Reprise! Looks for Repeat Success

In spring 1995, magazine journalist Marcia Seligson decided she didn’t want to write anymore. She’d done it for 25 years, and it was time to move on. She stopped accepting assignments, visited a career counselor and started making lists of things she cared about.

Musical theater was always at the top of any list.

“I grew up on musical theater in [its] glory days,” says the former New Yorker, “and I could never find enough good musical theater in Los Angeles to satisfy me. I started thinking I can’t be the only one in town who feels that way.”

After initial thoughts of producing a musical herself, she focused on how much she enjoyed New York City Center’s popular Encores! series of concert stagings of old musicals. “I realized you could do great revivals of shows that are fabulous, worthy of reviving, and that most people haven’t seen,” she remembers. “You could do it inexpensively by cutting way back on the scenery and extravaganza. There was nothing like that in Los Angeles.”

There is now. Seligson’s Reprise! Broadway’s Best in Concert series starts its second three-show season at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse on May 6 with “The Pajama Game,” starring Christine Ebersole, Dorian Harewood and Peter Scolari. “The Threepenny Opera” follows Sept. 9-20, and the series ends with “Of Thee I Sing” Nov. 11-22.

After a sold-out, critically acclaimed first season, Reprise! has more than doubled its performances of each show this season to 15 from seven. Even above the 85% resubscription rate already achieved, says Seligson, individual ticket sales “are going well. A couple of performances are already sold out.”

Never mind that before Reprise! Seligson had never produced live theater.

“The gumption is what you really have to note most in Marcia,” says actor Jason Alexander, who starred in the series’ first show, “Promises, Promises.” “There was a lot she didn’t know, but she had a vision and she was fearless. She would call anyone and everyone in pursuit of making this happen.”

She still does. Seligson’s key resource is clearly the ample Rolodex she’s filled through years of writing for such magazines as Life and Lear’s and turning out eight books on everything from the wedding industry to humor.

“I know how to bring people together,” says Seligson, who was instrumental in assembling

the daylong, celebrity-studded L.A. World Hunger Event in May 1980. “I know lots and lots of people, and I’m a very good networker.”

Seligson’s networking happens, for the most part, at the spacious oceanfront condo she shares with her husband, management consultant Tom Drucker, as well as their golden retriever named Spirit, and assorted Reprise! staffers who work in the upstairs and downstairs offices.

Boxes full of Reprise! T-shirts, brochures, stationery and programs border the den, and her collection of music-theater CDs is on the bar near the piano.

Seligson can still remember the first Broadway show she saw as a child--Ethel Merman in “Annie Get Your Gun,” and she says her whole background is musical. She studied piano, initially majored in music in college, and performed with an amateur choir. She also has what she describes as “a very odd quality--when I don’t know how to do something, it doesn’t scare me. I know how to get people who know more than I do to teach me. I’m a good student.”

In early 1996, for instance, she spoke with New York City Center president and executive director Judith Daykin. While there are several differences between Encores! Great American Musicals in Concert and Reprise!, Seligson readily concedes she modeled her effort on her New York predecessors. “They tapped into this audience, did it economically in a time when shows cost $11 million, and [they] were incredibly successful,” she says matter of factly.

“Why reinvent the wheel?”

She started assembling a board, scouted musical properties and looked at theaters. Seeking a midsized house rather than a larger, union house or a smaller, 99-seat one, she looked at sound stages, theaters used for film screenings, even an airplane hangar. It took six months, she says, before somebody suggested UCLA’s 568-seat Freud Playhouse, usually used for student productions.

A board member set up lunch for her with Peter Matz, a prominent Broadway arranger and orchestrator she hoped would help her choose from the half-dozen possible musical directors she’d been considering. But when she pulled out her list, Seligson says, “Peter said, ‘I hope you’re going to ask me to be your musical director,’ and I started to cry. I was just so overwhelmed.”

