He’s taking the plunge

HEY, where’s the fire?

The Sunday morning church bells at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels had just chimed 8 when two firetrucks rounded the corner from Temple Street to Grand Avenue and pulled up alongside the Music Center’s Ahmanson Theatre. Luckily, surrounding streets were blocked off for a 5-K run, part of the L.A. Tofu Festival.

But these firefighters were not here to extinguish a blaze -- or to celebrate soy products. They were about to pump more than 11,000 gallons of water into the Ahmanson’s orchestra pit to simulate New York City’s grimy East River for the theater’s season-opening show, “Dead End.”

The “river” needed to be deep enough, sterile enough and safe enough to accommodate the young actors who, as the play’s rowdy street urchins, the Dead End Kids, would be diving, cannonballing and shoving each other into the water.

The drama by Sidney Kingsley, first presented on Broadway in 1935, tells the story of Hugh “Baby Face” Martin, a former Dead End Kid who turns to a life of crime to escape the slums of Manhattan. Hiding his identity with plastic surgery, he returns home, only to find bitter rejection and betrayal on a dead-end street.

Perhaps better known to today’s audiences than the play is the 1937 movie starring Humphrey Bogart as Martin, as well as the same New York actors who played the “kids” onstage. The young performers became a Hollywood franchise, starring in their own movies, first as the Dead End Kids, later renamed the Bowery Boys.

For the original Broadway production, says James Noone, set designer for this production, actors dived into a net, then resurfaced onstage slathered with baby oil to simulate wet skin. But in 2005, Noone says, audiences want a real splash.

Within minutes, a hose would be hooked up to a fire hydrant around the corner on Hope Street, snaked through the theater’s cavernous loading dock, across the stage and down into the bottom of the pit, already waterproofed with a black pond liner that resembles an outsized Hefty bag.

Alice Holden, technical director for Center Theatre Group, shrugs as she describes the pool as “just a bag of water.” Still, the impending flood represents more than 50 tons of liquid. And those 50 tons would rest not on the actual ground of the building, but on a slab of concrete above the garage, conjuring visions of angry theater patrons in soggy Toyotas.

The “bag of water” is not the only thing that’s big about “Dead End,” opening Wednesday. Apparently re-creating the Great Depression takes, as the Dead End Kids might say, a lotta dough.

The play features a cast of 42, including Jeremy Sisto (“Six Feet Under”) as Baby Face, Joyce Van Patten as his embittered mother, a few child actors and 14 USC students who are permitted to participate for less than standard union wages through a onetime agreement with Actors’ Equity Assn.

Even with cheap labor from USC, the “Dead End” production budget is $3.1 million -- half again as high as the Ahmanson’s typical $2 million for a play. But for CTG artistic director Michael Ritchie, more than money is at stake. “Dead End” marks the first production under his leadership following the retirement of Gordon Davidson, who led the group for 38 years -- and it is Ritchie’s first chance to make his mark in Los Angeles.

Today, Holden appears much less worried than head carpenter Bill Anderson, who describes “Dead End” as “the hardest show I’ve ever had.” But she was right there beside him in the narrow space between the original wall of the pit and the one they’d built for the pool, tapping on the pool’s exterior or pressing an ear against it like a couple of worried E.R. physicians monitoring an erratic ticker.

“I’d like to stop at 3 feet and let it set a little, see how it looks along the seams,” Anderson says.

Things are looking OK at 3 feet. But at 5 feet, Anderson orders firefighters to shut off the flow because of visible bulge. “We’re getting some pretty good lean here,” he frets from below. “How much more have we got, Scotty?” Crew member Scott Allison, who’s been measuring all along with a pool stick, informs him that there are 300 to 400 more gallons to go.

That’s enough for Anderson to be concerned; beam him up, Scotty. He wants to add extra bracing before any more water goes in. The firefighters are sent on their way, and the crew agrees that they’ll fill the rest later with a garden hose.

In fact, the original plan was to fill the pool with an ordinary hose. It wasn’t until two days before that the crew decided to enlist the aid of the fire department. On the previous Friday, Noone -- who has served as set designer on two other “Dead End” productions -- pointed out that last time around, the fire department had filled the pit much more quickly than the two days it might take with a standard hose.

Despite the short notice, LAFD Station 3 was happy to oblige. But why, Noone was asked in a later interview, did he not speak up sooner?

“No one ever asked me,” Noone replied.

A LIVELY DEAD END

“THERE’S 42 people, there’s water, there’s gunfights, there’s kids, there’s a dog,” observes Sisto -- whose puppy, Winston, snagged the only canine role (Van Patten insists that her dog turned it down). During a rehearsal-break conversation, he is still sporting the beard required for his “Six Feet Under” character, the bipolar Billy Chenowith, but will shave it off before opening night. “In a way, it does take the pressure off the acting, because there’s so much going on.”

