On hand as muse emeritus

“When is this show going to start?” Craig Noel wonders out loud. It’s 8:15 on opening night of “Take Me Out” at the Old Globe Theatre. Curtain time was 8 p.m. Noel’s in a prime aisle seat.

“I’d better speak to the stage manager,” he says.

Years ago, Noel might have meant that literally. He ran the theater for nearly 35 years. Now, at age 89, he utters the words as a little joke. Though he still has an office at the Old Globe and the title of founding director, he has no illusions that he’s in charge.

Freedom from the responsibilities of leadership also means that the grand old man of San Diego theater is free to say just about anything. After decades of tending San Diego’s theatrical soil, he now sees theaters blooming in profusion -- and he can play the role of feisty elder statesman as long as he’s able to keep going to the theater.

Outside the Old Globe during the “Take Me Out” intermission, Noel smokes one of what he says is “no more than five cigarettes a day” -- a habit he started after the city’s original Old Globe was destroyed by fire in 1978.

A bell chimes, signaling the audience to return to its seats. But Noel doesn’t move. “They won’t start for 10 minutes,” he says. “I’m on to them.”

A theatergoer suggests that the show wouldn’t start without him under any circumstances. But he scoffs. “I have no influence at this theater. I complain, and they don’t do one thing about it.”

Still, Noel is hardly ignored. One of the theater’s leading contributors pays homage and comments on Noel’s upcoming 90th birthday. “Start counting backward,” she advises.

An Old Globe employee approaches Noel with a hug and mutters, “there is a God.” It seems that a long-awaited raise has come through for the employee. Noel later says he had been planning to intervene if the raise hadn’t been granted.

The play resumes -- about 10 minutes after the first chime, as Noel predicted. Richard Greenberg’s script, set largely inside the locker room of a major league baseball team, won a Tony Award but is probably best known for its shower scenes, featuring full-frontal male nudity.

The next day, Noel acknowledges that because of his failing eyesight, he didn’t realize that the play’s shower scenes used real water. His vision diminishes each day, he says. Macular degeneration requires him to wear amber-shaded glasses wherever he goes -- including inside the theater. His hearing aids don’t always do the job.

That he couldn’t quite see or hear everything doesn’t prevent him from delivering his opinion.

“When I read the script,” he says, “I thought it said something.” But the production “accented the coarseness and vulgarity more than I had envisioned. I didn’t visualize any of this.”

Perhaps more surprising is his opinion of last summer’s Shakespeare festival at the Old Globe. He was among those most responsible for the theater’s revival, after 20 years, of Shakespearean repertory -- three concurrent productions using the same set of actors. But he “was very unhappy” with two of the three, he says. “If we can’t do it better, I don’t want to do it anymore.”

Noel remembers when volunteers used to sew the costumes for the Old Globe’s Shakespeare festival. Now, he says, “when you see the number of [paid workers] working in our shop during Shakespeare, you think, ‘How can we afford it? We’ll have to raise our ticket prices.’ ”

But he hates that idea even as he speaks it. “I’ve always fought any increase in prices. I don’t even want to know how much we charge. When someone says $50, I’m surprised. I was worried when it went from $2.50 to $5.”

Noel is hardly pining for a theatrical golden age that died decades ago. In many ways, he says, the theater is healthier now.

“More plays are written by playwrights who have something to say,” he offers. In his early years in San Diego, he produced many a light comedy of a type that has since been superseded by TV sitcoms. This, he says, is “all to the good.”

A couple of longtime Old Globe subscribers in their 60s recently canceled their subscriptions, telling him “we want just to be entertained. We don’t want messages.” He thought -- but he didn’t say it so bluntly -- “Just stay home.”

Not that Noel believes explicit political messages in theater will change anything. “Many times we’re lecturing to the choir,” he says. At his 1962 production of “A Raisin in the Sun,” which relates a black family’s struggle against discrimination, “people cried and loved the show.” But he suspects that some of the same people helped pass a statewide initiative two years later that permitted housing discrimination (it was later overturned in court). “That’s when I realized that the theater can’t reach enough people.”

