Santa Barbara Festival Plans S.F. Visits; Discovery Series Begins Monday in Pasadena

The Santa Barbara Theatre Festival will spend more time in San Francisco than in Santa Barbara this season.

The festival will export three productions--including the “She Loves Me” that played Santa Barbara and the Ahmanson last year--to San Francisco’s Geary Theatre, winter home of the American Conservatory Theatre.

But Southland audiences need not go north, or at least that far north, to see the festival.

The season begins Friday in Santa Barbara, at the Lobero Theatre, with a production of “Sammy Cahn: Words and Music.” This one played San Francisco last spring, winning two Bay Area Critics Circle awards. It continues at the Lobero through April 17.

Next up will be Donna McKechnie in a production of Irving Berlin’s “Annie Get Your Gun” playing the Lobero May 10-22 and the Geary June 9-July 3.

The final show will feature Jo Anne Worley as Lucy Van Pelt in “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” June 14-26 at the Lobero and July 7-31 at the Geary, to be followed Aug. 4-28 by the hit of last year’s festival: “She Loves Me” (playing only at the Geary).

Joel Higgins will repeat his performance in “She Loves Me,” though Pam Dawber may not be able to return as his leading lady.

DISCOVERING WRITERS: The Pasadena Playhouse is offering a four-part play-reading Discovery Series to be launched Monday with Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey’s adaptation of her novel, “Joanna’s Husband and David’s Wife.” Participating will be Richard Lenz and Kendall Hailey, daughter of the author and the writer of the recently published “How I Became an Autodidact.” Bill Cort, a Playhouse alumnus, directs.

Next on the series will be Bernard Slade’s “Return Engagements” on May 23, a comedy spanning 20 years of life in a small hotel that services a Canadian summer Shakespeare festival. “Noble Adjustments” by Pulitzer Prize-winner D. L. Coburn (“The Gin Game”) follows July 11. This one’s a drama about a young man’s attempt to go home again. And the series will be capped Aug. 24 with the reading--playing? singing?--of a new musical. Details to come.

Cost of the series is $40 (subscribers get in at half-price). For information call (818) 356-SHOW.

Also announced for the Playhouse’s main stage season is the casting of Rebecca De Mornay and Ron Leibman in the first major West coast revival of Garson Kanin’s “Born Yesterday” in a decade.

De Mornay was seen most recently in Roger Vadim’s “And God Created Woman.” Leibman drew plenty of attention cavorting in the title role in “Tartuffe” at the Los Angeles Theatre Center in 1986. “Born Yesterday” begins previews June 16 and opens June 26.

SWITCHEROO: Sharon Ott, artistic director of the Berkeley Repertory Company, will be directing Wedekind’s “Lulu” at the La Jolla Playhouse this summer, not Mark Lamos as previously announced.

Lamos, who just scored a hit with his staging of O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms” at Moscow’s Pushkin Theatre, had to bow out due to commitments at his own Connecticut-based Hartford Stage Company. He’s mounting a new production of the “School for Wives” that he’d directed at La Jolla last summer.

“Lulu” opens July 10.

THEATERFEST 1988: Two musical revivals are the most intriguing items on PCPA Theatrefest’s upcoming summer schedule.

The festival, with theaters in Solvang and Santa Maria, will mark Superman’s 50th birthday with the first large-theater Southern California production of “It’s a Bird . . . It’s a Plane . . . It’s Superman!,” opening July 1. The other musical is Stephen Sondheim’s challenging “Sweeney Todd,” with festival artistic director Jack Shouse staging it for a July 15 opening.

Other shows include a remounting of a March staging of “Pump Boys and Dinettes” (opening June 3); Eric Overmyer’s “On the Verge, or the Geography of Yearning” (June 10); John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” (July 1), and Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” (July 15), to be directed by Ken Albers, associate artistic director of the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre.

“Superman!” arrives 22 years after its Broadway premiere and seven years after an Equity Waiver production in Hollywood which was billed as the West Coast premiere. Charles Strouse wrote the music, Lee Adams the lyrics, and David Newman and Robert Benton collaborated on the book.

Brad Carroll will direct. And all of the flying will be done by Flying by Foy. The shows will play in repertory through Sept. 17.

PIECES AND BITS: As a benefit for the Padua Hills Playwrights’ Workshop, John Patrick Shanley (who wrote “Savage in Limbo” and “Danny and the Deep Blue” both seen last year at the Cast Theatre, long before he was “Moonstruck”), will speak on writing Sunday, 2 p.m. at Plummer Park’s Fiesta Hall in Hollywood. Admission is $20, first come, first served. . . .

Stan Wells is now the revue director for those comedy zanies of Hollywood, the Groundlings. Founding member Tom Maxwell continues as artistic director, a post he’s held since 1979. . . .

A gift of $15,750 from Citicorp has launched the third season of downtown’s outdoor Shakespeare Festival/LA, where admission is a donation of nonperishable essentials to benefit the needy. The festival will offer “The Comedy of Errors” on Citicorp Plaza this summer and hopes to raise a total of $50,000 with which to do it. . . .

Rita Moreno and Cesar Romero are the recipients of 1988 Bilingual Foundation for the Arts “El Angel” awards. They will receive them at the Ole L.A. banquet to be held Cinco de Mayo--May 5--at the Biltmore Hotel.