Wide assent for leader's ascent

By Don Shirley

Jan. 29, 2006 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

DRESSED to the nines in film noir-era fashions, actors lounge in the little lobby of an unprepossessing rehearsal studio in North Hollywood, indulging in opinions about new musicals and gossip about whether a certain musical theater star has recently worked with a plastic surgeon.

Cast members of the Reprise! revival of “City of Angels” are waiting for their turns at a publicity photo session in the adjacent room.

Mingling among the actors are a number of behind-the-scenes personnel, easy to identify by their contemporary street duds. One -- a tall, middle-aged man sitting on a sofa -- smiles at others’ comments but offers no dish. Instead, Jim Gardia, the unassuming new leader of Reprise!, L.A.’s theater company devoted to vintage musicals, shares only favorable opinions (“Those shoes look great on you!”).

Gardia was officially handed the job of producing director in December, after three years as the organization’s managing director. His appointment came in the wake of the abrupt October departure of Reprise! founder Marcia Seligson. “City of Angels,” at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse, is Gardia’s first show as boss.

Just about everyone at Reprise! professes delight at Gardia’s ascension to the top job -- although most of them also emphasize that Seligson deserves “mountains of credit,” in the words of frequent Reprise! director Arthur Allan Seidelman, “for having the idea of Reprise! and bringing it to fruition.”

Robert Wunsch, president of the Reprise! board for a six-year period that ended Jan. 1, declined to directly compare the leaders but said, “Jim is uniquely qualified. He has talent, a wide range of experience and a tremendously warm relationship with the creative community -- a huge plus. Everyone feels supported and encouraged by him. He has already been handling the bulk of production responsibilities. But he stays behind the scenes. There is no self-aggrandizement there.”

Ronn Goswick, who was the company’s managing director for three years and has returned to stage manage shows including “City of Angels,” says Gardia “is a lot more laid-back” than Seligson, who was “an on-top-of-you person, a micromanager.”

Still, Seidelman points out that Gardia is more hands-on than Seligson because he has more previous theatrical experience than she did when she started the company. “That,” he says, “will be to the benefit of the organization.”

(Seligson, who was traveling outside the country, could not be reached for comment).

Gardia’s love of the stage began when he performed in a children’s theater company in Lynwood. He acted in productions at San Diego’s Mesa College, a community college, but he also was a lifeguard who at the time intended to be a swimming coach. An American Sign Language course that he took came in handy on his first big-name theater gig -- he worked as an interpreter for the deaf at the Mark Taper Forum in 1978.

“I tried to work as an actor,” he recalls, “but I was much better behind the scenes.” Or maybe at the front of the house: He took a job in the box office at the Wilshire Theatre in Beverly Hills for a year.

After following a friend to Philadelphia in the early ‘80s, he spent five years there doing ASL interpreting, appearing in “a lot of musical theater” and waiting tables.

His work as a waiter at the Four Seasons brought him back to Southern California, when the company opened a hotel in Newport Beach. A friend from the Wilshire box office introduced Gardia to the staff at the Canon Theatre in Beverly Hills, where he remained for the next decade.

“Very quickly he was running the box office, and pretty soon he was running my business,” recalls then-Canon producer Joan Stein. “There is no one who combines his good taste, his good manners -- his parents really raised him right -- his love of artists, his wicked sense of humor. And he’s a great problem solver.”

She recalls that one winter when rainstorms and leaks left stains on the Canon walls, Gardia assumed a deadpan expression and explained, “That’s part of the set design.”

Gardia was company manager for the long-running “Forever Plaid” at the Canon, then became the theater’s general manager. Stein, he says, “taught me the art of producing.”

In 1997, after Reprise! opened with “Promises, Promises,” Seligson hired Stein to produce an extension of the show three months after it had closed, and Gardia helped out as associate producer.

The small-scale commercial runs that were the Canon’s specialty began to fade along with the 20th century, and Gardia left the staff in 2000. He briefly lived in Sonoma County, trying to escape the big city, but returned for freelance jobs at the Canon. Then Seligson hired him for the No. 2 job at Reprise! in 2002.

Gardia probably will announce his first season next month. He offers no solid information but lists a few vintage musicals he’d like to produce. “Pal Joey” is at the top, with “Barnum,” “Dames at Sea,” “Li’l Abner” and “On Your Toes” also on his list. He’s interested in “The Wiz,” but, he notes, the rights aren’t available -- La Jolla Playhouse just announced it as part of its 2006 season.

As for hints concerning his taste in musicals, Gardia notes that he enjoyed “The Drowsy Chaperone,” the Ahmanson’s recent production about a faux-’20s musical whose narrator is obsessed with listening to the original cast albums of ancient shows. Is that character at all similar to Gardia?

“Never!” he replies in a mock huff, then acknowledges: “Yes, of course.” But, he says, there’s an important difference: “I got rid of all my LPs years ago, when cassettes started coming in.”

His own search for “lost gems” among ‘20s musicals hasn’t turned up anything he could produce. “Obscure shows are great if the script and score are fantastic. There aren’t many of those.”

Anyone who runs Reprise! has to find a balance between unfamiliar shows that might appeal to musical theater aficionados and the somewhat more familiar revivals that could appeal to larger audiences.

Stuart Ross, who staged the first Reprise! production of “Promises, Promises” as well as a recent Reprise! revival of the more familiar “Brigadoon,” predicts that “Jim will be able to see that some of the less safe shows are done.” But he adds that Reprise! “needs to discover a mission and stick to it. Are they going to do shows that can be seen in other places? What’s the statement there?”

Gardia says he has no plans to change the current mission or format of Reprise!, but he would like to expand its offerings to include more one-night revivals of shows from the past two decades, perhaps calling on the talents of some of the original cast members. And he’s examining the use of other venues besides the Freud, including the revivified Brentwood Theatre.

Living “with my dog and my kayak” not far from the Reprise! office in Santa Monica, Gardia says he’s excited that he will turn 50 in March because it means that “I made it this long through the worst of the age of AIDS.” Around the time when he produced a three-week benefit for the Minority AIDS Project in the early ‘90s, he says, “all my friends were dying. Why would I miss this bullet?”

He will celebrate his birthday quietly. “When I don’t have a show, I go to bed at 9:30,” he says. Nonetheless, “it’s great to be alive and well and able to turn 50.”

‘City of Angels’

Where: UCLA Freud Playhouse, 405 Hilgard Ave., Westwood

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays, 7 p.m. Sundays

Ends: Feb. 5

Price: $70 to $75

Contact: (310) 825-2101; www.reprise.org