Nevertheless, he says, theater should be a place for serious themes. He was elated by the construction of the Cassius Carter Centre Stage as the Old Globe’s second and much smaller stage in 1968. “It was my new toy, and I could do plays that didn’t have to be so popular.”

When Noel took over the Old Globe after World War II, there were only a few outposts of theatrical substance outside New York. He credits the arts-friendly Kennedy administration and the subsequent growth of the National Endowment for the Arts for the theatrical proliferation of the last half-century.

The tables have turned in a palpable sense. “Rather than our being dependent on Broadway, Broadway is dependent on us,” Noel says. The Old Globe, for example, just sent “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” to Broadway, on the heels of a range of other shows that made the same trip, starting with Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s “Into the Woods” in 1987.

Despite the recognition such transfers bring to his theater, Noel still maintains an independent eye about the shows’ merits. “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” in its Globe incarnation last fall, for example, was “very clever, but too long. The problem is there’s no one you really can identify with.” But whatever his thoughts on individual projects, “I believe in these exchanges and all of the vitality it produces.”

At the same time, he makes it clear that a theater’s first responsibility is to its local community. Until Jack O’Brien arrived in 1981 to take over as artistic director, Noel was doing so much of the directing that he went to New York only once a year. He traveled more often after O’Brien’s arrival, but throughout his career, he says, “my purpose was to bring theater to San Diego, to change the climate from ‘no theater’ to a theater town.”

O’Brien’s purpose, he adds, “was to use this as a steppingstone for other things.” O’Brien succeeded so well that he’s now directing a movie (“Hairspray”) as well as a slew of Broadway stage productions. Although O’Brien is still the Old Globe artistic director, he recently took a salary cut to help the theater help pay for a new position: resident artistic director, to be held by Jerry Patch.

When Noel says he always wanted to make San Diego a theater town, he’s speaking not only of the Old Globe. “I’ve done everything I can to encourage other theaters. Now there’s a little theater on every other corner.”

Two of the city’s other prominent artistic directors vouch for Noel’s collegial spirit.

“We wouldn’t have a theater scene in San Diego without him,” says La Jolla Playhouse’s Des McAnuff. During La Jolla’s reemergence in the ‘80s, McAnuff says, “he was supportive right from the beginning, even when there were probably some forces who thought we would be competitive. He always goes out of his way to say a kind word.”

San Diego Repertory Theatre’s Sam Woodhouse says Noel was instrumental in assisting his company with rehearsal space, props and costumes and even the use of an Old Globe stage for a benefit. But he adds that along with “his generosity and his passion for quality, he has a very sharp and critical eye. He quickly speaks his mind about an aesthetic decision he thought was wrong. In a helpful way.”

Several weeks later, Noel attends an opening at one of San Diego’s recently sprouted small theaters. It’s the Cygnet, near San Diego State University, on the east side of town.

The Cygnet doesn’t look like much from the street. It’s a storefront theater, lodged between College Tan and College Pregnancy Services in a minimall. Unlike most of the storefront theaters in L.A., however, the Cygnet has a surprisingly large seating capacity of 144.

On his way through the tiny lobby, Noel and the young house manager, Jason Connors, exchange greetings. Connors wrote a play that Noel directed in 2002 as part of a program for teenage playwrights.

After taking a seat in the fifth row, Noel notes that the rake of the seating area isn’t sloped enough to provide ideal sightlines -- it cuts off the view below the knees. He should know -- he’s been to the theater about 10 times since it opened in 2003.

Noel knows the Cygnet’s artistic director, Sean Murray -- who also codirected this evening’s production of “Pageant,” in which men in drag play contestants in a beauty pageant. Before the show starts, Noel recalls that Murray played Ariel in one of the Old Globe’s “Tempest” productions and was “one of the best.”

After the performance, as the rest of the audience is exiting, Murray comes over to Noel’s seat to pay his respects. They briefly discuss which of the fictional contestants should have won the pageant. But as soon as Murray has moved on, Noel delivers his verdict on the show:

“So boring!”

