A Cause for Celebration’s New Director

Celebration Theatre, the Southland’s foremost gay and lesbian company, has a new artistic director, Derek Charles Livingston, whose first production, “The Queer Nutcracker,” opens Thursday.

Livingston, 32, hopes to raise the profile of Celebration within gay and lesbian circles so that it draws ongoing institutional support instead of relying on the success of particular shows, he said. He cited East West Players’ relationship with the Asian American community as a model. He also hopes to establish greater ties between Celebration and the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center.

After “Queer Nutcracker,” a lighthearted revue by Adam Bock that Livingston hopes will become an annual holiday tradition, the theater will open a new Guillermo Reyes work, “Sirena: Queen of the Tango,” in February.

Livingston, an Angeleno for only two years, is a graduate film student at UCLA. He acted in “Love! Valour! Compassion!” at the Attic Theatre in Hollywood and has experience as a political activist, as well as an actor and director, in the East and South.

MORRIS MOVES: Jeremiah Morris, until recently the artistic director of El Portal Center for the Arts, is the new executive/artistic director of the West Coast Jewish Theatre.

Although the company has concentrated in the past on readings, it plans to launch full productions during 2001 in a 445-seat theater at West L.A. College in Culver City, with Actors’ Equity arrangements still to be negotiated. The first production will be Ira Levin’s “Cantorial,” which Morris directed in 1991 and 1992 for Actors Alley, the company that’s now based at El Portal.

WHERE’S FUDDY?: Every year, American Theatre magazine publishes a list of the 10 most frequently produced plays at resident theaters nationwide (other than Shakespeare and “A Christmas Carol”), based on the theaters’ announced seasons. It’s always interesting to see if Southern California theatergoers are seeing the same shows that will be widely available in the rest of America.

Some playwrights are eager for their work to be seen in the environs of Hollywood as soon as possible, but other playwrights hesitate to offer their work to local companies for that very reason--they want to have as much control as possible over any production that might be seen by Hollywood industry types.

At any rate, this year’s list is remarkably devoid of plays that have not been seen or are not scheduled to be seen in this area. Indeed, only one play on the list--David Lindsay-Abaire’s “Fuddy Meers,” which is tied for sixth place on the list--still has no Southland production lined up. However, South Coast Repertory will present the premiere of the same playwright’s “Kimberly Akimbo” next April.

At the top of the magazine’s list were--no surprises here--”Art,” “Wit” and “Side Man,” in that order.

WAS IT SOMETHING WE SAID? Brian Dennehy, on the Chicago theater audience, in a New York Times article last week: “It’s an audience that truly understands and appreciates and participates in the theatrical experience. You don’t get that in other places. I just finished a run in Los Angeles, and you can tell that a good part of the audience there just doesn’t get the whole idea of what we’re doing.”

Gee, when I saw Dennehy in “Death of a Salesman” at a Thursday matinee at the Ahmanson Theatre, the packed audience seemed vitally tuned in to every moment of the production--more than I would have thought possible for a non-musical in such a large theater.

To find out which city’s audiences were really paying the most attention to Willy Loman’s plight, perhaps Dennehy should have given pop quizzes after each performance.