The Chosen One

In 1993, Eric D. Schaeffer asked an architect friend to accompany him to an industrial site he was thinking of transforming into a theater.

Light poured through gaping holes in the ceiling. Stacks of abandoned auto bumpers, from the building’s former use as a plating plant, littered the floor.

The architect was aghast, but Schaeffer talked him into coming up with a renovation plan. Nine months later, Signature Theatre left its cramped old digs and moved into that building, which had been converted into a 136-seat theater.

“Just do it, just try,” Schaeffer remembers thinking. “That’s kind of how I live my whole life.”

That attitude seems to be paying off. From its base in Arlington, Va., the 9-year-old Signature Theatre is rapidly expanding its reputation due largely to word of mouth about the musicals that Schaeffer, its artistic director, stages there. Stephen Sondheim shows have become an annual event, and songwriting partners John Kander & Fred Ebb, as well as British mega-producer Cameron Mackintosh, have taken a liking to the young director and have used Signature as a testing ground.

As Schaeffer’s name recognition has grown, he has landed an increasing number of assignments elsewhere. Currently, he is in Los Angeles for his first show here, and it’s a biggie: “Putting It Together,” the Sondheim revue that opens today at the Mark Taper Forum with a cast that includes Carol Burnett, Bronson Pinchot and Susan Egan. As director, Schaeffer, 36, has been working not only with the big-name performers, but also with Sondheim, who has rewritten much of his 1992 show, and Mackintosh, who is presenting it in association with the Taper.

Taper artistic director Gordon Davidson had seen a few of Schaeffer’s Signature shows, and had already identified him as a promising young talent. So when Mackintosh suggested him for “Putting It Together,” Davidson readily agreed.

As Mackintosh puts it: “He goes for the simple center of what the author has written, and he’s able to put it up without any sense of pretension. It’s a terrific combination of show-biz savvy and a very serious mind.

“He’s almost unflappable, which is also good, but beneath that charm of his there is a very steely person.”

Burnett, too, seems enamored: “I’d like to adopt him and take him with me. As a director, he is very, very laid back, a great audience. He encourages you to think, and he loves to hear your suggestions and ideas.”

Even the tight-lipped Sondheim comes up with a few choice words, saying: “He’s very visual, he’s very flexible, and, I think, he’s very imaginative in terms of treatment of songs.”

One evening after rehearsal, Schaeffer settles in for a chat. He is of Pennsylvania Dutch stock, with dark blond hair swooping low on a boyish face. He smiles easily, and when he gets excited, his blue eyes sparkle, punctuating his sentences with glittery exclamation points.

He has been under the gun for hours, devoting the bulk of his day to “Putting It Together” while also attending to his duties back at Signature and writing up notes on the world premiere of Kander & Ebb’s “Over and Over,” which he will direct there in January. Yet rather than tiring him out, the work seems to have refreshed him.

“I love creating something,” he says. “I love getting in a room with a group of people and everybody saying, ‘Roll up your sleeves; we’re gonna get our hands dirty. Here we go. . . .’ ”

“Putting It Together” is a compilation of some of Sondheim’s greatest hits, from such shows as “Company,” “Follies,” “A Little Night Music,” “Merrily We Roll Along” and the movie “Dick Tracy.” The songs are strung along the merest thread of plot.

Sondheim devised the show with Julia McKenzie, a co-creator and star of the mid-’70s Sondheim compilation “Side by Side by Sondheim.” In his early days of producing, Mackintosh backed “Side by Side,” and he eagerly participated in “Putting It Together.” The show emerged in Oxford, England, in 1992, then played the Manhattan Theatre Club in 1993, where its cast included Julie Andrews and Christopher Durang. The show was first presented in Los Angeles, without Mackintosh’s involvement, in early 1997 at the Colony Studio Theatre.

Sondheim says he has reworked about 50% of the show since New York--an attempt to simplify and to shape to suit Burnett’s talents. (One of the most notable additions is the caustic “The Ladies Who Lunch” from “Company,” which Burnett performed to great acclaim in a 1993 Long Beach Civic Light Opera production.)

The action is set in a swanky Manhattan apartment, where a wealthy couple (Burnett and John McCook) are hosting a cocktail party. The husband invites a younger work associate (John Barrowman), who brings a date (Egan). A hired waiter (Pinchot) looks on, providing ironic commentary.