Staying true to his roots

Noel grew up in a home near the northeastern corner of San Diego’s Balboa Park -- not far from the eventual site of the Old Globe.

Although he is now considered an aesthetic conservative, his political roots were in the other corner. His father was active in his union, and his mother was a member of the radical labor group known as the Wobblies.

Soon after Noel’s 1934 graduation from San Diego High School, he joined a fledgling Shakespeare company. It consisted primarily of actors who had been stranded in San Diego when a production folded at the city’s Savoy Theatre, where Noel had ushered and played bellboys.

The group took condensed Shakespearean plays to Hollywood, performing at the Vine Street Theatre (now the Ricardo Montalban). Noel narrated “Romeo and Juliet” -- a big role since much of the play had been cut. “We were paid a pittance,” Noel says, “and we wound up wearing our clothes out of the hotel, leaving the bags, because we couldn’t pay the bill.”

In 1939, Noel began directing for San Diego Community Theatre, which was using San Diego’s first Old Globe, built in 1935. Noel became the group’s primary director -- until the military took over the park during World War II.

Fortunately, Noel’s farewell production won him a job as an apprentice film director at 20th Century Fox. There, his major claim to fame was that he directed Marilyn Monroe in a screen test.

His midcentury Hollywood experience might come in handy this summer at the Old Globe: He’ll codirect, with John Rando, “Moonlight and Magnolias,” a play about the turmoil behind the making of “Gone With the Wind.”

Drafted in 1944, Noel wound up directing shows at the mammoth Ernie Pyle Theater in Tokyo. That was, more or less, his final fling at a career outside San Diego. Called back home in 1947 to take over the rejuvenating Old Globe, he has since worked outside San Diego only once -- a directing job in a “freezing cold” Milwaukee that was, he recalls, “a terrible experience in every way.”

Not that life at the Old Globe was always delightful. In 1948, Noel started a junior theater wing for children and youth -- but several years later, while he was on vacation, the board voted to close the junior theater without consulting him.

“I was livid,” he says. Soon thereafter, then-board president Lowell Davies asked Noel to wear a white dinner jacket to a social event and had his tailor measure Noel for a custom fit. Still smarting over the closing of the junior theater, Noel complied with the plan -- but while wearing the jacket at the party, he spilled shrimp cocktail on it.

“There was no way to clean it, and I didn’t regret it one bit,” he says with a trace of a cackle in his voice. “It served you right, Lowell! I threw his dinner jacket away.”

Theater life comes full circle

On yet another night on the town, Noel attends “Our Town,” produced by the San Diego Junior Theatre at Casa del Prado, a few blocks from the Old Globe.

Despite the Old Globe board’s rejection of the Junior Theatre, the youth-oriented institution survived. Tonight, a group of teenagers is performing Thornton Wilder’s evocation of life and death in Grover’s Corners, N.H.

Noel takes a seat in the front row. A former Old Globe stage manager, now a mother of Junior Theatre participants, approaches Noel with an embrace and reminiscences. Noting that Noel portrayed the pivotal character of the stage manager in the Old Globe’s “Our Town” in 1975 -- his final role as an actor -- she tells him, “if someone breaks a leg, you can go up there.”

Noel points out that this production has divided the stage manager’s role among three actors. “I wish I had that. I didn’t realize the stage manager has one-third of the lines. It’s a backbreaker. I had stage fright at every performance.”

In pre-curtain remarks to the audience, the Junior Theatre’s executive director, Will Neblett, acknowledges Noel: “Fifty-seven years ago, Craig thought it was a good idea to have a junior theater, and we’re indebted to him for that.”

At intermission, a few youngsters cautiously approach the octogenarian. “Thank you. This theater is one of the greatest things in my life,” says a boy.

“You were founder of this?” asks another. “That’s a really good accomplishment.”

“I didn’t realize it was that long ago,” Noel observes quietly. “I was just a child at the time.”