A bolt for L.A.

When the movers cart Michael Ritchie’s things west in a year or so, their load will be lightened by the lack of the sort of keepsakes you would expect to find among the possessions of a self-styled “theater rat.” There will be very few posters, playbills or props -- few reminders of productions past -- in the boxes that Ritchie will bring along when he becomes the most powerful figure in Los Angeles theater.

At first it was “negligence,” Ritchie says, that left him without such mementos as his career progressed from summer stock to manning spotlights on Broadway to stage managing and then to producing, that as head of the Williamstown Theatre Festival in the Berkshires. But he eventually realized it had become a pointed choice “to not collect things.”

So there’s only one theater poster in his Manhattan apartment, and it’s not from any show he did, or any starring his wife, actress Kate Burton. It’s from “Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk” and adorns the room of their 15-year-old son.

In Ritchie’s office in the heart of Times Square, the walls display photos of Red Sox great Ted Williams and a vintage poster of the Who. True, there is one small theater poster across from his desk, and it’s even from a play he stage-managed -- but from a horrendous production, he’s quick to point out.

“The worst show I ever did,” he says. “Everything about that show was right going in, the whole concept -- the people doing it -- and this is the only thing I keep up because I look at it every day and go, ‘You can have the best idea in the world, and it could be a disaster.’ You just gotta be ready for that ride.’ It was horrible. People booed during the show. During the show!”

And where is that Tony he took home last year when the Williamstown festival became the first summer company to get the award for outstanding regional theater? Oh, that’s stashed in a drawer, Ritchie says.

“I’m not much for memorabilia,” he sums it up, fully aware of how odd that is in a profession in which you produce fantasy on stage for a couple of hours a night, for a couple of months if you’re lucky, and then all you have are the memories. Ritchie has tried to understand his quirk, but the best he can do is to speculate that maybe “I’m afraid I would start to revel in the past.... It’s sort of self-protection. I could be weak in that way -- I’d become self-satisfied.”

He says that even as he admits that he is quite satisfied, at 46, and with good reason, whether for the career that seems so unlikely, given his nuts-and-bolts background -- literally a nuts-and-bolts background -- or for the family at home with that royal theatrical blood running through it, or for the job he just was handed. Ritchie will preside over Williamstown’s 50th anniversary season next summer, then take over from Gordon Davidson, in January 2005, as artistic director of Los Angeles’ Center Theatre Group, which oversees three venues with 3,200 seats among them: the Mark Taper Forum and the Ahmanson Theatre in the downtown Music Center, and the new Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City.

Days after the Oct. 7 announcement that he had been picked for the post following an “international search” that considered 100 candidates, Ritchie was not able to walk a block in the Broadway theater district without someone stopping to offer congratulations or a quip -- like “You need to work on your tan,” from a casting agent who grabbed him by the shoulders.

The evening before, at a fundraiser for the Westport Country Playhouse, he got a hug from its artistic director, Joanne Woodward, a booster of his for two decades, and unique congrats from her crusty husband, who has resisted California life to remain a Connecticut Yankee. “Traitor!” roared Paul Newman.

Of course, it’s in part because of his roster of friends like these that Ritchie figures to fit easily into the other coast. He will arrive with clout also -- as the head of theaters with an annual budget of $48 million and attendance of 750,000 -- and with a style suited to A-list gatherings: tall, slender and casually chic, with a ready laugh. Even the spiky hair a la Samuel Beckett will work out there, though the film crowd may see it as the Brian Grazer look.

But if he remains the Mike Ritchie that friends here know, he won’t be driving yet another Mercedes up to the valet parking stands along San Vicente. For if Ritchie’s Quirk No. 1 is his disavowal of mementos, his Quirk No. 2 centers on his car. It’s not the type or age -- a 5-year-old Volvo station wagon seems sensible for a family with two kids that spends most of the year amid Manhattan’s bumper-car traffic. It’s where Ritchie parks it, which is on the street.

Most people living off Central Park West who have the means to garage their cars do just that. The alternative is the “alternate side of the street” parking game, which requires you to get up at insane hours to move your car and search, with other crazies, for an open spot.

“It’s one of the joys of living in New York,” says Ritchie, who chooses to play that game.

Is it any surprise that he “can’t imagine” any fancy car in his future?

