearsal space in the bungalow office building between the Gem and the outdoor Festival Amphitheatre. Hansen is directing “La Mancha,” and Quick, sporting an elegant goatee, is playing Don Quixote, “La Mancha’s” windmill-tilting hero.

“We asked ourselves, as we were organizing the company,” Hansen said, “how can we take these old chestnuts we love and take them in a new direction?”

Added Quick: “By artistic choice, we’re doing Mitch Leigh’s score with a completely different orchestration than audiences have become accustomed to with ‘Man of La Mancha.’ All we have is Spanish guitar, percussion and some sampled filler sound. You listen to the score in a new way. Our goal is to have people reawakened to the work.”

They’ve also incorporated their own historical research into their staging. Hansen explained that while reading of the Spanish Inquisition--the centuries-long, Catholic Church-directed persecution of nonbelievers during which “La Mancha” is set--she was shocked to learn that when Inquisition victims began packing prisons to overflowing, they were stockpiled in the sewers of Spanish cities. It’s in such a sewer underground that this revival is set, a far cry from the musical’s typical rural barnyard setting.

“It’s true to history,” said Hansen, “but it gives a new outlook on what was a terrible period.” Quick added that “there’s a zone of discomfort this show is aiming for, that makes audiences say, ‘OK, I’m going to have to stay awake for this.’ ”

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It sounds like the Serious Musical Theatre Company. But there’s another side to Hansen and Quick, who say they “became friends before we became partners.” Their Sal and Amanda Gecko routine, which they’ve been doing for years on various Orange County stages, brings out their taste for “funky stuff, lounge-act culture, camp-for-camp’s-sake,” said Quick. Sal and Amanda will show up later this year at the Gem.

The Serious label, though, is only reinforced by the company’s continual love affair with the Serious Musical Theatre Man himself--Stephen Sondheim.

“We have a real passion for Sondheim,” said Quick, “and we’re going to do something of his every year.” This season’s offering is a Sondheim revue, opening June 23. The company hopes to stage his “Assassins” during the 1996 election season.

The feeling, apparently, is mutual. When the company was hunting for donors during its organizing phase, it solicited Sondheim. To its astonishment, Sondheim responded with both a donation (which Hansen and Quick chose not to disclose) and “a lovely note, which I didn’t notice on my desk until the day after it arrived,” said Hansen. “I mean, he got back to us in five days .”

Musical Theatre Company has had other boosts, particularly from Grove Theatre Company artistic director Kevin Cochran, who invited the group into the fold, which developed following the 1993 demise of the theater center’s previous tenant-producer, GroveShakespeare. Waiting last year for a stamp of approval from the city, which owns the theater complex, and for the partnership to be sealed “was the longest summer I ever spent,” Hansen said.

Though Quick said he has visions of operating one day in a mid-size theater with modular seating “where you can do any kind of musical you want, any way you want,” he added that “we also know that we have to establish a track record of solid work.

“People still think this is ‘the Shakespeare group’ doing stuff in the Gem, and we have to explain to them that we’re a different group,” Quick said. “But this theater is absolutely the right fit for what we want to do.”

The Garden Grove identity dilemma extends to building up a subscriber base--one of the few things this company shares with a standard CLO.

“We must build an audience carefully, slowly,” Quick said. Although the company wonders whether the current model of the theater company-subscriber relationship will be outmoded in the 21st Century, to get on its feet, it is pursuing that model with telemarketing and direct-mail campaigns. And Grove Theatre Company subscribers are offered a $5 discount on tickets to Musical Company Theatre shows.

“We see there may be an attitude among the people who used to come to the Gem that goes, ‘Show us what you can do, because we were burned before’ ” with GroveShakespeare, Quick said. “I can’t blame them.”

* The Musical Theatre Company presents “Man of La Mancha,” Gem Theatre, 12852 Main St., Garden Grove. Tonight, $35. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2:30 p.m.; May 14 and 21, 7 p.m. Ends May 21. $20 to $26. (714) 741-9550.