Pasadena Playhouse’s New Season

Groucho Marx, corporate chicanery, tap-dancing Communists and a potentially disastrous wedding are the subjects to be dramatized on the Pasadena Playhouse mainstage for the 1989-90 season.

The selections include three West Coast premieres and one brand-new play, announced artistic director Susan Dietz.

“Groucho: A Life in Revue” will open the season, Oct. 1-Nov. 5. Groucho Marx’s son, Beverly Hills resident Arthur Marx, will direct; he co-wrote the play with Robert Fisher. Pasadena-born Frank Ferrante, who created the role of Groucho in the play’s previous runs in New York and London, will again do the honors here, assisted by the original production’s Chico/Harpo, Les Marsden.

Richard Dresser’s “The Downside,” described by Dietz as “a wickedly funny expose of corporate America,” will occupy a Dec. 10-Jan. 14 slot. Kenneth Frankel, who staged the play’s premiere production at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Conn., in 1987, will again direct. The play examines the efforts of a pharmaceutical company to market a new anti-stress drug.

A revival of the 1965 musical “Flora, the Red Menace,” is scheduled for Feb. 1-March 18, starring Chloe Webb in a role created by Liza Minnelli. Last year, a reworked version of the John Kander-Fred Ebb show played Off Broadway; Dietz said Kander and Ebb may write a new final song for Pasadena. Scott Ellis will direct. Set in New York in the ‘30s, the narrative is about “a girl who is seduced into the Communist Party,” said Dietz.

The season will end, April 22-May 27, with the first production of New York writer Douglas McGrath’s “The Big Day,” an account of a wedding rehearsal and wedding, told from the perspective of the best man, who wants to sabotage the ceremony. Sam Weisman will direct.

There will be only four productions next season, compared with five in 1988-89, because “we’ve lengthened our runs in order to allow present subscribers to upgrade their seats and still get more new subscribers in,” Dietz said.

None of next year’s shows will be co-productions; there were three co-productions this season.