To understand where this newcomer to the Los Angeles stage is coming from, you have to check out one piece of memorabilia he will bring with him, the exception to his rule.

Beating odds

It sits atop a bookcase in his office: a model of a set depicting tenements and a street scene of 1930s New York -- James Noone’s design for “Dead End,” which was staged during Ritchie’s second season at Williamstown and convinced him that he, the humble ole Worcester boy, might be the real thing as a player in the theater.

Though Ritchie is hardly a product of the Dickensian bleakness depicted by that set, he was a Dead End Kid, in a sense -- born in a brick apartment project in the aging Massachusetts industrial city and reared, in fact, on a dead-end street. And while his ended at an elementary school, not the East River, the odds were against escaping all that far. Ritchie’s father was an electrician for Massachusetts Electric and his only brother wound up working for the utility as well. His three sisters also remained in the area, one working in insurance, another as a teacher and the third a housewife.

Ritchie recalls watching old movies on TV when he was 12 and “having some sort of longing for something different ... I was never going to capture.” He credits pure chance with providing a path out, starting with his failure to make the high school baseball team. Looking for something else to do, he settled on the spring show, and became one of 40 chorus kids singing “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby.”

“I couldn’t sing, dance or act,” says Ritchie, who must have been eager, at least, for after his sophomore year the director invited him to apprentice with a summer company on the New Jersey shore. The Surflight Theatre churned out one new musical a week, though Ritchie bowed out of taking the stage after just one of them.

He recalls telling the director, “Look, don’t send me home, but I don’t want to act anymore,” and the man replying, “You kidding? You’re gold to me. You want to build sets. You want to work in the box office. Everyone in the world wants to be a performer.”

Ritchie learned carpentry, electronics and other skills at the theater, to which he returned each summer through high school and his two years at Assumption College in Worcester, where he studied sociology before dropping out. Not long after, he went to work in a factory that made nuts and bolts. “My job title was material handler because I carried boxes of them,” Ritchie explains, not shying away from the metaphor the job suggests.

“Deep inside we all have a sense of the artist, or artistic aspirations,” he says. “But I come from a nuts-and-bolts background, as a person, and even in the theater.”

The “lucky door” that opened next was a call from a friend whose actress sister (Kate Mulgrew) had gotten TV work in L.A. and was temporarily leaving her New York apartment, “and did I want to move there?”

“I had $36 [and] no real resume,” Ritchie goes on. But he had a sofa to sleep on, and after a few calls, a small paycheck -- for manning a follow spot as part of the lighting crew on a show.

He was earning $70 a week in 1980 when his off-Broadway production had an opening for a stage manager. That paid $100, so he took the promotion that put him “in the middle of everything,” from representing Actors’ Equity to having to figure out how to get a large piece of scenery off the set in 20 seconds.

His second stage managing job was in Ohio, at the Kenyon Festival, on a production of “Candida” starring Woodward. The Oscar-winning actress recalled recently how he looked “like a baby,” and so skinny that she figured he had to be freezing, so she bought him a cashmere sweater. Woodward also thought he had the perfect temperament for a stage manager (“very calm”) and when the show moved to New York’s Circle in the Square Theater in 1981, she insisted he get the position there -- his first Broadway gig.

Thus began a long association with Circle in the Square that won Ritchie his reputation and his wife.

In 1982, George C. Scott was spearheading a revival of Noel Coward’s “Present Laughter,” directing it and playing the lead. As if it wasn’t enough to be stage managing under the formidable Scott, Ritchie was asked to be a reader at auditions. “So here I was, no talent for acting, none at all, and I was playing George’s part in front of him -- and he was ‘Patton’ -- and these poor actors coming in to audition.”

One was a young woman fresh out of Yale Drama School who happened to be the daughter of Richard Burton, “and I remember reading with her and basically falling in love with her, saying, ‘God, I hope they hire this girl.’ And she’s doing the audition and thinking, ‘Where did they get this guy? He’s the worst actor I ever met.’ ”

But they were dating by the time her famous father came to see the show, and it was a sign of Ritchie’s comfort with himself -- however many self-deprecating stories he offers up -- that he was not intimidated by their first meeting. “He was never to me, you know, Richard Burton the movie star. He was Richard Burton my girlfriend’s father ... one of the most down-to-earth guys you could ever meet. He really was a Welsh miner’s son who made his way out of that world to another,” says Ritchie, who was doing the same himself.

