Ritchie is preparing to get acquainted

“If this production fails on a major, major scale, then, as I said to the staff, you might as well start looking for someone else,” said Michael Ritchie, “because this is everything in one package of what I love about the theater.”

The new artistic director of Center Theatre Group was speaking of “Dead End,” a 1935 drama that will launch his tenure at the top of Los Angeles’ flagship theater company when it opens the 2005-06 Ahmanson Theatre season on Sept. 7.

“Dead End” will not only serve as Ritchie’s signature show, introducing his tastes to Los Angeles audiences, but it also will mark the beginning of a new partnership between CTG and the University of Southern California theater school.

Ritchie, who began his new job on Jan. 1, discussed plans for the 2005-06 seasons at the Ahmanson Theatre and Mark Taper Forum during a meeting with Times reporters and editors.

He’ll bring a David Mamet play to the Mark Taper Forum in his first production at the Ahmanson’s smaller sibling. It will be the Taper’s first Mamet play.

The new Taper season marks the first time that anyone other than founding artistic director Gordon Davidson chose the Taper shows. Davidson also selected Ahmanson programming since the 1989-90 season.

Ritchie hopes to unite the wings of Center Theatre Group more closely under the CTG label in the public mind. “I was told there are Taper plays, Taper audiences, Ahmanson audiences,” he said. “I was adamant that we should start making CTG audiences, CTG productions. The less we define the venues, the better off we’ll be.”

Ritchie’s first production will no doubt be one of his biggest. Sidney Kingsley’s “Dead End” will feature a cast of 44 and will fill the Ahmanson orchestra pit with water to simulate the East River -- the local swimming hole for the drama’s Dead End Kids.

Nicholas Martin will restage his 1997 revival for the Williamstown Theatre Festival in northwest Massachusetts. Ritchie was the producer there from 1996 until last year, following a career as a Broadway stage manager. Although Ritchie is now a Los Angeles homeowner, he’s also keeping his New York home until his son Morgan graduates from high school in 2006.

“ ‘Dead End’ ranks No. 1 in personal pride and experience” of the 200-plus productions he has supervised, Ritchie said. “It was the first moment I really felt my powers as a producer, in that sense of the power to find something and shepherd it to the stage and see it succeed.”

Ritchie said he didn’t know what the show’s budget would be, but the cost will surely dwarf the budget for the same show at Williamstown, and he will have to raise an extra $1 million for it. When he first started raising money at Williamstown, he said, he hated it: “It was horrible. I’m an Irish Catholic kid from Worcester. The idea of asking anybody for anything -- I couldn’t ask for directions.” But now, he added, he enjoys that side of his job. “As much as I love picking up the newspaper and reading a great review, if I open an envelope and there’s a great big check in it, I get a buzz.”

The “Dead End” cast will include 25 actors on Actors’ Equity contracts, plus 14 USC students and five children who aren’t Equity members. Because the union normally requires all actors at the Ahmanson to work on Equity contracts, participation of the nonunion actors is possible through a one-time-only agreement.

The use of the USC students will mark the first public sign of the new partnership between CTG and USC. Ritchie said the collaboration eventually would include “internships in virtually every phase of theater” -- administrative as well as creative. And if Equity approves a designation of the Taper and the Kirk Douglas as “academic theaters,” USC students would be allowed to fill some roles -- if their ages are appropriate for the characters -- in Taper and Douglas productions.

Madeline Puzo, dean of the USC School of Theatre and a former employee of CTG, called the partnership “an exciting opportunity” and said that the idea was generated within the first four minutes of her first conversation with Ritchie.

The Ahmanson season will continue with the U.S. premiere of a Canadian-originated musical, “The Drowsy Chaperone,” on Nov. 18. The run is expected to be a pre-Broadway engagement. In Bob Martin and Don McKellar’s script, a supposedly classic ‘20s musical is brought back to life. The music is by Greg Morrison, the lyrics by Lisa Lambert.

