‘Salesman’ Traveling to L.A. to Open Ahmanson Season

“Death of a Salesman,” starring Brian Dennehy, will open the 2000-01 Ahmanson Theatre season, which will be capped by a new version of “Flower Drum Song,” rewritten by David Henry Hwang, and the Broadway dance sensation “Contact,” it was announced today.

The celebrated Goodman Theatre production of Arthur Miller’s classic drama will run from Sept. 20 to Nov. 5. The production won four Tonys last year, including best Broadway revival, and was videotaped and broadcast on Showtime in January. Ron Eldard also will repeat his performance as Biff, and “the intention is to get everyone who did it before,” said artistic director/producer Gordon Davidson, though deals haven’t been signed yet with a few key players.

“Swing!,” a Broadway song and dance revue directed and choreographed by Lynne Taylor-Corbett and supervised by Broadway veteran Jerry Zaks, is up next, Nov. 29 to Jan. 14.

Peter Hall, who directed two Shakespeare plays in repertory plus “Amadeus” at the Ahmanson last year, will return to stage “Romeo and Juliet,” Feb. 18 to April 1. The stars could be “anyone from Leonardo DiCaprio to total unknowns,” Davidson said. He had hoped to produce another pair of plays in repertory, but “I couldn’t find the right pairing and I need another year in grounding repertory as a fully funded component of the program.” He expects to return to repertory in 2001-02.

To any veteran theatergoers who object to seeing the frequently produced “Romeo,” as a few did to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” last summer, Davidson said that “most classic plays are familiar, but many people have never seen them live and know them only from the movies. No one gets in an uproar in London if there are two ‘Hamlets’ being done at the same time.”

The revised “Flower Drum Song,” May 13 to June 24, 2001, will be the first stop for what is planned as an eventual Broadway production, with Benjamin Mordecai and Tony Petito joining Center Theatre Group as co-producers. Hwang, author of “M. Butterfly” and “Golden Child,” will update a script that is sometimes criticized for old-fashioned stereotypes, but the script will still be set in the past. Asked for an example of specific changes planned, Davidson said that the older generation of Chinese Americans in the script will be aficionados of Chinese opera instead of a contemporary nightclub--but that the creative team “is still fine-tuning it.” Robert Longbottom (“Side Show,” “The Scarlet Pimpernel”) will direct, and the Rodgers and Hammerstein score will remain intact.

“Contact,” July 8-Aug. 26, 2001, tells three stories through dance and dialogue to a range of classical, pop and jazz recordings: “Swinging” is set in 18th century France; “Did You Move?” is set in Queens, N.Y., in 1954; and the final story, “Contact,” is about an advertising executive in a swing dance club. The Ahmanson staging will be the first time the production, which is currently at Lincoln Center in New York, is presented on a proscenium stage.

“Contact” was co-conceived by writer John Weidman and director-choreographer Susan Stroman. Stroman was scheduled to choreograph “The Night They Raided Minsky’s” as part of the current Ahmanson season, but that production was canceled upon the death of its director, Mike Ockrent, and is on hold until another director is found, Davidson said.