The Coward revival ran for nearly six months, and provided the Broadway debuts of not only Kate Burton, but future stars Nathan Lane and Dana Ivey, who remain among the couple’s circle of friends to this day.

Career ties

Ritchie’s career is very much tied to friendship with such talents, and returning favors. Woodward recalls directing a revival of “Golden Boy” in the mid-’90s and needing a substitute stage manager at the last moment -- but not having the budget to pay one -- so she “frantically called Michael [and] he ran the show that night, having never seen it.”

That was about the time Woodward was on the board of the Williamstown Festival, which was looking to change artistic directors. She did not hesitate to suggest a certain New York stage manager who sometimes worked at their theater.

Such positions normally went to directors or accomplished actors -- not the guy who pulled the ropes to help a character fly in “Defying Gravity,” as Ritchie had one fateful night when the teenage daughter of Blythe Danner, a Williamstown regular, served as an emergency fill-in for an actress. (“She’s got it,” was the consensus opinion about the young sub, Gwyneth Paltrow.)

Woodward eventually decided that picking a stage manager to lead the theater was inspired because Ritchie could focus on running the place without fighting “inner yearnings” to be directing productions. He did not even want the title of artistic director, preferring to be listed as the festival’s producer.

Facing the task of putting together his initial season in 1996, Ritchie called his friends first, naturally -- inviting Woodward to direct a play, for instance. But he also called people he didn’t know, including the agent for Arthur Miller. Within days Ritchie was suggesting to the playwright that the 520-seat main stage in the northwest corner of Massachusetts might be a good choice for the American premiere of Miller’s “The Ride Down Mt. Morgan,” which had been produced only in London.

When Miller didn’t dismiss the notion, “I remember walking out of the meeting thinking, ‘Maybe you do have a shot at this,’ ” Ritchie says.

That play became one of 15 Williamstown productions to make it to Broadway or off-Broadway during his tenure, including several others by Miller -- most notably “The Man Who Had All the Luck.” Miller’s first play, it had only four performances in 1944 and had only been staged once again -- in Culver City -- before Ritchie and director Scott Ellis mounted it.

But while such collaborations with Miller quickly became one of the signatures of Ritchie’s work in Williamstown, his revival of “Dead End,” another obscure work, was closest to his heart.

Like most people today, Ritchie had been aware only of the 1937 film of that name, which was about Depression-era tenement life in New York and paired Humphrey Bogart with a cadre of wisecracking young actors who became known as the Dead End Kids. Watching the movie on TV, Ritchie decided, “This must’ve been a play first,” then tracked it down -- “Dead End,” by Sidney Kingsley, had a run on Broadway in 1935 and been performed in the White House (Eleanor Roosevelt liked it) then been all but forgotten. Ritchie sent the work to another friend, actor-turned-director Nicholas Martin, who said, “We’ve got to do this.”

Martin, the artistic director of Boston’s Huntington Theatre, says “Dead End” appealed to their shared passion for large-scale drama -- it requires a cast of nearly 40 -- and that the characters resonated with Ritchie. “I think he identified with the kids in that show, the scrappy American longing of those kids,” the director says.

They cast George C. Scott’s son, Campbell, in the Bogart role (as a hoodlum), Robert Sean Leonard as the good guy (an idealistic architect) and a television actor with minimal stage experience, “Party of Five’s” Scott Wolf, as one of the kids, helping solidify the theater’s reputation as a place for film and TV performers to polish their craft in the summer.

To lend realism to the 1997 production, they filled the orchestra pit with water, making it an East River the kids could jump in. And when the water began leaking out the day before opening, Martin discovered the advantage of having a former stage manager running the theater: Ritchie got “a real swimming pool liner,” he recalled, “and when I came in that morning, at 10 a.m., there he was with this hose, filling the orchestra pit.”

In the years following, Ritchie would premiere works by the likes of John Guare, Paul Rudnick and A.R. Gurney, whose play about doomed tennis great Bill Tilden, “Big Bill,” will go to Lincoln Center this winter. Ritchie also would have the good fortune to have a no-longer novice Paltrow perform Shakespeare (“As You Like It” ) right after she won the Oscar for portraying the Bard’s muse in “Shakespeare in Love.”

