And So the Celebration Continues

How do you surpass “Naked Boys Singing”?

The long-running revue with the sensational title pulled the Celebration Theatre, Southern California’s primary gay-oriented theater, through some difficult times in the past year. It was so successful that the company’s artistic director, Robert Schrock, left to guide the commercial development of the show.

The new artistic director, Richard Israel, decided not to try to match the flash of the “Naked Boys” phenomenon. “Nudity is a dicey issue,” Israel said. “There’s obviously an audience for it. I’d never rule it out. But it’s too soon to do that type of show again.” Indeed, Schrock himself probably would agree; the final show of his tenure was a non-nudie revue about older gays called “Too Old for the Chorus.”

The first show under Israel’s authority is “Marry Me a Little,” a much quieter revue of Stephen Sondheim songs, featuring only two singers.

Celebration got permission from Sondheim--who only recently acknowledged his own homosexuality publicly--to do “Marry Me” with two men instead of a man and a woman. The text of the show differs from the customary version only in the changing of pronouns and in dropping one song, “Bang,” which “is very much about being a woman,” Israel said. There is some shirtlessness, but that’s as close as the production will come to featuring “naked boys.”

“Marry Me,” which opened Friday, is the first entry in what is planned as a four-show season, a concept that had been more or less forgotten at the Celebration in recent years in favor of running shows until their box-office potential was exhausted.

The theater’s board wanted to return to a season, Israel said. Under new Actors’ Equity rules, longer runs will cost more as actor compensation rises every four weeks. If the theater has a hit, alternate spaces or staggered schedules might help extend it.

A long-running issue at the Celebration has been whether it’s a lesbian company as well as a gay men’s company. Israel said he and the board want to revive the lesbian side of the Celebration, even though none of the four shows in the season is lesbian-oriented, and not one board member is a woman.

A co-production with the Ivy Theatre, a lesbian company that formed out of reaction to the absence of a lesbian presence within Celebration, might be in the works, Israel said. He considered doing a two-woman version of “Marry Me a Little” in addition to the men’s version, but the “rehearsal period was truncated.”

Women are not totally absent at the Celebration; the new managing director is Jill Moore, who worked with Israel at the West Coast Ensemble.

THEATRE 40 BROUHAHA: The recent crisis that briefly enveloped Theatre 40, in which the company received an eviction notice from its longtime home at Beverly Hills High School one week and then was invited back the next week, isn’t quite over.

The subject will arise again at an Oct. 25 school board meeting. However, based on the sentiment expressed at a board meeting last Monday, artistic co-director J. David Krassner said he expects the board to vote to let the company finish its current season and to open discussions regarding a contract for the company’s long-term residency.

Dozens of Theatre 40 fans attended the board meeting Monday to voice their support for the company.

A.S.K. AT THE FORD: The format of A.S.K. Theater Projects’ fall reading series has been changed from eight Monday evenings to two more intense sessions, next weekend and Oct. 30-31, with two different plays read each Saturday and each Sunday.

Because the format has changed, the location also has changed. The new site will be Inside the Ford, the county-operated facility on the lower level of the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre. At 89 seats, it’s smaller than the series’ previous home at Skirball Cultural Center. But the Skirball was never filled to capacity, said an A.S.K. representative, and the Skirball couldn’t accommodate the new schedule, which is designed to make it easier for the playwrights to see one another’s work--and one another.