Charles Smith, 77; Staged Works by Ray Bradbury

Charles Rome Smith, theatrical director, producer, writer and actor who co-founded Ray Bradbury’s Pandemonium Theatre Company and had a lengthy association with “The Threepenny Opera,” has died. He was 77.

Smith died Aug. 16 in Sunland of lung cancer.

With Bradbury, Smith formed and operated the theater company for more than four decades, producing plays and theatrical versions of Bradbury’s stories. Smith directed and often co-produced the Bradbury works, beginning with “The World of Ray Bradbury” at the Coronet Theater in 1964.

Among others Smith staged were “The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit,” a musical, at the Pasadena Playhouse; and “Falling Upward!,” “Bradbury X 2,” “Drunk and in Charge of a Bicycle” and “The October Country,” at Theatre West. Smith also directed “Fahrenheit 451” at the Falcon Theater and “Bradbury: Past, Present and Future,” “The Time of Going Away” and “Let’s All Kill Constance” at the Court Theatre.

Although he preferred production tasks, Smith was equally at home on stage. Born in Springfield, Ill., and educated at the University of Denver, he said he was “a kid fresh out of the Army” when he was cast for a New York production of “The Threepenny Opera” in 1954.

At 6 foot 3 and 135 pounds, he seemed a natural for the role of the decadent warden in the Greenwich Village Theatre de Lys production that ran for seven years and helped establish the commercial clout of off-Broadway. Smith soon stepped behind the curtain as stage manager, but later spent a year in the role of the Street Singer who opens the show. Written by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill and introduced in Germany in the late 1920s, the show looks, Smith once told The Times, “as if it’s put together by a bunch of beggars.” A sharply worded satire of corruption and capitalism featuring criminals and prostitutes as protagonists, the musical was based on the 18th century “The Beggar’s Opera” by John Gay. Despite its bohemian nature, staid New Yorkers flocked to the 1950s off-Broadway production.

“You’d see people pulling up in Rolls-Royces, wearing minks,” Smith told The Times in 2001. “Bourgeois New Yorkers, the fat and the well-fed, were fascinated by the whores, the beggars and the criminals” in the musical.

Smith followed the play west for its limited run in San Francisco and then in Los Angeles. Long after he permanently moved to Los Angeles in the early 1960s, he directed a revival of “The Threepenny Opera,” which opened at Theatre West in 2001.

“Selling each other out is what the play is about,” Smith said in explaining the musical’s continuing relevance. “Money controls everything. It’s about the expediency of survival -- and people are still fascinated by that. Look at ‘Survivor.’ ”

A longtime member of Theatre West, where he moderated its apprentice actors’ workshop, Smith also wrote and directed the theater’s “Tallulah and Tennessee.” His final project was a Bradbury adaptation, “Next in Line,” which he wrote with novelist and screenwriter S.L. Stebel.

Smith is survived by a daughter, Bailey Smith.

A memorial service is planned for 2 p.m. Sept. 26 at Theatre West, 3333 Cahuenga Blvd., Los Angeles.