Stanley Soble; Top L.A. Casting Director

Stanley Soble, widely considered the leading casting director in Los Angeles theater, died Tuesday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center of complications following surgery. He was 59.

Soble was the casting director of the Mark Taper Forum from late 1988 until his death, and he also supervised casting for some of the productions at the Taper’s larger sister theater, the Ahmanson, including that theater’s current Shakespeare comedies.

“He was wonderful,” said Richard Thomas, one of the stars of the Ahmanson Shakespeare plays. “He was fiercely loyal to the actors he cared about. And he was pure theater--he was everywhere, seeing everything.”

“He was the best. . . . He had a sharp eye,” said Taper and Ahmanson artistic director Gordon Davidson, who described casting as “95% of the challenge of doing a play.”

Born and raised in Richmond, Va., Soble studied theater at the Richmond Professional Institute of the College of William and Mary, graduating in 1962. He moved to New York to become a professional actor, appearing in off-Broadway productions and in the national touring company of “Fiddler on the Roof”--first as the rabbi’s son, then as Motel the tailor. But he eventually gave up acting for behind-the-scenes work as an agent. “He wanted to eat,” explained his sister, Sarah Soble Coyne of Richmond.

Soble landed a job as casting director for the soap opera “Search for Tomorrow” in 1978. Then he worked in the casting department of the New York Shakespeare Festival from 1980 to 1984, after which he began his own casting business in partnership with Jason Lapadura. In the mid-’80s, his firm cast a number of productions at the revived La Jolla Playhouse, as well as other resident theaters and many TV and film projects.

“He absolutely loved actors,” Lapadura said.

After taking the Taper job in 1988, Soble cast hundreds of shows, ranging from the full productions on the main Taper stage to workshops and readings in smaller venues.

A member of the board of directors of the Casting Society of America, he received five nominations for the society’s top honor, the Artios award, and won it for the casting of “Angels in America.”

“Actors felt well taken care of by him,” Davidson said. “He wasn’t afraid to disagree with a director if he felt talent wasn’t being recognized. We encouraged each other not to fall into the same old patterns, such as using the same names over and over, but also not to forget the people who had worked here. It’s a challenge to mix the two up, but he did it well.”

In an interview in the trade newspaper Back Stage West in 1997, Soble spoke passionately of the difficulty of luring established TV and movie stars back to the theater. Their agencies “say they love theater and want their actors to work in the theater, but the reality is we become an annoyance,” Soble said.

Not only does the theater pay less for jobs that often last longer, but “film and television actors are afraid of the theater because the exposure and criticism is so enormous. People lose technique over the years, so they’re afraid to come back. . . . I wish there were a law or a rule that every actor who made films had to do at least one play a year somewhere in America.”

Besides his sister, Soble is survived by a brother, Paul Soble of Richmond, three nieces and two nephews.