This Board Chief Knows Stagecraft

Richard Kagan used to write summer-camp musicals in the Poconos, collaborating with young Marvin Hamlisch. Then he became a commercial theater producer.

Now he’s the president of the board of Center Theatre Group, L.A.’s biggest nonprofit theater company, which runs the Mark Taper Forum and the Ahmanson Theatre.

He succeeds Phyllis Hennigan, who had served since 1997.

Elected president last month, Kagan is the first CTG president who has previous experience as a theatrical producer.

Kagan produced an off-Broadway show, “The World’s a Stage,” when he was just 23. It was not a financial success. Kagan’s family suggested the insurance business as an alternative profession.

He followed their advice: He is founder and CEO of Kagan Life & Health Insurance, based in Century City.

But he didn’t forget about the theater. After the success of “A Chorus Line,” scored by his former summer-camp friend Hamlisch, Kagan became involved in helping raise money for Hamlisch’s shows--and others.

He co-produced “Leader of the Pack” in 1985, receiving his first shared Tony nomination, although he admits that the book of that musical never worked. He was a line producer on Hamlisch’s “Smile” and raised money for Hamlisch and Neil Simon’s “The Goodbye Girl,” for which he also shared in a Tony nomination as part of the production team.

He also raised money for the infamous Richard Burton-Elizabeth Taylor production of “Private Lives,” which “lost every penny,” he said.

Kagan is still raising money in what he calls his “CEO” role at CTG. He joined the board 12 years ago and has been chairman of several committees. Even though nonprofit and commercial theater are different animals, they are increasingly linked. “I know grosses, nets, royalty structures, how to structure arrangements with other producers,” Kagan said. “I can help with deals.” However, he took care to note that “the board has nothing to say about artistic decisions.”

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AND VICE VERSA: If Kagan has moved from for-profit theater to nonprofit, Marcia Seligson has begun to travel in the opposite direction.

The founder and producing artistic director of Reprise!, the vintage musicals series that operates out of UCLA’s Freud Playhouse, Seligson is also one of the producers of “Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks,” the Geffen Playhouse hit that is expected to open in New York next spring.

Seligson had worked with director Arthur Allan Seidelman in Reprise!, and he sent her a copy of Richard Alfieri’s script for “Six Dance Lessons.” She liked it enough to sign on, along with Rodger Hess and Entpro Plays, as one of the three producers.

When Randall Arney became artistic director of the Geffen last year, she took him to lunch as a collegial gesture from a neighboring artistic director and, in the course of the lunch, mentioned “Six Lessons.”

Arney and the Geffen’s producing director Gilbert Cates liked it so much that when Seligson later told them that a New York theater wasn’t available at that time to fit the schedule of “Six Lessons” star David Hyde Pierce (also a Reprise! actor), they grabbed the play for the Geffen.

Seligson said she was careful not to actively solicit Reprise! donors for money for “Six Dance Lessons” “unless they asked me.” And she’s not going commercial in a big way. Nonprofit theater is “much more creative, much less about fund-raising,” she said. Plus, she added, she doesn’t want to move to New York.

When Seligson thinks a Reprise! show might attract interest from commercial producers, she invites them to see it.

So far, two Reprise! productions, “Mack & Mabel” and “Hair,” have interested producers enough to obtain the rights and announce plans for commercial runs, but neither production has materialized.

If they ever do, Reprise! will receive a small royalty. But Reprise! isn’t ready to enter the commercial arena as an active producer, Seligson said.

The next Reprise! show, “1776,” will star Orson Bean as Ben Franklin, Roger Rees and Marcia Mitzman Gaven as the Adamses, and Thomas Ian Griffith as Jefferson. It opens Sept. 5.