Start of something new

The ultimate goal probably is Broadway -- but writers and composers of four new musicals are taking a detour through suburban Los Angeles this weekend to present staged readings of their work at the first Thousand Oaks Festival of New Musicals.

Included on the program are “The Grouch’s Daughter,” a new offering from Mark Hollmann, Tony winner for “Urinetown,” and Jack Helbig; “Maccabeat!” by L.A.-based rock drummer Harvey Shield (Episode Six, Bay City Rollers), Richard Jarboe and Chayim Ben Ze’ev; “I Come for Love” by Jeffery Lyle Segal and Los Angeles-based actor-director Terrence Atkins; and “Showgirl of 52nd Street” by Charlies Leipart and John Kroner.

Tickets for the festival, taking place Saturday and Sunday at Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza, are $24 and include admission to all four staged readings as well as workshops, discussions and a Saturday night party at a local deli where patrons can mingle with the writers.

Mark Edelman, founder and president of the nonprofit Kansas City-based Theater League -- which is presenting the festival in association with North Hollywood’s Academy for New Musical Theatre and Cabrillo Music Theatre, resident company of Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza -- says the idea is to tap into the Hollywood’s talent pool.

“There is such a talent base here, not just the acting base but the writing talent,” Edelman says. “There are people who have made a lot of money writing TV and film who got their start in musical theater and want to go back to it.”

“It’s also a good place to find book writers; that’s the hardest part,” he adds. “Guys who churn out sitcoms every week, that’s a talent that should be adapted for theater. There are a lot of writers of a certain age who aren’t writing for television anymore, but they should be writing for theater.”

A similar philosophy led to the establishment of another Los Angeles-area musical theater fest, this one to take place in May and June: In March, Marcia Seligson (formerly behind the Reprise! musical series) and partner Bob Klein announced the Festival of New American Musicals, a two-month festival during which more than 30 Southern California performing arts organizations will produce a new musical. Composer-lyricist Stephen Schwartz (“Wicked,” “Pippin”) serves as an advisor.

Both Edelman and Seligson say that, if the timing is right, next year’s Thousand Oaks events may take place under the auspices of the similarly titled Festival of New American Musicals. “I wish they’d change their name, but what can I do?” Seligson jokes.

While Edelman and Seligson each seek to foster the cross-pollination of theater and the entertainment industry, Edelman says this year’s applicants for the Thousand Oaks festival included more New Yorkers than West Coast writers, though he expects that to change as the festival, which organizers hope will become an annual event, becomes more established.

He adds that he hopes to see Thousand Oaks become a breeding ground for the kind of musicals that might be suitable in the future for Theater League, an organization responsible for touring Broadway presentations to locations in Arizona and the Midwest as well as at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza.

“Ours is not the avant-garde stuff,” Edelman says. “We -- and I think Cabrillo Music Theatre feels the same way -- are looking to nurture talent to create the new ‘West Side Story,’ the new ‘Fiddler’ and the new ‘Legally Blonde,’ shows that have wide appeal.” Edelman is also a member of the Academy of New Musical Theatre, which holds its own annual festival, but describes its offerings as “a little artsy fartsy” for Theater League.

Wherever the musical may fall on the popular-appeal spectrum, Hollmann believes that Thousand Oaks is the right place for “The Grouch’s Daughter.”

“There are so many advantages to developing a show outside of New York,” he says. Another musical that Hollmann has written with “Urinetown” writing partner Greg Kotis, “Yeast Nation,” will have its world premiere Oct. 6 at the Perseverance Theatre in Juneau, Alaska.

In the case of “Urinetown,” Hollmann did start in New York, but that show was “roundly rejected” by New York producers, so the creators ended up self-producing their own reading in that city in 1999. Later that year, they submitted “Urinetown” to the New York International Fringe Festival, and it was accepted. “I think of all the musicals that I’ve worked on, it had the shortest trip to production, and that was just because no one else wanted to develop it,” Hollmann says.

More commonly, the process happens slowly via readings and productions, many of which take place at festivals and workshops. While the granddaddy of annual new musical festivals is held in New York by the National Alliance of Musical Theater, others occur regularly around the country, including events in Chicago, Seattle and Palo Alto.

In fact, “The Grouch’s Daughter,” set in ancient Greece, was born in Chicago in 1988 at Theater Building Chicago, an incubator of new work. The musical tells the story of a bad-tempered miser who owns the town’s only working well. Much like the monolithic corporation that controls the latrines in “Urinetown,” the Grouch controls the water supply in drought-ridden suburban Athens. “Grouch’s Daughter” has since been through eight to 12 readings and several title changes (“Deus Ex,” “Complaining Well” and “Wild Goat”). The most recent reading was in June at the Kansas City Festival of New Musicals, also produced by Theater League.

“Ten years later and wiser, we have come up with some solutions to things I hadn’t figured out before,” Hollmann says. In both Kansas City and Thousand Oaks, Hollmann and Helbig were not part of the rehearsal process until the end, arriving just a day or two before the reading, but Hollmann likes it that way.

“I had a great composition teacher who drilled it into us: Assume you are not going to be in the room, get everything on the page, and I try to live by that,” Hollmann says. “When I showed up in Kansas City, sure enough there were certain things that were not clear enough on the page, or just not good enough yet. That kind of realization hits with greater force than had I been in all of the rehearsals.”

Ultimately, says Edelman, the two-day event may draw audiences, but it’s really all about the writers. “This is not to put on show,” he says. “It’s to learn about the work.”

diane.haithman@latimes.com

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Thousand Oaks Festival of New Musicals

Where: Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza, 2100 Thousand Oaks Blvd.

When: “Meet the Writers” noon Saturday and Sunday; readings 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday

Price: $24

Contact: www.theaterleague.org, (213) 480-3232 or www.ticketmaster.com