She had similar success with “Seinfeld” star Alexander, who was a Tony Award winner for his work in “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway.” “My first reaction was ‘who the hell is Marcia Seligson, and how real can this be,” Alexander says. “Was she involved in live theater? No. Had she ever produced theater before? No. She was basically a fan. Then she started to offer concrete things--a theater, funding, Peter Matz. Piece by piece, she kept coming up with a list of the goods.”

Seligson asked Alexander to suggest some shows he wanted to do, and he was particularly keen on Neil Simon’s “Promises, Promises,” with its now-classic Burt Bacharach/Hal David score. She was amenable, the rights were available and Reprise! opened with the show in May 1997, starring Alexander.

Seligson sent out 100,000 brochures for the series’ first subscription season. Within a month, she says, they’d sold 80% of their subscriptions and immediately added a seventh performance of each show. “You couldn’t get a seat for ‘Promises, Promises,’ ” recalls Alexander, who gave a post-curtain talk after every performance. “Marcia, late in the run, said we’d been turning people away by the hundreds.”

Capitalizing on that success, Reprise! brought Alexander and “Promises” back for 14 performances in August, helping to lessen some of the nonprofit organization’s debt. It cost about $750,000 to put on last season’s three shows, Seligson says, noting most of their funding came from individuals. “We were so successful that we only lost $50,000 on each show,” she adds wryly, “And that’s entirely sold out.”

Reprise! is remounting last season’s “Wonderful Town,” at the Orange County Performing Arts Center for five performances starting July 30, Seligson says, with virtually the same cast, except for a couple of ensemble members. Seligson also confirms reports that she is in “very preliminary discussions with the Music Center” about producing a show at the Ahmanson, but says it is “premature” to elaborate at this time.

Her wish list for future Reprise! productions includes both the well-known “Kiss Me, Kate” and “Bells are Ringing” and the lesser-known “Mack & Mabel” and “House of Flowers.”

Seligson talks about shows, not stars, in discussing future offerings. While Reprise! casting of stars like Alexander, Andrea Marcovicci and Tyne Daly (who later dropped out at the last minute and was replaced in “Wonderful Town” by Lucie Arnaz) obviously helped sell the first round of subscriptions, Seligson indicates irritation that “a lot of people think the reason we were so successful last year is that we had a couple of big stars. They think Los Angeles is a totally star-driven town, and we have to have the big TV names, but that is not my instinct at all. I think it was important the first year because we were nobody and nothing. We had no credibility.”

Seligson has drawn on the willingness of many TV and film actors here to do short theater runs at relatively low pay, but she says she’s also aware she isn’t always their first priority. “When this season came along, I and others argued that we were not going to book major stars a long time in advance because several of them dropped out last year,” says Seligson. “I feel strongly that what’s going to have Reprise! succeed over the long haul is doing the best-quality shows using top people, but I don’t want to sign major stars just because they’re stars.

“I think our audiences have come to trust us. We had this huge resubscription rate without [audiences] knowing what the shows were going to be, much less who the actors were. I really have operated this whole thing on instincts. I pick the stuff I love, and the stuff I have a sense will go over in Los Angeles.”

Seligson says she and Matz are also trying to find an original musical, possibly as early as next season. “I think it should be part of our mission,” she says. “If what we’re about is preserving this great heritage of musical theater and creating new and young audiences for it, then we have to do new musicals. It’s a natural outgrowth of our passion for musical theater.”

Meanwhile, Reprise! has teamed up with the educational Galef Institute on programming for local high schools. Seligson says she also recently signed a three-year agreement with the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television regarding use of the Freud Playhouse. “Pajama Game” will feature some UCLA theater students in the chorus, she adds.

“If this second season of Reprise! proves to be as fruitful as the first one, Marcia really has to be taken seriously as a major producing force in Los Angeles,” says Alexander. “She was up to bat three times and hit three home runs--go find another producer who has that in the first season.”

*

* “The Pajama Game,” UCLA’s Freud Playhouse, (parking in Lot 3), Westwood, May 6-9 and May 12-16, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 p.m. Ends May 17. $45-$50.