From the Back Lot to Backstage

The worlds of theater and television may cohabit in Los Angeles, but they’ve long eyed each other with suspicion. Theater people often view TV with disdain, and not a little financial envy. And TV people often feel theater folks don’t appreciate the amount of artistry that goes into making a good sitcom.

What’s more, the animosity is fueled by the brain drain, as theater artists are lured away by lucrative prospects elsewhere. More and more though, the flow also goes the other way, with TV and film personalities cropping up onstage so often it’s now considered a hallmark of L.A. theater. Nor is the crossover limited to actors.

Veteran TV and film writer-producer-director Garry Marshall, who’s also a playwright, made good on his longtime love of the stage by building the Falcon Theatre in Burbank. He recently launched the venue’s first full season with his staging of Beth Henley’s “Crimes of the Heart,” featuring Crystal Bernard, Faith Ford, Stephanie Niznik and Morgan Fairchild--actresses familiar from their work on screen.

Gil Cates, producing director of the Geffen Playhouse, has directed and produced in the theater, including on Broadway, but is better known for his extensive career in film and television.

And now another man better known for his work in television is crossing over to the boards. David Lee, co-creator of the TV series “Frasier,” is directing Moss Hart’s “Light Up the Sky,” which opens at the Pasadena Playhouse on Tuesday.

Actually, as with Marshall and Cates, Lee is not making his debut, but a return. “I brought a lot of my theater resources to television, and now I’m just hauling them back down the hill,” explains the friendly yet quiet Lee, 49, dressed in shorts and seated amid the “snooty East Coast lawyer” decor in his office on the Paramount lot. “I think television can only benefit from the inclusion [of theater talent]. I think, I hope, that it can maybe help out in the other direction too.”

Indeed, Pasadena Playhouse artistic director Sheldon Epps, who also directs for “Frasier” and other TV shows, thought it was a gamble worth taking. “Certainly the style of writing in Moss Hart’s play is a precursor to the kind of elegant wit and sophistication of language that is prevalent in ‘Frasier,’ ” says Epps. “And the work that I’ve seen David do with essentially a group of well-trained stage actors suggested to me his ability to apply those same techniques to bringing this play to life. The work David has been doing week to week for the past six years has prepared him for doing this play.”

Hart’s 1948 comedy “Light Up the Sky” is an affectionate ode to the backstage shenanigans, farce and melodrama endemic to the world of the theater. The story focuses on a troupe that’s in Boston for the out-of-town tryout of a new play by an unknown writer. Hopes are high at first, but then the proverbial script hits the fan.

At Epps’ suggestion, Lee took a look at the Hart play and immediately felt an affinity for it. “As a writer, I was always taught: Don’t write about writers,” Lee says. “But Moss Hart actually wrote a play that is about writers. It’s about an older writer who is somewhat cynical and jaded, and during the course of the play he regains his heart a bit. And it’s about a young writer who has too many stars in his eyes, who gets a few of them removed, but in the course of that gets the necessary tools he needs to survive in that world.

“The irony is that Hart started out writing the piece as those two writers being the warring factions of himself, and in order to make it work he had to surround them with these crazy stock characters of the American theater,” Lee continues. “So, basically, what makes a play about writers work is that it’s not focused only on the writers.”

Born and raised in Claremont, Lee didn’t spend his boyhood dreaming of becoming a TV writer. But he did discover the stage quite young. “I can remember the moment I fell in love with the theater,” Lee says. “A third national tour of ‘My Fair Lady’ was going to play at the Biltmore Theater, which is now the parking lot behind the Biltmore Hotel. So we got tickets and went in, and I got my little orange soda and I sat down, and the curtain went up, and I remember just that moment going ‘I want to do this.’

“I knew from that moment on that I wanted to be in show business,” he says. “The next year I wrote a letter to Walt Disney asking if I could come work for him. I think I was 7 years old at the time. He never wrote back.”

Undaunted by the mouse man’s cold shoulder, Lee set himself a show-biz course anyway. He acted in plays in high school and went on to attend the University of Redlands, graduating in 1972 with a degree in theater. Lee also studied directing in a graduate program at a university in the Midwest he won’t name, but he left after six months and returned to L.A.

Initially, he found work as an actor and singer. But after a few years, he decided to try another route. “At the age of 25, I met my partner Peter Casey, and we just thought maybe we could try writing a TV script.” Many tries later, they finally sold a script to “The Jeffersons.” “After struggling for 3 1/2 years or so, it really took off and I didn’t look back at the theater,” Lee recalls. “But there was always that thing of theater being my first love.”

A decade later, Lee and Casey moved to “Cheers,” then in its fourth season. They spent four years there. Then, in 1989, they joined with fellow “Cheers” writer David Angell and formed Grub Street Productions. Grub Street created “Wings,” which ran for eight seasons; the ongoing “Frasier”; and, more recently, the ill-fated “Encore! Encore!” In addition to serving as a writer-producer, Lee has also continued to direct. He’s won nine Emmy Awards: two for directing, one for co-writing and six for producing.

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Significantly, the key to the success of “Frasier” is partly its theatricality. “ ‘Frasier’ was a conscious attempt to counter what was going on at that time, which was what I call the MTV-ization of sitcoms, which was shorter and shorter scenes,” Lee explains. “My partners and I sat down and said, ‘Let’s try to make the scenes as long as we possibly can.’ I was making it more play-like. And so when I run up against the Moss Harts and the Noel Cowards of the world, where everybody’s having witty conversations, it strikes a chord with me.”

Nor was it “Frasier” that led Lee to rethink his career. “What finally did it for me was I made a big mistake,” he says. “I’d always done TV projects because I wanted to do them and they spoke to me in some way. And then a couple years ago I agreed to do a new TV series [“Encore! Encore!”] because other people wanted me to do it, and it proved to be a disaster.

“After that, I went, ‘What do I really want to do?’ So I started dissolving Grub Street Productions. My partners and I still work together and it’s very amiable, but the partnership only exists as long as ‘Frasier’ exists. I changed my agent of 20 years and signed up with an agency that has a really large presence in New York. And much to the chagrin of everybody who’s been making money off of me, I said, ‘I’m going to start working in the theater.’ ”

Of course, as one might expect from a creator of “Frasier,” Lee is aware of the potential ironies of his choice. “It smells suspiciously like a midlife crisis to me,” he says. “All this happened right around the time I bought a red sports car. But it’s fun; it’s part of getting older.”

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“LIGHT UP THE SKY,” Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena. Dates: Opens Tuesday. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 5 and 9 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends Dec. 19. Prices: $13.50-$42.50. Phone: (800) 233-3123.