Cast Changes : The Wiviott/Stava team comes to L.A. Civic Light Opera from Long Beach where they are succeeded by Broadway veteran Barry Brown

By SYLVIE DRAKE

Nov. 4, 1990 12 AM PT

Our local civic light opera companies have been playing musical chairs, or at least musical theaters.

Last August, Martin Wiviott, the artistic director of the Long Beach Civic Light Opera, and his associate, Keith Stava, moved over to the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera, which has had no artistic director or much direction since 1981.

Replacing him at Long Beach is New York producer Barry Brown.

If change is salutary, it would seem to come at the right time for the men and the organizations.

It could mean that Long Beach will benefit from some Broadway savvy and that LACLO will show some strategic thinking where hitherto none has existed.

The goals of both organizations as itemized by their respective heads are not particularly different. In each case, a desire prevails to widen operations, step up professionalism and networking, reach out more into the community and become an originator of and/or match for Broadway shows.

In other words, fairly standard aspirations. What they won’t do is collaborate on productions, “because,” as Wiviott put it (and Brown concurs), “it’s the same market. Two theaters would end up with half houses each.”

How well each succeeds will depend on budgetary constraints. There won’t be many at LACLO, where the Nederlander Organization is committing up to $7.5 million to production under the new leadership, according to vice president Stan Seiden. As for the younger, leaner LBCLO, it recently created a controversial new post of CEO ( see related story , Page 52 ) in the hope of steering a balanced course.

What brought on the moves?

For Wiviott, 53, and Stava, 33, it was the lure of playing the big leagues that persuaded them to travel the 40 miles into Hollywood.

They jointly assumed the reins of the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera on the crest of seven buoyant years at Long Beach, during which they rescued LBCLO from amateur status and the brink of bankruptcy, and made it turn a profit on an increasingly professional level.

“There gets to be a point where you will never do anything if you don’t need to,” Wiviott said in an interview in the utilitarian basement quarters he now shares with Stava at the Pantages. “You have the job, you have the paycheck, you don’t need to make a move. We wanted to make ourselves need to move. It happened when the (LBCLO) deficit was paid off.”

Where before Wiviott was producer and Stava associate producer, they are now producers on equal footing at LACLO--a parity jokingly played up on a business card that has Wiviott’s name on one side and Stava’s on the other.

When they made their move, they gained access to a $7-million budget, or twice what they were used to at Long Beach. Available funds per show jumped to $1 million from about half that much, and they needed to plan for only three musicals per season instead of four.

For the Nederlander Organization, it meant someone was finally minding the store. When it had taken over the nearly bankrupt LACLO from producers Cy Feuer and Ernest Martin in 1981, it had assumed a $1.8-million debt (extant) along with a coveted mailing list of more than 100,000 names. But audiences were growing restless.

They missed the personal handling of CLO founder Edwin Lester, who had guided the organization with an unwavering hand until his retirement in 1977. They had been buffeted by the stormy Feuer and Martin years that followed, and they resented the disenchanting seasons of a CLO by then rudderless and too dependent on a shrinking Broadway market.

It’s what Wiviott and Stava hope to correct. They say proudly: “We’re people people.”

“The mandate,” explains Wiviott, “is to rebuild the CLO.”

Brown, 48, was simply a man in search of a challenge when he was approached by Long Beach CLO board member Ross Hunter to assume the Wiviott spot. He had come to Los Angeles from New York last January, following the death of his former partner, Fritz Holt, but found himself unhappy guiding the Universal Studio Tour as its director of entertainment--a job he gave up in six months.

To Brown, who had been a key player in putting together Broadway’s “La Cage aux Folles” as well as two Tony award-winning editions of “Gypsy” (with Angela Lansbury in 1974, Tyne Daly in 1989), a regular paycheck is a nifty idea.

“Producers in (commercial) theater don’t get paid until a show opens,” he quipped in conversation at the Beachwood Cafe near his Hollywood Hills home. “And if it flops and closes in a week, that’s it. And I don’t even have to raise the money, which is what I hate most about producing.”

Except for the summer of 1976 when he and Fritz Holt ran the Berkshire Festival in Stockbridge, Mass., Long Beach is Brown’s first venture into institutional theater. The LBCLO he inherited came with a balanced budget and a 1990-91 season. When the season centerpiece, “Meet Me in St. Louis,” followed Wiviott and Stava to the Pantages, it prompted Brown to reconsider the lineup. He changed everything but “Chess,” the season opener.

“Not to demean the shows themselves,” he explains, “but ‘Purlie,’ ‘Meet Me in St. Louis’ and ‘The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas’ was too traditional a package for me. Things that are slightly off center interest me more. It means going out on a limb, but I’m willing to take the chance.”

The loss of “Meet Me in St. Louis” cost Long Beach 300 subscribers. But it acquired 1,000 others, according to LBCLO executive director Pegge Logefeil, when Brown announced “Bye-Bye Birdie” with Tommy Tune and Ann Reinking.

