Musicals Mushroom at This Co-op

Nine days ago, members of the first L.A. cast of composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim’s first full-length musical, “Saturday Night,” gathered in the Valley Glen living room of the producer, Eileen Barnett, for a potluck dinner and an initial reading of the script.

The five dogs who live in the house licked director Michael Michetti’s face in between scenes and barked loudly whenever a latecomer showed up at the front door. A few cast members weren’t there, for this was not a required rehearsal. Those were scheduled to begin last Friday--three days before show time.

Yes, “Saturday Night” will make its L.A. debut Monday night, at the Pasadena Playhouse, after only four rehearsals of about five hours each.

That’s the amount of rehearsal that Actors’ Equity allows for the producing organization, Musical Theatre Guild, to get its act together. Its act is a staged reading, not a fully mounted production. On Monday, the actors will carry scripts during the dialogue passages but are expected to drop them for the musical numbers. To save rehearsal time, a number that normally would be danced by two actors will be performed by two dancers hired just for that number.

“A show takes as long to get up as you have to rehearse it,” said the show’s musical director, Nick DeGregorio, while stationed at the upright piano in Barnett’s home during a break halfway through the reading.

DeGregorio tries to schedule an additional half-hour alone with each singing actor away from the rehearsals. But time constraints don’t bother him. Guild members “are mind readers,” he said. “You give them a concept, they run with it.”

Most of the guild’s regular actor-members are such veterans that for “Saturday Night”--in which most of the characters are about 20 years old--the guild had to recruit outside its ranks more than usual. Some of the guild’s relatively few members who look the right age were busy on other jobs.

Even so, Michetti told the cast at the reading that “many of you are somewhere between three and 15 years too old for these roles.” Amid general laughter, he added, “If these are a bunch of losers in their 30s and 40s, it’s a different story altogether.” Sondheim himself was only 24 when the musical, about young and unsettled Brooklynites in 1929, was first scheduled to be produced in 1954. That production was canceled after the death of producer Lemuel Ayers, but the show finally received its premiere in London in 1997.

The Musical Theatre Guild occupies one of the most distinctive niches in L.A. theater. Not only is its programming highly unusual, but its co-op-style structure is otherwise unknown among L.A. companies that operate above the 99-seat level.

First, the programming. Most of the guild’s shows are obscure musicals that presumably have been seen by only a minuscule number of people in L.A. (among the titles: “Colette Collage,” “Louisiana Purchase,” “The Rink,” “I Remember Mama,” “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” “How Now, Dow Jones?”). Generally, the guild presents them for only one night, in a staged reading at the Pasadena Playhouse. The company has 305 season subscribers.

Besides “Saturday Night,” the upcoming season includes Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “Allegro” and Cole Porter’s “Jubilee!,” as well as “Lucky Stiff” and “Grand Hotel,” both of which received a single production in L.A. in the past decade.

“There’s a huge inventory of shows that did well at first but never became classics,” said guild board chairman Alan Weston.

The only other group in town that tries anything similar, Reprise!, rarely picks shows as unfamiliar as the guild’s. It has done “1776” and “Hair,” and its current “Anything Goes” is a show that’s often seen at civic light operas. Reprise! also abandoned the staged-reading format soon after it began and runs its shows for two weeks.

In 1999, Reprise! producing artistic director Marcia Seligson saw the guild’s production of Sondheim’s “Passion”--even now, the only professional staging of this Tony-winning musical in the L.A. area--and picked it up for one additional performance at UCLA, as a benefit for both groups. It was the only time a guild show was staged more than once.

This year, however, Reprise! appeared to be trying to steal some of the “Saturday Night” fever when the bigger group announced, just three weeks ago, that it will host a benefit concert reading of Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along” at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse on Monday, the same night that “Saturday Night” will play Pasadena.

Eileen Barnett, co-producer of “Saturday Night,” said the conflict was “a little distressing” and that a guild board member “sent out a panicky e-mail.” However, “I can’t imagine they were trying to compete,” she said. “I’m assuming they just didn’t think about us.” She expressed confidence that true Sondheimaniacs will choose “Saturday Night” because of its relative unfamiliarity (“Merrily” was produced in L.A. two years ago, by the West Coast Ensemble).

