'Anything Goes' Replaces 'Black and Blue' at Pantages

By DON SHIRLEY

June 23, 1988 12 AM PT

Bye-bye, “Black and Blue.” Next season, “Anything Goes.”

“Black and Blue,” a jazz and blues revue from the “Tango Argentino” producers, has pulled out of its late August slot at the Pantages, where it would have opened the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera season.

The national touring company of the New York revival of Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes,” which just won the Tonys for best revival and best choreography of the Broadway season, will replace “Black and Blue” in the LACLO season. “Anything Goes” probably won’t occupy the first slot of the season--and certainly not the same late August dates vacated by “Black and Blue.” But LACLO President Stan Seiden expects it to show up “before the end of the year.”

Explaining the decision to open “Black and Blue” on Broadway in October without a tryout engagement, producer Mel Howard said that the scenic design “came in outrageously complex and heavy. It should really be built to sit, not to tour.”

He estimated costs of altering the scenery to play Los Angeles, as well as New York, at about $500,000, plus moving expenses.

However, he added that Los Angeles “will be the first place we go (after New York), given availabilities. And when we get to L.A., maybe we can stay longer” than the five weeks that had been scheduled, though probably with a smaller set.

No dates or casting could be confirmed for the national touring company of “Anything Goes,” but a spokesman for the producers said its New York star, Patti Lupone, would not go on tour.

Meanwhile, a touring company of “Cats” will move into the Pantages for a July 19-24 run. These particular felines played Long Beach last summer, and they’ll return to the Southland in September, playing Pasadena Civic Auditorium Sept. 6-11 and Orange County Performing Arts Center Sept. 20-25.

IN COSTA MESA: South Coast Repertory will present the first production of “At Long Last Leo,” a comedy by Washington, D.C.-based Mark Stein, as the second Mainstage production of its 25th season. The play is about a young man who can’t get anyone to read his one-book-fits-all self-help treatise. The script received a workshop reading at South Coast in February.

Opening the season will be Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” playing on the Mainstage Sept. 9-Oct. 13, and Eric Overmyer’s “In Perpetuity Throughout the Universe,” playing the Second Stage Sept. 23-Oct. 23.

WOBEGON FREEWAY: Company of Angels will present “An Urban Home Companion,” a one-night fund-raiser, featuring celebrities and improvisational comics taking off on Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion,” Monday at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. The proceeds will go to the company’s building fund, which was established in the wake of the fire that destroyed the group’s Hollywood theater on April 27. Tax-deductible tickets cost $25; information at (213) 466-1767.

AWARDS: Peter Brosius, director of the Mark Taper Forum’s Improvisational Theatre Project, has won the second annual Alan Schneider Director Award, given by Theatre Communications Group to a director “who has exhibited exceptional talent in a specific community or region.” The prize is $10,000 toward partial support of two directing opportunities at major professional theaters, preferably theaters that are outside the director’s home base. . . . Robert E. Lee will receive the William Inge Festival’s William Inge Award, “for lifetime achievement in the American theater” in a ceremony at his home in Encino next Tuesday. His partner Jerome Lawrence won the award in 1983.

DIRECTORS: Actors aren’t the only stage people mulling over the problems with Equity Waiver. Directors will gather Tuesday at 7 p.m., at the Taper Annex downtown, to discuss their own status with Waiver theaters. A member of the council of the directors union, the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, which lacks a local office, will be on hand. Information: (213) 465-8431.

ALAN BOLT: Nicaraguan playwright and director Alan Bolt will discuss “Theatre of the Magical Reality: Theatre and Dance in Nicaragua Today” at the new Ash Grove, 6820 Santa Monica Blvd., tonight at 7:30 p.m. Information: (213) 452-2227.

VALDEZ ON PINERO: Playwright Miguel Pinero, who died Friday, and director Luis Valdez inspired each other, Valdez recalled in remarks delivered from the stage of the Los Angeles Theatre Center before the opening of “Roosters” last Friday. The LATC dedicated the opening night performance of Milcha Sanchez-Scott’s play to Pinero’s memory.

According to Valdez, Pinero saw a 1970 television presentation of the work of Valdez’s El Teatro Campesino.

“It connected with him and gave him the belief that he could do the same thing,” said Valdez, adding that Pinero was recovering from heroin addiction at the time.

Two years later, Pinero’s “Short Eyes” was playing Lincoln Center in New York, and its success, Valdez said, “planted a seed for me to take ‘Zoot Suit’ to Broadway,” which he did in 1979.

Valdez called Pinero “one of America’s outstanding playwrights” and predicted, “His plays shall go on, performed by generations of Latinos.”