Ritchie, who exuded relaxed confidence and spoke with traces of his Massachusetts accent, joked about beginning his Ahmanson tenure with a show titled “Dead End,” followed by one with “Drowsy” in the title. “Start off your life with ‘Dead End,’ ” he said, imagining a possible ad campaign. “Here I am, guys, there’s nowhere to go but up.”

A Broadway-bound production of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” is slated to open at the Ahmanson Jan. 22. Its New York producer, Emanuel Azenberg, said in response to reports that Diana Rigg might play Lady Bracknell: “Any announcement that it’s going to happen is premature” because the deal is “nowhere near concluded.”

The creators of the Ahmanson production scheduled to open on April 26, 2006, are a motley trio: avant-garde director Robert Wilson, singer and songwriter Tom Waits and the late Beat writer William S. Burroughs. They collaborated on “The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets,” a production based on classic German folklore that Ritchie saw during a San Francisco engagement.

The final production has yet to be announced, but Ritchie said he hopes it will be “Curtains,” a long-gestating backstage musical mystery from John Kander and the late Fred Ebb, plus writer Rupert Holmes. The decision hinges on the results of a June workshop in New York.

Ritchie noted that his first Ahmanson season, unlike most, contains no imports from Broadway. “We’re trying to change the path a little bit more, to start here, go there,” he said, adding that nothing from Broadway was available this year. But if “Spamalot” were ready to move west, he would “drop it into the season in a heartbeat,” he said, standing to demonstrate a scene from the Monty Python musical.

The Ahmanson will host a two-week return of Matthew Bourne’s “Swan Lake” and two weeks of “Dame Edna: Back With a Vengeance!” in March and April, 2006.

The Taper season will open Oct. 9 with Mamet’s “Romance,” a courtroom farce currently playing off-Broadway. Although the Taper has never presented a Mamet play, his “Oleanna” was scheduled for a 1993 slot -- until Davidson canceled the production over Mamet’s insistence on casting a particular actor. So there is a small irony in one of the reasons why Ritchie scheduled “Romance” next fall -- Davidson saw it at a New York preview and recommended it to Ritchie.

Ritchie read the play and, on the day of its New York opening -- before the reviews came out -- asked Mamet for a Taper run. “I didn’t want to be on the bandwagon,” he said. “I wanted to be driving the bandwagon.”

Playwright Robert Schenkkan, whose Pulitzer-winning “The Kentucky Cycle” was a prestigious attraction at the Taper in 1992, will return Dec. 11 with “Lewis and Clark Reach the Euphrates,” in which the explorers find themselves entangled in more recent events in American history.

The only star actor announced in either CTG season is Annette Bening, who will appear in Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” at the Taper, opening Feb. 12. Ritchie acknowledged that his ability to attract stars to Williamstown may have been a factor in his CTG hiring, but he said that he rarely announces stars when he announces shows.

Joshua Sobol’s “iWitness,” opening at the Taper April 9, 2006, is a potentially controversial choice. It reportedly drew criticism in its Israeli premiere for telling the story of a German conscientious objector during World War II in the context of Israeli “refuseniks” who refuse to serve in occupied Palestinian territories.

Alfred Uhry’s “Without Walls,” a drama about a high school teacher in 1977, played in a short workshop at Williamstown in 2002. It’s slated to open June 11, 2006, at the Taper.

Culture Clash, the L.A.-based comedy trio who presented “Chavez Ravine” at the Taper in 2003, will return Aug. 6 with “Water and Power,” the story of a DWP worker’s twin sons, named Water and Power. Although none of Ritchie’s selections came out of CTG plays in development, “Water and Power” was commissioned by the Taper and will go through CTG development channels during the next year.

Ritchie said he was hiring a new associate producer whom he knew at Williamstown, Kelley Kirkpatrick, and was changing a few titles but otherwise had initiated no personnel changes.

He has not picked a single title yet for the Douglas Theatre season. “We’re reserving time to review what’s happened there this year,” he said. Eventually, he added, he would like to stagger the season openings so they’re not all in the fall.