Gone is a second-act section in which the sozzled guests turned to a series of increasingly cruel games. It has been replaced with a more reflective section in which the party-goers--their fun souring a bit--begin to think about their disappointments and thwarted desires.

“What I’m happiest with,” Sondheim says, “is that the show seems, to me, clearer--less convoluted, less complex--[yet] still maintains its emotional thread.”

Schaeffer adds: “You get to hear songs that you’re familiar with, but done in a whole new way. It’s like rediscovering them.”

Schaeffer grew up in small-town Fleetwood, Pa., the youngest of four children of a high school teacher father and a nurse mother. Early on, he was interested in visual art. Then, when he was in the eighth grade, his church prepared a youth performance of “Godspell.” He hadn’t planned to take part, but the show needed more guys.

That was it. “I was hooked,” he says.

At 15, he staged his first musical: a community production of “Oliver!” It had a cast of more than 70, ranging in age from 4 to 72.

Schaeffer has no formal training in theater; he has learned by watching others--and by doing.

“It’s not only that you have to have a visual sense of what you’re going to bring across, as well as a dramatic sense,” he says of directing, “but it’s also having enough common sense to be the politician, making everybody feel they’re in a creative environment and all contributing.”

Schaeffer studied graphic design at Kutztown University, a stone’s throw from Fleetwood. Once out of school, he worked in advertising, then as art director for WETA, the PBS affiliate in Washington, D.C.

In his free time, he worked with community theater groups--particularly the Arlington Players in Arlington, Va., for whom he staged a production of Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George.”

On impulse one night, he suggested to actress friend Donna Migliaccio: “We should just start a theater company.” A month later, she called back and said, “Were you serious?” They chipped in $250 apiece, and Signature Theatre was born.

Since its inception in 1989, Signature has become a nonprofit, professional regional theater with 3,600 subscribers and an annual budget of $1.3 million. It presents five shows a year--three musicals and two plays. Schaeffer lives just four minutes away.

The theater is working its way through Sondheim’s canon, having presented “Sweeney Todd,” “Assassins,” “Company,” “Into the Woods,” “Passion,” “Sunday in the Park With George” (a co-production with the larger Arena Stage) and “You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow--A Stephen Sondheim Evening.” Schaeffer directed them all, winning Washington, D.C.-area Helen Hayes Awards for “Sweeney,” “Assassins” and “Passion.” Those shows, as well as “Into the Woods,” were also honored as outstanding musical. The just-closed “A Little Night Music” is the first Sondheim show that Schaeffer hasn’t directed.

Sondheim has seen just one of the productions--”Passion”--which, he says, “was terrific.”

Schaeffer and Signature have also forged a relationship with Kander & Ebb. Schaeffer staged “Cabaret,” then decided to present “The Rink,” which had been a Broadway disappointment. The songwriters and book writer Terrence McNally had been reworking the show, and Signature became the first theater to present the revamped version, slimmed down to an intermissionless 90 minutes.

Given Schaeffer’s success with their work, Kander & Ebb invited him to join their new project, “Over and Over,” which they and librettist Joseph Stein are basing on Thornton Wilder’s wacky tale of human survival, “The Skin of Our Teeth.” Schaeffer offered Signature for a tryout production, which opens Jan. 18, starring Bebe Neuwirth.

Mackintosh--the producer synonymous with such shows as “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Les Miserables”--began to hear about Schaeffer from a variety of sources, including Flora Roberts, the legendary agent who represents Sondheim and now manages Schaeffer as well. When a new musical that Mackintosh was backing in London didn’t live up to expectations, he invited Schaeffer to take a look. Mackintosh liked Schaeffer’s suggestions, and last spring Mackintosh linked forces with Signature to present the American premiere of that musical, “The Fix.”

Among the projects that have begun to draw Schaeffer away from home: the recent national tour of the Broadway fizzle “big,” which Schaeffer scaled down and reshaped--to much praise--with creators John Weidman, Richard Maltby Jr. and David Shire. It played at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in February.

Asked if he’s fazed by the company he’s keeping these days, Schaeffer at first answers evenly: “I just think of it as a job.” But then he can’t contain himself.

“The other day,” he admits, “I actually did sit there and think, ‘Oh, my God, that’s Carol Burnett.’ ”

*

“Putting It Together,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave. Opens today, 7 p.m. Regular schedule: Tuesdays to Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Ends Dec. 6. $38-$47. (213) 628-2772.