Theater : Theater Notes : Reprise! Has a Yen for ‘Passion’

The two groups that provide L.A. with regular diets of previously staged but seldom-seen musicals are joining forces to bring “Passion” to the Westside for a one-night benefit.

Reprise! producing artistic director Marcia Seligson, whose company presents semi-staged musicals at the Freud Playhouse on the UCLA campus, saw the one-night concert version of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s “Passion” that the Musical Theatre Guild presented in June at the Pasadena Playhouse.

“I was knocked out by it,” Seligson said. The next morning, she called to propose the partnership between the two groups for one night of “Passion,” which has yet to be professionally and fully staged in L.A, despite its status as a recent Tony winner.

The rerun of the somewhat choreographed concert version is happening on Sept. 27 at the Freud, with most of the same cast that performed it in Pasadena and the same director, Michael Michetti. That’s a Monday, an otherwise dark night in the middle of the Reprise! revival of “The Boys From Syracuse.”

The actors will carry scripts, as they sometimes do for Reprise! and almost always do at the one-night stands of the Musical Theatre Guild. But the sound and lighting will be enhanced over what was heard and seen in Pasadena, thanks to the existing equipment for “Syracuse,” said Mary Jo Mecca, a Musical Theatre Guild member and performer who is serving as producer. The two groups are splitting the costs and proceeds down the middle.

This kind of cooperation between two groups in the L.A. area who work on the same kind of material is rare. But Seligson noted that their audiences are so far apart, geographically--Westwood and Pasadena--that they don’t overlap very much. She hopes similar opportunities might appear in the future. There is no talk of uniting the two groups permanently, however.

The Musical Theatre Guild has gone through a big upheaval in the past few months. Jeff Rizzo and Eric Andrist, the team that ran the group for most of its history, submitted letters of resignation in April, only to rescind them within weeks, only to change their minds again after a stormy membership meeting on June 14.

Rizzo and Andrist told The Times that too many members of the company failed to shoulder any of the work, outside the actual performing. They also claimed that a couple of new board members campaigned against them.

Interviews with several company members and board members yielded complaints that Rizzo and especially Andrist wanted to run the company as producers instead of as leaders of a membership-driven organization. Those members who were willing to comment said most members supported the two men’s departures. At a climactic board of directors meeting June 21, the board voted 5-0 to accept Andrist’s resignation and 4-1 to accept Rizzo’s.

If members weren’t contributing much to the offstage operations before all this turmoil, they are doing so now. They produced the first show of their new season, “Nine,” last month and plan to do the rest of the previously announced season, as well as the reprised “Passion.” It will be at least six months before anyone is hired as a manager, said a board member.

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CAST CHANGES: When producer Diana Gibson left the Cast Theatre last spring, the new producer Andy Daley and longtime resident playwright Justin Tanner promised that the theater would become more than the showcase for long-running Tanner plays that it has been in recent years.

Now they’ve announced an upcoming season of five non-Tanner plays, one Tanner revival, and one new play by Tanner. Most of the runs are relatively short, by Cast standards, and they’re even pulling the plug on the longest-running show in town, the Daley-Tanner “Zombie Attack!,” which will take its final bow on Halloween.

Perhaps even more surprising, the revival of Tanner’s “Bitter Women” (Oct. 8-Nov. 21) will be staged by someone other than Tanner--that is, Lisa James. “There’s no time like the present to leap off the cliff,” Tanner said. “I’m hoping to see a totally different play.” Well, maybe not totally different--the script will remain the same. But “I want her to surprise me.”

The season will begin Sept. 17 with “The End of the Watch” by Greg Suddeth, and an off-weekend series will begin Sept. 29 with “Stolen Time,” by Michael Farkash. The entire company may appear in Tanner’s new “The Romans” next summer. Set in ancient Pompeii instead of his more customary locations of Silver Lake and Salinas, it will feature lots of togas and orgy scenes, he pledged.