“Perhaps,” he said, “because I replaced a family show with another family show.”

Logefeil anticipates acquiring another 2,000 subscribers. Total subscriptions at the end of the first half of LBCLO’s campaign came to 26,500. “We’ve been up to 28,000,” she said, adding that she hopes to surpass that number by the end of the campaign’s second half.

Brown raised a few eyebrows, however, when he announced the chancier revivals that will fill out his season: “Funny Girl” with Pia Zadora and “Pal Joey” with Dixie Carter and Sally Struthers.

Pia Zadora . . . ?

“People don’t take her as seriously as they should,” he defended, “usually the people who’ve never seen her and never heard her. ‘Funny Girl’ is due for a major new production and Pia is one of the few people who can pull it off.”

Carter, who’ll play Vera in “Pal Joey,” has successfully performed her own cabaret act at New York’s Carlyle Hotel on her hiatus from “Designing Women” (“I’ve always wanted to do ‘Pal Joey’ with Dixie Carter,” says Brown, “it’s happening because she said yes”) and Struthers, he insists, “is a great musical-theater performer.”

One wants to believe him, since he has a track record for cannily putting performers together with roles for which they don’t seem suited. “When I told people that I’d asked Tyne Daly to do ‘Gypsy,’ eight out of 10 would say ‘Why don’t you ask Liza or Bette Midler or Carol Burnett. . . ?’ ”

Brown’s Long Beach budget is $4 million--$500,000 to $600,000 per show. And while Wiviott and Stava are negotiating for a LORT (or League of Resident Theaters) contract with Actors’ Equity that will allow them to produce shows locally for less money, Long Beach prides itself on the special production contract it already has, which permits a mix of Equity and non-Equity players that substantially lowers the tab.

Long-range plans at Long Beach include presenting an original musical every year (though not this year) and perhaps a couple of plays in the adjacent, under-utilized 840-seat Center Theatre. “Maybe one new play and one old one,” Brown said, casually mentioning that “Tyne (Daly) is interested in doing ‘The Rose Tattoo.’ ”

“I can’t believe that Long Beach theatergoers don’t want to see plays as much as they want to see musicals,” he added, contradicting the findings of the Regional Arts Foundation, which earlier this year abruptly canceled plans to present a season of plays at the Center Theatre on the grounds that there was not enough public support.

Brown is meeting with Gordon Davidson to explore the possibilities of collaborating with the Center Theatre Group. Is he thinking of the Center Theatre as an extension of the Mark Taper Forum?

“No,” he replied with characteristic quickness. “I like to think of the Taper as the possible extension of the Center Theatre. I don’t want to be a little sister to anybody.”

He is, however, keenly aware that adding plays and one extra musical per year depends on money that “must be approved by the board,” which in turn will depend “on how well this season does.” And on at least one other thing: How well he will be able to tour some of the shows.

One complaint of the former regime was the brevity of the runs in the Terrace, which has 3,054 seats to fill each night.

“You can’t afford to build scenery, costumes, etc., for a two-week run,” had said Stava, who, with Tom McCoy, went on to produce the Cathy Rigby “Peter Pan” that began at LBCLO and opens on Broadway in December. “For almost everything we did, the scenery was rented or shared with other theaters. A lot of (programming) was decided by what was available. There needs to be an afterlife to amortize the costs.”

“It’s not a problem, it’s a crime,” Brown says while acknowledging that “you can’t do intimate musicals. ‘Cage aux Folles’ you could do, but not ‘Gypsy,’ which is fundamentally about three people.”

The issue is something he says he’ll deal with on the job. For now he’s just getting acquainted. This first year his productions won’t travel beyond Long Beach. Future projects won’t exclude Broadway, but “I wouldn’t mount something because I thought it would go to Broadway,” he states. “I would mount it because I thought it was good, and if it turned out to be as good as I hoped, then I’d think, ‘Well, maybe we can move this.’

“What I really love to do is put people together, sitting down and saying, ‘OK, if I were doing (this musical), who’s the best person to write the score? To write the book? To direct, to choreograph? And put it all together.”

Previous Broadway contacts and associations will come in handy. Fran and Barry Weissler, Brown’s partners in the Tyne Daly “Gypsy” (which they will co-produce in London next year), are the producers of the “Birdie” tour that will originate in Long Beach.

“It certainly made it easier for me to work out an arrangement to get the show,” Brown said. It is this kind of networking he hopes to do more of. But on a budget of $500,000 per show can he really afford Broadway talent?

“It’s the other way around. I think that if I go to Theoni V. Aldredge, who is a collaborator as much as she is a costume designer, and ask ‘Would you design something for me?’ it would be with the understanding, ‘Here’s what I can pay. You won’t get rich here, but you can have a terrific time.’ ”

For all his brightness and unflappable good humor, Brown eludes facile definition. He has always been his own mover and shaker and considers his tastes eclectic while admitting to such favorites as “My Fair Lady,” “West Side Story” and “Carousel.” Co-producer Fran Weissler praises his “excellent taste and ideas” and his decision-making generosity.

