Latino trio adapts Loesser

A culture clash seemed possible when the brash Latino comedy trio Culture Clash agreed to collaborate with Frank Loesser of “Guys and Dolls” fame.

Actually, the group’s partner was Loesser’s legacy -- not the songwriter himself, who died in 1969. He left behind an unfinished musical called “Senor Discretion Himself,” set in a small Mexican town and based on a short story by Budd Schulberg.

Loesser’s widow, Jo Sullivan Loesser, liked the 1999 “Guys and Dolls” revival directed by Charles Randolph-Wright at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., so much that she asked the director if he would consider taking a crack at “Senor Discretion Himself.” He had worked with Culture Clash on “Anthems” at Arena in 2002 and asked the L.A.-based group if it would like to trim and adapt the script.

“I knew they would know the dignity of the characters and how to combine it with humor,” Wright said, “how to create a local color that doesn’t feel stereotypical.”

Culture Clash member Ric Salinas says the group began with a manuscript more than 300 pages long. It’s now 110. Rewriting will continue as the Washington opening night of April 15 approaches.

Wright is happy with the results. “There was far less of a collision than even I expected,” he says. “You can’t even tell what they wrote and what Frank wrote.”

Until last month, Culture Clash also was planning on performing in the production, but Salinas says the double duty was too hard.

Adapting is harder than writing an original piece, he says. “We wanted to keep the Loesser style but bring it into the future.” Although musicals are “not really our shtick,” he says, “we fell in love with the music,” which is “Mexican style.”

“Senor” isn’t the only project Culture Clash has adapted recently. Last week at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo., the group performed a 60-minute version of “Chavez Ravine” -- which was more than twice as long when Culture Clash introduced it at the Mark Taper Forum last year. Salinas says most of the cutting was from the scenes about a family evicted from the titular ravine rather than the scenes that outlined the political squabble over the ravine in the ‘50s.

“We took out the ‘Wonderful Life’ aspects,” Salinas says. However, one added attraction at Aspen was a minute of archival film footage about the evictions -- material that wouldn’t have worked at the Taper because of the shape of the stage.

-- Don Shirley