Yet his definition of “wildly exciting” theater would remain that first night of “Dead End,” when he stood in the back watching an audience file in with no idea what to expect, then embrace what he put on the stage. Ritchie called it the moment, “I kind of found my handle as a producer,” one worthy, even to him, of a keepsake.

Forming a strategy

A few days after he was named the next head of Los Angeles’ Center Theatre Group, Ritchie laid out his strategy for the coming year: Each month, he’ll spend three weeks in New York, planning Williamstown’s 50th season, and “five days or a week” out west, “meeting staff, meeting board members, meeting donors, seeing shows, getting more of a feel for L.A. and [its] arts.”

Though he hopes to drop in on the scores of sub-100-seat theaters around town, his priority is to haunt the three larger ones he will supervise, “to sit in the theaters first and have some sort of ownership,” he says, “before I try to create something for them.”

He jokes that most of his time in L.A. has been as “an adjunct” to his wife, while she did TV shows or plays, including Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia” at the Taper.

But Ritchie goes back 20 years with Gordon Davidson, whose daughter worked in Williamstown, and he understands how politically edged productions such as “Zoot Suit” and “Angels in America” are part of the “history and mission” of the theaters he will inherit.

While he will have 15 times his summer theater’s budget, replicating his Williamstown trademarks may be difficult. Recruiting those audience-drawing film and TV faces might sound like an easier task in the shadow of Hollywood, but in Williamstown he needed only a five-week commitment from them, and “in an idyllic spot, away from people, not under a big glare.”

Will he be able to talk them into 12-week runs in L.A., among their peers? “I don’t know,” Ritchie says.

He will continue to offer playwrights outlets for new works, including potentially controversial ones, as he did with Rudnick’s “The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told,” which imagined a Garden of Eden populated by Adam and Steve. But in Williamstown, where that show debuted in 1998, the tinkering can go on in relative anonymity, in a small downstairs theater where runs last only a week and a half and critics are not allowed in until the second week, meaning few reviews.

Even in the smallest of the Center Theatre Group’s theaters, the new Kirk Douglas, which opens next fall, “it will be different,” Ritchie acknowledges, with any new work being showcased “on a larger palette [and] review[ed] by major newspapers.”

But he has spoken to friends out there who have reassured him that he doesn’t have to accept any “party line” on L.A. being so dominated by film and TV that there’s little room for serious stage work. One playwright friend gushed about having survived for a year and a half without giving away his soul or “trying to sell a movie script.”

As for the leadership of Center Theatre Group, it’s merely asking that Ritchie take a “global view of all three theaters,” according to board chairman Richard Kagan. That means offering everything from the new plays to classics in productions good enough to export “all over the world.” That’s it. “Our theater should be world theater,” Kagan says.

But they’re not putting such pressure on Ritchie just yet. When Kagan recently was in New York with his wife, actress Julie Hagerty, they met him for brunch and allowed the conversation to focus not on theater but that most popular L.A. topic, real estate. Where to live?

While schools for their son and daughter will be the No. 1 factor, Ritchie says, “I wouldn’t mind living on the subway line.” Fighting for a Manhattan parking spot is one thing, an L.A. commute another.

Ritchie insists it’s too early to talk about specific productions for Los Angeles, given that he hasn’t locked in a single one for next summer’s landmark Williamstown season. But it’s fair to assume that “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is not on his desk for decoration -- as his friend Nick Martin later confirms.

The director also cautions the uninitiated not to go for all Ritchie’s protestations that he is less than the master of his fate.

Martin tells of Ritchie’s visit to Boston to take in a Red Sox game and mull possible collaborations, starting with next summer. Martin said he was busy and preferred a “little show.”

“He was shaking his head and smiling,” Martin relates. “He said, ‘I was kind of hoping Shakespeare ... Of course, the comedies are done to death.’ ”

“I said, ‘No, no, no. Not “A Midsummer’s Night Dream.” ’ And before I knew it, it was on.”

That was for Williamstown. And how did Ritchie break the news that he was heading west after that?

“He said,” Martin recalls, “ ‘How would you like to do ‘Dead End’ in Los Angeles?’ ”

Times staff writer Don Shirley contributed to this report.