A Good Thing Comes in a Small Package : Theater: ‘Forever Plaid,’ a modest four-man musical that has broken all box office records at the Old Globe Theatre, proves that small musicals can outsell the big spectaculars.

It’s just a show about four guys doing four-part harmony with a piano and a bass player, but “Forever Plaid” has broken all records at the Old Globe box office--so much so that, after the sold-out show closes Aug. 25, the Globe will bring back the awesome foursome Nov. 1-24. It also will leave the stage open through the first week in January in case further extensions are required.

It’s the biggest success to date for this wildly successful story of how four hopelessly square guys, who sang ‘50s tunes up until their untimely death in 1964, are brought back to life for one last concert. “Forever Plaid” is now playing Off-Broadway, in St. Louis and in Washington, where the Plaids recently gave a command performance for the White House.

Old Globe Managing Director Thomas Hall said the Globe is negotiating with creator-director Stuart Ross to help produce the show in other venues--possibly in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Vancouver.

But “Forever Plaid” may be less a phenomenon in itself than it is a signal that in a time of rising costs, small musicals with one or just a handful of musical accompanists are going to be in big demand at regional theaters, where they are more likely to turn a profit than larger musicals.

At the Old Globe, “Forever Plaid,” which has sold 97% of each performance since previews, is projected to gross $639,888 for the 50 performances that end on the initial Aug. 25 closing date.

And that’s for a show that costs one fifth of what it cost the Old Globe to produce Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods”--a lavish retelling of fairy tales with a cast of 18 and full orchestra. Even with its eventual Broadway run, “Into the Woods” never broke even for the Globe.

“We could have sold every single seat in the (Globe) theater, and it never would have broken even,” Hall said.

“If any small production delivers as much to the audience as a big production, it’s always going to be a much better business proposition. More and more, the traditional American musical is becoming harder and harder to realize from the financial point of view and because audiences are no longer really accepting of the traditional old-fashioned kind of ‘Kiss Me Kate’ musicals.”

That’s not to say that some big musicals can’t still pull in the crowds that make the big expenses work. Look at the numbers for “Les Miserables,” a July San Diego Playgoers presentation which grossed $1,819,997 million in a two-week San Diego run, a record for theatrical productions presented at the Civic and a record for “Les Miz” productions nationwide.

Still, these figures for “Les Miz”--a mega-musical which is capitalized at $4.2 million--are highly unusual. “Most of the Broadway musicals, when they come to town, gross more in the $400,000 to $500,000 range for a week,” San Diego Civic Theatre assistant general manager Bill McElrath said.

Not only are big Broadway mega-hits like “Les Miz,” “Phantom of the Opera” and “Miss Saigon” not available for regional theater productions, they also don’t make financial sense for regional theater budgets.

“There was an $8-million physical renovation done to the Ahmanson (Theatre in Los Angeles) just to get ‘Phantom’ in. That’s our entire annual budget,” Hall said. “That’s a scale of musical that not only doesn’t fit our stage, but with only 600 seats, we can never make it back.”

Not all small musicals make money. “Six Women With Brain Death or Expiring Minds Want to Know” did not achieve the success in any other city that it did in the local Rep production. Independent producer James A. Strait, noting the success of “Six Women,” poured his own savings into a production of the five-woman show “Nunsense” that lost money after a 3 1/2-month run of 92 performances that played to 6,000 people. Hall still winces at the very mention of “Romance/Romance” which was neither an artistic nor box office success at the Globe in 1989.

Some big musicals do very well. The La Jolla Playhouse’s biggest successes are big musicals like “Big River,” “80 Days” and “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” Hopes are high for the Playhouse’s upcoming production of the musical “Elmer Gantry.”

But extra financial support is needed for such ventures.

“We do the big musicals when we have the enhancement money. We would not be able to capitalize that on our own,” a Playhouse spokeswoman said. “But, while we look at cost, that’s not our only consideration. If there’s a trend, we’re likely to buck it.”

But there does seem to be a trend.

Starlight Musical Theatre, which produces an entire season of large musicals, ran into the red and had to dip into its surplus for the third time in three years this year. Starlight Executive Director C.E. Bud Franks attributes part of the problem to the rising cost of producing large musicals and part to the absence of new musicals that will pique the interest and support of new audiences.

“There’s little new product except for the small musicals and the big spectacles that keep touring and touring and touring,” Franks said. “We need to have full-blown musicals in the Bowl. But people (composers) don’t think in terms of big full-blown musicals anymore because they think that, unless it is a huge spectacle done by people like Lloyd Webber, it’s unlikely that you can do it. So they think of a six-person cast with a chorus of eight. That’s the Off Broadway theater. But we believe people still want to see spectacle--they want to see the big shows with a chorus of 24 and a lot of dancers. That’s a fact of life.”

But even medium-size musicals struggle to break even. Just compare the “Plaid” returns to the popular San Diego Repertory Theatre production of “The Rocky Horror Show,” with its cast of 14 and band of five. With 77 performances and about 30,000 tickets sold by its closing last Sunday, the show generated much audience support for the deficit-strained theater over a nearly three-month run, but broke even at best.

That’s not the Rep’s fault; the Woolly Mammoth Theatre in Washington ran “The Rocky Horror Show” for its own record-breaking six-month run and, because of high overhead, it made some money, but “not tons,” according Nancy Hensley, the company’s producing associate.

The Rep has had its own success with small musicals; the longest running show in San Diego history and the one that helped pull the Rep out of its 1987 financial crisis was “Six Women With Brain Death or Expiring Minds Want to Know.” With a six-woman cast, a four-piece band and a run that lasted a year and nine months for well over 500 performances and played to more than 100,000 patrons.

For the Old Globe, the biggest main stage box office bonanzas before “Forever Plaid” are “Suds,” a four-person musical that grossed $627,919 for 59 performances and “Pump Boys and Dinettes,” a six-person musical that grossed $462,169 for 50 performances before it went on for an extended run at San Diego State University. In the smaller Cassius Carter Centre Stage, a one-woman musical, “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill” as well as a five-woman revue, “A . . . My Name is Alice” were also runaway hits.

Lamb’s Players Theatre, which scored one of its biggest hits with its six-person “Godspell,” always puts at least one small musical in the season every year and already has one new one in the works for next season called “Smoke on the Mountain.”

“Musicals are generally more successful for us than anything else” Lamb’s Artistic Director Robert Smyth said. “When we do musicals, we automatically put an extra week on, because they sell better.”

At the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company, small musicals like “The Wonder Years” and “Party of One” have done very well at the box office, according to Producing Director Kit Goldman.

It was evidence of the success of these shows that led Gordon Cantiello, the artistic director of the new Theatre in Old Town company to build a whole season around small musicals. He hopes small budget shows like “Starting Here, Starting Now,” “Side by Side by Sondheim,” “Beehive” and “I Do, I Do!” will give his new company a firm foothold in San Diego.

“We’re starting out with a modest budget and in terms of what shows I can do given our state in terms of money and yet be very successful, I chose small musicals. It’s really kind of a calculated season,” Cantiello said.

Cantiello is not alone in his calculations.

Hall said he is completing negotiations for the world premiere of a small musical for next season at the Globe.

“Given two musicals of equal artistic merit, one larger than the other, certainly we would choose to do the smaller one,” Hall said. “When you’ve got a limited budget and limited personnel it becomes quite stressful to do ‘Into the Woods,’ so we try not to do more than one a year.”