Most of the cast members are too young to have a connection to the “Dead End” era, but veteran actress Van Patten, 71, recalls reading the play as a theater-obsessed child. She was not a Dead End Kid, but certainly a stage kid: She made her Broadway debut at age 5 in “Love’s Old Sweet Song.”

“Sidney Kingsley -- he’s like one of the not-done-anymore playwrights; there’s a whole bunch of them,” Van Patten says. “They keep reviving the same American authors, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill.”

The adult actors, at least, are aware the stakes are high. Tom Everett Scott, whose credits include a role as Guy Patterson in Tom Hanks’ directorial debut film “That Thing You Do!,” plays Gimpty, an unemployed architect whose leg is twisted by rickets. He says he solves the problem by humming to himself whenever anyone brings it up.

The sets are big: The apartment houses lining the Manhattan street set stand between 46 and 48 feet tall. They’re so tall that the lights couldn’t be hung with conventional Genie lifts that reach 40 feet. Instead, a track had to be hung from the ceiling grid, 58 feet up. “We fly a man up to the track,” Noone says, “and there’s a little seat and he can push himself along the track and focus the lights.”

Together, the tall set and the big bag of water cost $397,000 -- about double the average for a typical play set at the Ahmanson. Sets for musicals tend to cost more because they often call for mechanical elements.

Ritchie, formerly producer of the Williamstown (Mass.) Theatre Festival, oversaw director Nicholas Martin’s 1997 revival of the drama for Williamstown. Martin, who is artistic director of the Huntington Theatre Company in Massachusetts, also directed the play there in 2000. Set designer Noone was involved in both productions.

“This is everything I love about theater, from soup to nuts,” Ritchie says over lunch. “ It’s so huge; it’s operatic on every level.” With 42 actors, Ritchie adds, the show is probably the largest-cast show of any play currently onstage in America -- and larger than most musicals.

Ritchie adds that plays like “Dead End” are “being lost to history” because they cost so much to produce; it was briefly seen off-Broadway in 1961 and 1978, but has been neglected since.

“I really thought I was bringing something new to the table, both artistically and [as a producer],” Ritchie says of his decision to revive the play at Williamstown. As is the case with the Ahmanson production, Williamstown Theatre could employ student acting talent without violating Equity protocol because it was a training institution. “I knew that we were one of few theaters who could do it, so we should do it -- that should be part of our mission.”

At the end of the meal, Ritchie’s fortune cookie says something about taking chances; he decides to keep it in his wallet.

In late July, Ritchie held court at the official pre-production “meet and greet” -- a Davidson tradition in which the entire cast and crew, as well as CTG staff, go around the room and introduce themselves before the first script reading. Because of the range of ages of the cast, the crowd in Rehearsal Room A -- now officially renamed the Gordon Davidson Rehearsal Room -- resembles an unruly family reunion; and one of the family members present was Davidson, who when his turn came, announced, with appropriate theatricality: “I’m Gordon Davidson, and I used to work here.”

According to CTG officials, Ritchie has raised $1.75 million for “Dead End,” well above the extra $1 million the show will cost -- but for a nonprofit theater, a dollar is always a dollar that could be spent somewhere else. The cost of “Dead End” is just about the same amount as CTG’s $3-million operating deficit, a constant worry for the company.

They’re watching box office carefully. Jim Royce, CTG’s director of marketing and communications, said advance ticket sales have been brisker than for most plays at the Ahmanson. Two weeks before opening night, “Dead End” had sold $152,000 in tickets, compared to $101,000 for Peter Hall’s staging of “As You Like It,” which opened in early February, and $95,000 for “The Royal Family,” onstage in spring 2004. Royce said advance sales for musicals are much higher, generally taking in about $2 million in the same time period.

Still, those figures weren’t in at the time of the cast gathering. And Ritchie appeared to be only half-joking as he began his remarks: “I would like to say that, Nicky Martin, my entire career is in your hands.

“This is obviously a major burden on an organization even as large as CTG,” Ritchie added. “But this one deserves to be on our stage.”

LIKE HERDING CATS

MARTIN -- “Nicky” to just about everyone -- has the air of someone who isn’t directing a $3.1-million show. In fact, with his workday ensemble topped with a crisp, oversized shirt that billows like a sail, the director usually looks more as though he might be headed toward a lounge chair overlooking the Mediterranean rather than a grueling rehearsal.

The director rolls his eyes as he recalls the painful process of watching some 140 USC students audition for roles such as “Tenement Girl” or “2nd Ave. Boy” back in late April. That’s 140 kids. In six hours. In a room with broken air conditioning. Those numbers could be slightly off, but the terror was real.

Still, once the roles were cast, Martin embraced the “bonding” process that he goes through with each set of Dead End Kids as they begin rehearsals. Although 13 other USC students have smaller roles, the Dead End Kids include only one USC student: tall, sleepy-eyed senior Trevor Peterson, as TB, whose character never jumps into the water because of his tubercular lungs. The other Kids are Ricky Ullman -- the Israeli-born actor is known to the others not by his stage name, Ricky, but his real name, Raviv -- as gang leader Tommy, Josh Sussman as timid Milty, Greg Roman as the appropriately named Dippy, Adam Rose as Angel and Sam Murphy as the hot-tempered Spit.

