Gaslamp Tenacity Pays Off, Snags a Wasserstein Play

By NANCY CHURNIN

Feb. 28, 1991 12 AM PT

If there’s one quality the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company has in abundance it’s perseverance.

Without it, the financially strapped company would have closed its doors for good last year.

Without it, too, the company would have given up its pursuit of Wendy Wasserstein’s Tony-and Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “The Heidi Chronicles.”

After all, the Dramatists Play Service had initially awarded the San Diego rights to the San Diego Repertory Theatre, as was reported in this column earlier this month.

But the disappointed Kit Goldman was not willing to take no for an answer.

She called Sam Woodhouse, producing director of the San Diego Rep, and asked him if his company was definitely planning to produce the show.

When he told her the Rep had decided to pass on it, she was back on the phone with the Dramatists Play Service.

The Gaslamp now has permission to do the show, Helen Sneed, director of professional rights at the Dramatists Play Service, confirmed.

The show will be in the Gaslamp’s Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre from Jan. 14-Feb. 23. It will be the Gaslamp’s third Wasserstein play. “We’re absolutely thrilled,” Goldman said. “We’ve been very, very tenacious. It’s nice to know that, if you keep pushing, you sometimes get what you want.”

As for the San Diego Rep, a season announcement of the shows the company will present should be coming soon, Woodhouse said.

Meanwhile, Starlight Musical Theatre has moved its much promoted new musical, “For My Country--the USO Musical” off its upcoming season schedule and back into development.

The company will substitute “Evita,” the Tony-award winning Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice musical for the Aug. 14-25 slot in the Starlight Bowl.

That will be just three days before “Evita” opens at Moonlight Amphitheatre for a run through Sept. 8. Starlight produced the show once before in 1986.

“For My Country” appears to have been a victim of the high cost of producing new musicals. Producing a new work was to have marked a new direction for Starlight.

“We were needing $150,000 on top of what it normally costs us to produce a show (for “For My Country),” said Clarence Edwin (Bud) Franks, Starlight’s new executive director. A national company, which Franks declined to name, had shown interest in donating the money for the “For My Country” musical, but had not committed to it by Starlight’s deadline for printing season brochures.

But the show, which has already received $15,000 from the city as one of the Special Projects grants as well as $5,000 from privately raised funds, will remain in development and may have another staged reading in the spring, said Franks.

“I love to develop new works, but I manage a bottom line. We want everyone who donated one dime to know that that dime will be managed carefully and not be squandered. It was just not the prudent thing to do to go out on the limb and use any more of Starlight’s reserves. We have to be very careful about producing something without underwriting.”

For the past two years, the company has had a deficit that has eaten into its reserve fund. That fund is “not healthy enough for us to gamble on anything,” Franks said.

Starlight also will continue its commitment to producing new musicals with its second annual Prelude Series, a staged reading of new musicals, he added.

Two world premiere plays being developed by San Diego theaters have opened back East. So far the reviews, while not uniform raves, seem promising for both the Old Globe’s “The Snow Ball,” now at the Hartford Stage Company, and the La Jolla Playhouse’s “The Heliotrope Bouquet by Scott Joplin & Louis Chauvin,” now at the Baltimore Center Stage.

“The Heliotrope Bouquet” is Eric Overmyer’s story of the differences between onetime collaborators--Joplin, a musician who made it, and Chauvin, a musician who died young and in obscurity. It drew praise for its lyricism rather than its drama from Baltimore Sun critic J. Wynn Rousuck.

“Many of the images that the playwright and director Stan Wojewodski Jr. have conjured up are as ethereal as music and as mysterious as Chauvin himself,” Rousuck wrote.

David Richards of the Washington Post noted that “a lot of the production of ‘The Heliotrope Bouquet’ is magic.” Richards found the play’s meaning “cloudy,” but also “fascinating, even seductive.”

As for “The Snow Ball,” which playwright A.R. Gurney based on his novel of the same name, most of the critics praised the poignancy of the story of a man and a woman who try to relive their past by reviving the Snow Ball, a grand cotillion of 40 years before. Jack O’Brien, artistic director of the Old Globe Theatre, who will reprise his direction of the play here, received general acclaim, as did Graciela Daniele for her choreography and Old Globe associate artist Kandis Chappell for her performance as the divorcee helping to plan the ball.

Kathy O’Connell of the Middletown Press described the show as “an evocative little story that holds something special for anyone who ever attended dancing classes or assumed traditions were like parquet floors--virtually indestructible if properly maintained.”

Malcolm Johnson of the Hartford Courant offered more restrained praise, describing it as “slight perhaps, but shot through with a fine sense of the way things were, and the way they are today.” Steve Kemper of the Hartford Advocate put down the play as “flimsy and trite, not nearly up to Gurney’s best work.”

“The Heliotrope Bouquet” will be presented at La Jolla Playhouse from Aug.11-Sept. 15 at the Mandell Weiss Forum. “The Snow Ball” will be at the Old Globe from May 9-June 16.

PROGRAM NOTES: A look into the lives of the inhabitants of a garbage dump in Tijuana is the subject of a new work-in-progress to be presented by Teatro Mascara Magica at Sushi Performance Gallery at 8 p.m. Saturday. It will also play at San Diego City College at 7:30 p.m. March 6, the Educational Cultural Complex at 7:30 p.m. March 8, and Centro Cultural de la Raza at 8 p.m March 9. The show, “A Handful of Dust,” was written by members of the UC San Diego Hispanic American Graduate Theatre program in collaboration with Luis Urrea, whose Reader article inspired the piece. Jose Luis Valenzuela, artistic director of the Los Angeles Theatre Center’s Latino Lab, will direct, and San Diego visual artists David Avalos and Victor Ochoa will design the settings. . . .

The Big Kitchen Dessert Theatre will return with Vaclav Havel’s “Audience” March 15-17, 22-24 at the Golden Hill restaurant. Havel, the onetime dissident playwright who is now president of Czechoslovakia, wrote this one-act, two-person play in 1975 about a writer in exile. . . .

Sam Shepard’s “Fool For Love” has been extended at the Marquis Public Theatre through March 2.