Brown says he likes doing musicals “that have something to say. I was brought up in this business by Arthur Laurents,” he said, referring to “Gypsy’s” book writer who also directed the Tyne Daly edition of the show. “Whenever anybody would come to Arthur and talk about doing something as a musical he’d say, ‘Why? What’s it about?’ If they said, ‘Well, it’s about this man and--,’ he’d stop them and say, ‘No, no, no. Don’t tell me the story. What’s it about ? Take “Gypsy.” It’s about recognition. Everyone in it is looking for recognition.’ Just because something is a musical doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be about people and emotions and what happens when people attract.

“If I have a vision for what I would like to do, it would be to turn the Long Beach Civic Light Opera into the Long Beach Performing Arts Center. It’s so strategically located--a half-hour south of L.A. and a half-hour north of Orange County. There’s no reason why that facility shouldn’t become a West Coast Kennedy Center without the deficits.”

Wiviott and Stava met at the Sacramento Music Circus. Both come from backgrounds in stage management. Wiviott was a producer at the Milwaukee Melody Top for 10 years during the ‘70s before coming to Los Angeles and working summers in Sacramento.

In 1982 he went with friends to see “Carousel” at the Terrace and privately admired the facility. The next week he read that managing director Lars Hansen had left and, in a letter to the president of the board, volunteered his help. They offered him the job. That was 1983.

“It was a struggle,” Wiviott said. “There was a million-dollar debt. You can’t get into an organization and turn it around in a minute. I warned the board it would take three years. The first year, you’re into whatever’s been set; the second, you institute whatever you’re going to institute; the third year shows a reaction to the second year. Strangely enough, the third year, there was a $60,000 profit.”

It didn’t erase the deficit, but it was a turning point. In 1985 Wiviott brought Stava on board, first as production manager, then as associate producer.

Except for the locally mounted “Cinderella,” which opens their LACLO season at the Pantages Dec. 12, Wiviott and Stava are into importing this year: the national companies of “Meet Me in St. Louis,” “Grand Hotel” and “Black and Blue,” a revue about the early years of jazz. But they’re pledged to do more local production including an operetta every other year.

“We want to begin to mount most of the national tours here,” says Wiviott. It’s cheaper and “the talent base is here. We get five weeks in L.A., four weeks in San Francisco, a week in San Diego. That’s 10 weeks right there. You can recoup a lot of your costs.”

To renew the audience they’ll mix up the programming, much as they did in Long Beach. The plan emphasizes networking through the 5-year-old National Alliance of Musical Theatre Producers, a nationwide consortium of light operas. “It allows us to do projects together,” says Wiviott, “that we couldn’t do alone.”

Paradoxically, now that they have access to Broadway through the Nederlanders, Wiviott and Stava want to turn LACLO into “more of a community organization.”

“I was surprised to learn,” Wiviott said, “that in its 56-year history the CLO had guarantors but never widespread subscriber contributions.” He wants subscribers to help support newly minted outreach projects that include youth and in-school programs and staged readings of new works, all to be implemented through the American Corporation of the Arts, the nonprofit arm of the Nederlander Organization. He hopes community outreach will help attract unearned income such as grants and corporate underwriting.

The children’s program this year consists of an association with the Great American Children’s Theatre of Milwaukee, scheduled to play the Wilshire Theatre with “The Secret Garden”--and something they plan to produce for the schools called Musical Therapy.

Wiviott calls it “education through entertainment.”

Edutainment?

“It’s plays with music,” says Stava, “based on a series of books about topical children’s issues such as sexual abuse, alcoholic parents, divorce, adoption, drugs. The L.A. school district’s counseling department is paying close attention to the content.”

Ironically, the two companies would seem to be embarked on a potential collision course. But not really. If they became competitors, the financial clout of the Nederlanders could prove a formidable Goliath. But Brown is not unresourceful and his connections and artistic tastes differ sufficiently from those of Wiviott and Stava to ensure that the programming is unlikely to split the available audience or the networking routes. If anything, the similarity of the two groups’ ambitions may ensure that both organizations will carefully assess their priorities to guarantee that they steer clear of each other’s toes.

Audience subscriptions are currently neck and neck, somewhere around 26,000 in Long Beach and 30,000 in Los Angeles--down from an unconfirmed 75,000 at the time of Edwin Lester’s 1977 resignation. And while Brown’s triangulations see LBCLO as strategic to both Orange County and the Los Angeles market, Wiviott, who computes his audience on a 50-mile radius, wisecracks that, on that basis, “in Long Beach half the audience is fish.”

Which only goes to show that perspective is whatever you make it. It’s going to be a bumpy ride, but a ride, finally, that may be worth the challenge.