San Diego Magazine / June 2005 / Beach Party Music

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Beach Party Music

ONCE UPON A TIME, San Diego theaters only occasionally sent plays to Broadway. Then it became yearly. Then twice yearly. And now it seems a rare month when something playing locally doesn’t have a national future. Our newest aspirant is La Jolla Playhouse’s world-premiere Palm Beach, the Screwball Musical, May 31–July 10 at the new Potiker Theatre.

The show, helmed by indefatigable Playhouse artistic director Des McAnuff, has a young creative team in a collaboration that could well be the first of many. Writer-lyricists Robert Cary and Benjamin Feldman and composer David Gursky became friends at Yale 15 years ago, then followed diverse career paths before teaming on this production. Mainly, Cary was a performer and screenwriter, Gursky a musical director and Feldman an entertainment attorney.

Besides Palm Beach, they’re cooperating on a musical theater adaptation of the film Heartbreakers, and Cary is working with Berry Gordy Jr. on a stage show using the Motown songbook. Obviously, Cary, who recently cowrote and directed the film Anything but Love, has a full plate. But as he points out, writing plays and films “is a long-haul process. They don’t all come to fruition at the same time.”

Palm Beach, for instance, resulted from an abridged workshop version done in a New York play festival in 2001. As Cary recalls, an agent liked it, then brought it to the attention of Shirley Fishman, Playhouse associate director and dramaturge. She recommended it to McAnuff. “We’re really grateful to them,” says Cary, “for getting this from script to production so fast.”

The story concerns a wealthy, powerful New York family vacationing in Florida. “They’re infiltrated by outsiders,” Cary says, “one of which is a broken-hearted showgirl hoping to marry into riches.” The fortune-hunter, however, soon finds the family’s glitter is not so golden, and the discoveries underscore the title’s “Screwball.” Although the songs and plot are intended to recall the comedies of the late 1930s, Cary says, “it is not in any way an homage. It’s a modern musical with Broadway-style songs and contemporary twists.”

“In the late ’30s,” Cary says, “the Hays Code was taking hold in movies, and the portrayals of sexual attraction had to become less direct. They began to be shown as verbal and physical sparring. That’s the way we’re doing it. Like the story, it has elements of hypocrisy with modern parallels.”

AS THE WEATHER WARMS, the outdoor-theater season gets hot. The Old Globe opens its Shakespeare Festival on the Lowell Davies Stage June 19, alternating three plays—The Comedy of Errors, Macbeth and The Winter’s Tale—in repertory. And our two musical stages, Starlight in Balboa Park and Moonlight in Vista’s Brengle Amphitheatre, start their seasons with distinctive offerings. Starlight is resurrecting a 1965 cult favorite, the Anthony Newley–Leslie Bricusse tuner The Roar of the Greasepaint, the Smell of the Crowd (June 23-26), while Moonlight is doing one of the first regional productions of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (June 22–July 9).

WHEN BROADWAY’S TONY AWARDS are presented June 5, San Diego will again be a presence. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, debuted in September at the Old Globe, got 11 nominations in the musical categories, including one for director Jack O’Brien. Among his competitors is Bartlett Sher (Light in the Piazza), who started his directing career with the San Diego Public Theatre in the early ’80s. Billy Crystal’s tour de force 700 Sundays, workshopped at La Jolla Playhouse in April 2004, was named in the special event category. And Sara Ramirez, nominated for her part in Spamalot, spent her formative years here, graduating from the San Diego School of Creative & Performing Arts.