This time around, bonding included a Dodger game and poker at Ritchie’s Los Feliz home. “Baseball and poker are the only two things I know about macho, so we did both,” Martin says with a throaty chuckle. “And it worked!” Ritchie’s son Morgan, who serves as “assistant to the director” on “Dead End,” also assisted the director in learning to play poker. The novice player won $30.

“When it gets down to why a director wants to do a play for a third time, it’s as much for me a celebration of live theater as it is any kind of character study or social document,” Martin says. “I’m drawn to, I guess the word is picaresque -- books that have many different characters like in Dickens, or to movies like ‘Magnolia’ or “Nashville’ where you start with seven different people and bring them all together. ‘Dead End’ is like that.”

Besides the general angst of herding 42 actors, Martin also acknowledges that he’d feel a little more comfortable without “all this political fracas about Michael” -- meaning the controversy that has swirled around one of Ritchie’s first executive decisions, to eliminate a group of CTG programs designed to develop new plays and playwrights: the Other Voices program for disabled artists, a Taper fixture since 1982, plus the Latino, Asian American and African American labs established from 1993 to 1995. Ritchie has said he hopes collaborations with other, small theaters would fill some of the gaps.

Given the flap, it’s tough that Ritchie’s first big show calls for an all-white cast, save one role as a doorman. But both Martin and Ritchie argue that there’s no way to effectively present this naturalistic play, set in a highly specific time and place, with colorblind casting. “I investigated the idea of updating it somewhat so you could use African American kids or Latino kids, and you can’t,” Martin says. “I’m hoping this all dies down; the future will vindicate Michael. But I know how difficult it all was for him.”

When asked about colorblind casting for “Dead End,” Ritchie is quick with his answer. “Absolutely not. I’m all for it, but not on this particular show. To impose the present in any way would take away from the universality of the story.

“I imagine,” he adds, “there will be productions where we do exactly the opposite.”

DIVING RIGHT IN

“WE got Shamu right there,” observes Peterson as his fellow Kid, Murphy, plunges into the orchestra pit, drenching those brave and foolish enough to stand near the edge during the boys’ first day of rehearsal in the water.

Sussman, pale as milk, lifts his hands in front of his chest like an anxious squirrel hiding a nut in its paws before tentatively descending into the pool, Milty-style, down a ladder on the side. But later, he decides to jump in “just for fun,” climbing out to a round of applause, his cloud of reddish hair plastered to his head.

In Williamstown, the pool liner developed a leak and the water had to be pumped out. It was refilled in time for the opening, but the water was a chilly 48 degrees and no efforts to jury-rig a heating system worked effectively. The Ahmanson pool has no leaks so far, is comfortably heated and kept clean with bromine instead of chlorine to ensure that the theater won’t smell like the YMCA.

Rick Sordelet, the show’s fight coordinator, is also overseeing diving practice. He shows the young men how to point their toes and other tricks to keep from splashing too much water into the first rows. This is theater, not Sea World. But no matter how skilled they become, Sordelet notes wryly, they will make sitting in those first rows an “interactive experience.”

For the new Dead End Kids, the play -- in which poverty clashes with privilege -- remains relevant regardless of whether there’s colorblind casting. “It’s still the same issues; I know it’s happening in my neighborhood,” said Ullman in a round-table conversation before the water rehearsal. Peterson says he sees it every day as elite USC tries to coexist with its low-income neighbors. Observes Rose: “It’s happening a block from where we’re doing this show.”

But in terms of playing their roles, the idea is to just go up there, have fun and “bond” the way they have offstage. “I’ve been looking to do theater for a long time, something in L.A. because this is where I am,” says Ullman, 19-year-old star of the Disney Channel comedy “Phil of the Future.” “So when this came up, for someone my age -- plus we have fun, we climb on a jungle gym, we get to swim, we get to fight, we have shootouts....”

Also, the boys joke, if the show is a hit, their 1935 street dialect will reenter the American vernacular. And if you don’t believe them, boy, ahl knock yur fera loop, yah fat tub a buttuh. Same to yur fadduh and muddah.

Of course, interpreting the dialect as written in the script wasn’t always easy, admits Sussman. “I didn’t know what hones was,” he says. “I tried to look it up in the dictionary, but it wasn’t there, I couldn’t find hones.

“Then I figured out that hones was hones’ -- [a slang contraction of] honest.” He grins. “And I guess that’s why I’m here today.”

*

‘Dead End’

Where: Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave.

When: Opens Wednesday. Performances at 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Sundays. No performances 2 p.m. Sept. 4, 8 p.m. Oct. 5 and 8 p.m. Oct. 16.

Ends: Oct. 16

Price: $15 to $75

Contact: (213) 628-2772 or www.TaperAhmanson.com.