For her part, Seligson said she hadn’t known about the “Saturday Night” production, but “even if I had known, it wouldn’t have stopped us. I don’t think our Westside audience is their Pasadena audience.” As for Sondheim fans who are tearing out their hair, “they’ll just have to choose.”

Actually, there is another alternative.

Musical Theatre Guild is about to expand ever so slightly. Following the Pasadena performance Monday, the “Saturday Night” team will regroup Oct. 20 for two Sunday performances at Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza’s 390-seat Scherr Forum. “Grand Hotel” will do likewise, playing in Pasadena on Feb. 3 and twice in Thousand Oaks on March 9.

The Thousand Oaks venue is contributing its facilities and technical assistance, and the two groups will divide the proceeds, said Tom Mitze, director of the Thousand Oaks theaters. He hopes to develop in his audience a taste for less familiar musicals, he said.

In another sign of cautious expansion, the guild’s “Allegro” in November will be performed at the Alex Theatre in Glendale, twice as big as the Pasadena Playhouse, because the playhouse’s stage will be altered for another production in a way that wouldn’t meet the guild’s needs.

Like most decisions at the guild, the venue arrangements are handled by the actor-members. The 60 members, who each pay $15 in monthly dues, control every creative aspect and many of the managerial tasks. There is no artistic director or producer.

True, the group has a board of directors--more than half of whom are not actor-members. The board raises money, serves as the legal overseer for nonprofit purposes and pitches in on projects. But the shows are picked by an elected executive committee of five members, two of whom organize the agenda for three months before those responsibilities are rotated to one or two others.

New members are picked by existing members, with attempts made to provide a balance of men and women, different ages, leading actors and character actors, and--most recently, with the recruitment of four new African American members--races.

Of course, the lower costs and reduced box office pressures of only partially staged one-nighters may explain why the group can operate without ongoing central leadership--and why it’s able to indulge in esoteric programming.

The communal model wasn’t always in force. The group was founded seven years ago by Jeff Rizzo and Eric Andrist, who invited friends to do living-room readings of shows. For the first few years, Rizzo and Andrist did much of the work and assumed the position of producers.

In 1999, however, the two left after discontent spread about their leadership style. In the wake of their exit, the group reorganized with strictly egalitarian guidelines. To this day, said Teri Ralston, one of the founding members, “we fear so much having one person become too powerful.”

Expansion plans may eventually force a rethinking of that position. Ralston, co-chairwoman of the group’s expansion committee, said that ideally the company will not only thrive at Thousand Oaks and export all of its productions there, but also come up with one other venue, in a different area such as Long Beach or Palos Verdes, for similar treatment.

Board Chairman Weston, who lives in Santa Monica, said he’d like to develop a Westside audience for the guild--in the heart of Reprise! territory.

The company has already developed a show that tours schools under the auspices of the Music Center. Even never-produced musicals are not out of the question--a recent guild reading focused on an unproduced Billy Barnes musical.

Guild members occasionally discuss the pros and cons of moving a show to a full production in a 99-seat theater. But Weston said he doubts that the Equity actors, who receive a total of $260 each for the rehearsals and three performances, would want to step backward in compensation (actors in 99-seat shows seldom receive anything for rehearsals and no more than $15 per performance). He also believes that most of the guild’s shows were written for larger venues.

Weston recalled that only 40 people were in the audience for the company’s first production. “I thought we’d go broke before we got past the first show,” he said. Now the audience is usually in the range of 400 to 500. “People think, ‘How can this be good if they’re carrying scripts?’ But after five minutes, you don’t notice the scripts.”

Still, everyone in the guild appears to recognize that growth must be carefully monitored. “The whole idea is not to do what everybody else is doing,” Weston said. “Granted, our shows aren’t going to appeal to everyone, but we don’t have to fill a big theater for two or three weeks.”

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“SATURDAY NIGHT,” Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena. Date: Monday, 7:30 p.m. Price: $35. Phone: (818) 848-6844. Also: Oct. 20, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m., Scherr Forum, Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza, 2100 Thousand Oaks Blvd.

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Don Shirley is a Times staff writer.