40 years? It seems like only yesterday

Tom Titus

With South Coast Repertory logging its 40th season and both the Costa

Mesa Civic Playhouse and UC Irvine’s drama department poised to do

the same this year, it occurs to me that -- since I chronicled the

birth of all three of these local organizations -- this column also

has reached the big 4-0.

It certainly doesn’t seem that long since a fellow Daily Pilot

reporter offered me a pair of tickets to a local community theater

production and asked if I’d like to write a review of it. But since

the year was 1965 and the leading actor in that show -- “A Thousand

Clowns” at the old Laguna Playhouse -- was a young Mike Farrell (late

of “M*A*S*H” and “Providence”), it seems that four decades’ worth of

greasepaint has, indeed, washed under the proverbial bridge.

For me, it was a case of being in the right place at the right

time. I’d developed a fondness for the theater during my last year

and a half in the Army -- having been stationed in New Jersey, about

an hour’s drive from Manhattan, where the USO offered free theater

tickets to Broadway and off-Broadway attractions as well as movies

and ball games.

I took advantage of more than 100 of them, and when I arrived in

California, and signed on at the Pilot in December of 1963, local

theater was waiting in the wings, just about to burst forth.

Shortly after that first review, I had a visit from a young fellow

named David Emmes, who was starting a theater group with some of his

buddies from San Francisco State and asked if I could give them a

little ink.

Well, that group was South Coast Rep, and I caught that first

production (“Tartuffe,” also at the old Laguna Playhouse) and have

reviewed every South Coast Repertory show since then -- 396 with next

weekend’s opening of “The Clean House,” and counting. Needless to

say, I’ve given them quite a bit of ink over the past four decades.

The Civic Playhouse was launched that same year in a World War

II-era auditorium on the Orange County Fairgrounds, as was my

personal involvement in community theater. I played a minor role in

the playhouse’s first production, “Send Me No Flowers,” and went on

to act in and direct local shows, particularly during a 31-year stint

as artistic director of the Irvine Community Theater, for the next 38

years, until two years ago when I declared a temporary hiatus.

Also materializing in 1965 was UC Irvine and its drama department,

headed by a young professor fresh out of Yale, Robert Cohen, who

still directs a show or two at UC Irvine each season. Cohen has

inspired a plethora of now-professional performers, such as Bob

Gunton, who went forth to create the role of Juan Peron in “Evita”

and has been seen on the popular TV show “Desperate Housewives.”

Fifteen years later, in 1980, another local playhouse was born --

the Newport Theater Arts Center -- which marks its silver anniversary

this year.

I was privileged to direct three shows for that group, although

the last one was 20 years ago. Time does, indeed, fly.

Orange Coast College’s theater department probably is the oldest

continuously producing organization locally -- next to Laguna’s,

which switched from community to professional operations 15 years ago

-- having started its activity in 1956. The big, splashy summer

musicals in the Robert B. Moore Theater are a thing of the past, but

Orange Coast’s Drama Lab Theater offers some entertaining fare, which

is not limited to student participation. (I’ve acted in two of their

shows.)

The adjacent Studio Theater serves as a proving ground for

career-minded theater students.

Just walking distance from Orange Coast College was Southern

California College, now known as Vanguard University, which also

offers a fine theater program and is primed for expansion. Look for a

summer stock-type operation there soon, as well as a remodeling of

the school’s Lyceum Theater stage.

We’ve had a few performing groups that have come and gone in the

past 40 years -- Newport Harbor Actors Theater, Backstage Theater,

Trilogy Playhouse -- but the above-mentioned troupes have grown and

endured, and in the case of South Coast Repertory, have thrived.

The elaborate two-theater complex on Town Center Drive is a far

cry from the converted marine swap shop on Newport’s Villa Way, where

operations began in March of 1965.

Costa Mesa really became the “City of the Arts” back in 1978, when

South Coast Rep, freshly ensconced in Town Center, got a new neighbor

-- the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

This state-of-the-art showplace has hosted some elaborate touring

productions for the past quarter century and soon will offer an

extended engagement of “The Lion King.”

For an incurable theater junkie, this is the ideal place to be,

and it was particularly fortuitous to get in on the ground floor of

the local live theater movement. It’ll be interesting to see what the

next 40 years will bring.

* TOM TITUS reviews local theater for the Daily Pilot. His reviews

appear Fridays.