THEATER : ‘Oklahoma!’ Isn’t OK in This Man’s Book : ‘Man of La Mancha’ creator Dale Wasserman wrote his new musical, ‘Western Star,’ to counter the fairy-tale image of the Old West.

Most new musicals are big risks. In only a few cases, they create big rewards.

Dale Wasserman made a lot of money from one of those rare cases, “Man of La Mancha,” for which he wrote the book.

Now he has written a new musical about people who--like new musical producers--took big risks: Western pioneers.

“Western Star,” opening Friday at Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center, is the first home-grown, large-scale, professional production of a new musical in Los Angeles County since last year’s ill-fated series of practically new musicals at the Alex Theatre--which landed their producer in the red and in court.

“It’s a bit of a gamble,” said Irv Kimber, artistic director of the group that’s producing “Western Star,” the Civic Light Opera of South Bay Cities. This is the company’s fourth season--and “we weren’t planning to look at new material until season five or six.”

But Wasserman yanked the rights to “Western Star” from Santa Barbara Civic Light Opera last year because, he said, he wasn’t happy with that group’s progress on the show. So when he asked the South Bay group to step in, “he wanted it up as quickly as possible,” Kimber said. South Bay booted “Nunsense” off its 1995 season to make room for “Western Star.”

“I read it, I liked it, I liked a lot of the score,” Kimber said. “It’s a little different from the big, splashy musicals we usually produce. But there is a good chance of it becoming a staple in regional theater.”

“Western Star” has been “in gestation” for seven years, ever since Wasserman contacted the music-writing team of Scott DeTurk and Bill Francoeur after admiring what he calls their “melodic” work for a musical version of “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.”

In their mid-40s, DeTurk and Francoeur are from a different generation than Wasserman, who was born in 1917 according to reference sources (Wasserman won’t state his age, citing “ageism” in America). However, Wasserman said, there is no generation gap--”I’m younger than they are.”

A civic theater in Fairfield, in Northern California, staged an amateur production of “Western Star” in 1992, after a Wasserman associate saw Fairfield’s new $7.2 million theater. But Wasserman was anxious to see it in professional hands.

Wasserman drew on his visits to Western ghost towns as a teen-aged hobo during the Depression while conceiving the show. But his final inspiration to do it came after “I saw one too many productions of ‘Oklahoma!’

“I got fed up with that pretty fairy tale. I wanted to write a musical Western that’s got bite, some sharpness, a sense of reality about it.”

The traditional Hollywood image of pioneers is “baloney,” Wasserman declared. “Two-thirds of them gave up and went back. Almost all of them were defective people, but some of them found a core of something that caused them to create a community and survive. I’d like to watch that struggle.”

The show is set in a Western town “in the front range of the Rockies” in 1875, not far from where DeTurk and Francoeur began their musical collaboration at the University of Northern Colorado, and not far from where Francoeur still lives.

But the story is very loosely based on the Book of Job. Two con men in “Western Star” roughly parallel the roles played by God and Satan in Job, Wasserman said. They are struggling for the souls of the town folk--particularly of a doctor, who has been a hermit ever since his family died, and of a young woman torn between the doctor and her brutish bad-guy husband.

Not that Wasserman believes in God. He’s an atheist who believes that “people who look to outside leadership, such as organized religion, never have a chance for redemption. People are swayed to almost any purpose if you use the right con-man psychology.”

But he does believe in the possibility of redemption somewhere within the human community itself. He illustrated this notion in “Man of La Mancha” and now in his new show.

Still, this openness toward human redemption is a bit ironic, considering that Wasserman also said he feels an affinity with his play’s hermit in his “rejection of a social context.” And considering that Wasserman said he has never felt at home. Not where he now lives, in Scottsdale, Ariz., or anywhere else.

In his early childhood, Wasserman’s Midwestern family moved from town to town, following his father’s job--converting storefronts into movie theaters. Wasserman was an orphan by the age of 9, and by age 12 he “hit the road,” he recalled. Except for a year at Belmont High School in Los Angeles, which his brother insisted on, young Dale spent his Depression-era teen-age years riding the rails and wandering around the West.

He took occasional jobs--including one as a wrestler at a bordello outside Reno--and he often landed in jail--”Sometimes I was happy to be in them--when the weather was bad,” he said. His book-learning consisted largely of reading volumes he would steal from the local library and then return to the next library down the road.

At 19, Wasserman was living on a rooftop in downtown Los Angeles, on Spring Street where Los Angeles Times parking garages now stand, he recalled: “Every rooftop had a colony of hobohemia.” It was in this unlikely spot that he became involved in the theater--first in a radical street theater group called the Rebel Players and then in a succession of similar groups. “There was a strong and thriving left-wing theater in L.A. at the time,” Wasserman said.

He became a lighting designer for Katherine Dunham’s dance company, which eventually took him to New York and a succession of other jobs--first in lighting, then as a writer. He wrote a script about Cervantes and Don Quixote for television and then transformed it into “Man of La Mancha,” which still seems to pop up in a new production every few weeks [the Musical Theatre Company in Garden Grove just did it and Long Beach Civic Light Opera will stage it next month].

Wasserman created a flap in 1991 over one of those “La Mancha” productions. He didn’t like the traditional revival that composer Mitch Leigh was producing. Wasserman said he wants to see “La Mancha” done in a staging in which the set surrounds the audience, which would make theatergoers feel they are in the story’s prison.

That would probably require a small space. And even with “Western Star,” Wasserman said, he’s a little “frightened” by the scale of the 1,424-seat South Bay venue, with its “enormous stage . . . I didn’t mean it to be this big. I intended it to have a cast of only 14.”

Wasserman said he doesn’t care if it ever goes to Broadway. Producer Kimber said he thinks “our venue is the right size. We had to expand it a little bit, but it’s still only 26 actors.” However, he said, “if someone handed me a pile of money and said, ‘Let’s take [“Western Star”] to New York,’ I’d say, ‘Off Broadway.’ Broadway is a dying breed that doesn’t have much to do with artistry.”

The budget for the show at South Bay is $325,000--more than the group’s average cost of $275,000 for mounting a revival, but less than the $350,000 for the group’s recent revival of “42nd Street.” There will be 10 actors on an Equity contract; if the show were being staged in a full Equity house, costs “would skyrocket,” Kimber said.

So far Kimber reports no negative reaction from the group’s nearly 13,000 subscribers to the idea of an untested show. “Yes, they want to see a lot of the tried and true, the ‘Oklahomas!,’ ” Kimber said. “But you can occasionally show them that someone other than Andrew Lloyd Webber writes new shows and they don’t need $17-million sets.”

Wasserman applauds the group’s determination. “Very few groups have the guts or the money to produce a new musical. It’s tough and costly and it gives the critics something to sink their teeth into. But it’s important--we need new theater literature.”*