Cooking up a comedy in Delaware(2)

From:The News Journal
By GARY MULLINAX

Regional theaters serve as launching pads

Professional regional theaters have originated Broadway shows increasingly in recent years. Money is one reason. Katz said he would need about $1.5 million to open the show on Broadway. Here he can do it for about $700,000.

Katz has a friend who knows Bill Shea, head of the Delaware Theatre Company board. The board liked the idea of taking on a co-production targeted for Broadway, but could come up only with part of the money required. This is a six-actor play, a large cast by Delaware Theatre Company standards. Katz's New York producer, Bill Haber, added "enrichment" money to complete the budget.

Haber is crucial to this production in more ways than one. He's the established Broadway producer whose name and connections can smooth the way for "Partners." Now the show does not have to lure a New York producer to come see it in Wilmington. The producer is already on board.

"Partners" will be the first Delaware Theatre Company production under new producing director Anne Marie Cammarato. She is overseeing the production from her own company's point of view.

"Credit for having a world premi鋨e carries a lot of weight in the theater world," she said. "It's great for our audiences to have an investment in a play that has a life beyond Wilmington."

But she is also mindful that regional theaters are sometimes criticized for emphasizing commercial projects like "Partners" at the expense of more high-minded productions.

"We have to find a balance within our season and occasionally we might find it within one play," she said.

Cammarato also pointed out that some in the Wilmington audience might find "Partners" a bit risqu? not just for the sex-change theme but also for copious use of the F-word.

"I don't think people are offended by 'The Odd Couple,' but this play they might be," she said.

Katz knows that's a risk. But he thinks the problem will disappear when people actually see the show. He noted that it is not about homosexuality. "Even for somebody a tad homophobic, it has nothing to do with that."

He also cited the experience of a Delaware Theatre Company board member.

"When she read the first draft, she was very vocal against it. She said she didn't know if they should open the season with a play with that language and that subject matter. But in the first couple of days after we got here we did a reading for the board, and she was laughing harder than anybody."

On the other hand, Katz is leery of too much laughing. He sounds like a man who doesn't want his play to be tagged with a "just like a sitcom" label.

"If a couple of stand-up comics were doing this, it might feel like wall-to-wall jokes," he said. "But these guys are seasoned actors who fill every moment of this thing. They make what might be read as a joke into reality. Some will be brought to tears."

Actors adapt to stage

Rosenberg and Ruginis attended the Yale School of Drama, and both left early. Rosenberg was five years ahead of Ruginis. They didn't meet until one day when Rosenberg was back in New Haven, Conn., to act in a play. He was eating a hamburger at a greasy spoon.

Says Rosenberger: "Vyto came up and said, 'You're Alan Rosenberg. I hear you dropped out of this [dump], too. You're my hero.' Then he was gone."

They met again on the soap opera "Ryan's Hope" during the mid-1980s. Rosenberg played the manager of a sleazy hotel, Ruginis played a pimp and Helgenberger - before she and Rosenberg married - played a policewoman undercover as a prostitute.

Rosenberg was eager to get back on stage in "Partners" after his years in television. "There are rewards in television, but they're mostly financial," he said. "In theater you get to go through a process from one point to a final point. You get to be flexible and learn from the audience every night."

Rosenberg and Ruginis are performing under a "favored nation" arrangement that pays them the same amount as other cast members.

Rosenberg was cast first, after Katz saw him play a comic role in a movie called "Frankie and Johnny Are Married," which is due at Wilmington's Theatre N on Sept. 27.

"I'd always liked him as an actor, but until then I didn't know he was capable of doing this comedic stuff," Katz said.

For the Jack/Jackie role, Rosenberger suggested his friend Vyto. Katz said he would have him read, but acknowledged last week that he did so only as a favor.

"I knew his work, but as a dramatic actor, a tough guy," Katz said. "You look on the Internet and find his picture and he looks like he's gonna eat his young. But he came in, he looked fabulous and he just blew us away.

"I told him he saved me a phone call to tell Alan your friend is really nice but not quite right for this."

In Wilmington, Rosenberg and Ruginis are rooming together - and not at some palatial Ch漮eau Country estate, either. Like all actors who work at the Delaware Theatre Company, they are staying at the Greenville Place apartment complex near the edge of Wilmington.

"It's just fine so far, but it's a little like being at camp," Rosenberg said. "It's been a long time since I've had a roommate and had to fend for myself. But it's good for character-building."

Ruginis was going to talk about his own experiences after Rosenberg, but he couldn't make it. He had an appointment in the wardrobe department, where he was being fitted for a dress.