Equus, presented by The Production Company, continues through Sept. 5. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street opens Sept. 18; plays Fri.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 3 pm; through Nov. 22. Tickets: $34. Chandler Studio Theatre, 12443 Chandler Blvd., North Hollywood; 800.838.3006 or theprodco.com
When August Viverito signed the lease in July 2007 for the 33-seat Chandler Studio Theatre in North Hollywood, he and his partner TL Kolman had just returned from a New York theatre trip. “We had seen the musical Spring Awakening,” Viverito recalls, “and the idea for our inaugural production was born: we would do the play by the same name that had inspired the new Broadway phenomenon. We opened Spring Awakening in late September. After a thousand phone calls, work calls with friends, our first season was in place: eight productions including two original works.”
Actor/teacher Michael Holmes had held the lease on the Chandler for 20 years. “Michael is old-school theatre of the highest order,” Viverito says. “There had been sporadic great productions but it had lately been used mostly for classes taught by Charles Nelson Reilly, Roscoe Lee Browne, Lu Leonard and many others. Our artistic sensibilities matched beautifully and when Michael announced he was ready to turn over the lease, I signed on the dotted line.”
August Viverito
In its first two years, The Production Company presented 15 plays, garnering seven Ovation Award nominations and eight LA Weekly Award nominations on budgets many companies toss to costumes alone, says Viverito. “My background won’t allow me to produce plays in an unsustainable way. If the play can’t sell tickets to pay its bills, we find a way to make it do so. I know a $25,000 set would be gorgeous but we have no arts funding or grants yet. Although a group of individuals has donated cash to us along the way, that total is very small. The Production Company operates in the black because we make it so. I think great art can indeed be bare-bones so long as it is invested with passion. Passion we’ve got in abundance.”
The current production, Peter Shaffer’s Equus, has extended to Sept. 5. The next show, the Steven Sondheim/Hugh Wheeler musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, directed by Derek Charles Livingston, opens Sept. 18. “Sweeney Todd is a fully-realized, new incarnation,” Viverito says. “Hal Prince’s original version in the cavernous Uris Theatre was done representationally with stairs and boxes rolled around to suggest locale. Ours will be scaled down but every moment and scene will be there including restoring Judge Turpin’s lament. Derek is a director I admire for his skill and humanity so I have nothing but confidence in his ability to pull this off. Plus, our Musical Director is Richard Berent and the cast is truly top-notch. I think Sweeney is going to startle.”
Viverito is originally from Baltimore, “a little neighborhood called Highlandtown,” he describes, “which borders the community of Canton from which John Waters drew many of his characters and discovered Divine running her thrift shop. We lived in one of those row-after-row identical homes with white marble steps; ours was a corner house which meant it had a store front. My dad (August, Sr.) had a mad scientist-meets-entrepreneur nature so he opened a succession of businesses there including a corner grocery and a print shop. I think I got my business sense watching him turn nothing into something.”
His first acting venture was in an NEA-sponsored summer theatre program. He was then accepted to the theatre program at Towson State University where the NEA had created another arts/work program at the Morris Mechanic Theatre. He says, “I got an NEA position which paid a whopping $6,880 per year to work in quarterly blocks in theatre administration, house management, backstage and box office. A New York group called Theatre Now was producing a tour of The Me Nobody Knows and I was the stand-in for an unknown young lady named Tisha Campbell, who was around eight at the time. Tisha was sick a few days and yes, I sang her songs.”
He joined forces with Baltimore County Dept. of Recreation & Parks and turned a donated abandoned mansion into The McCormick House Theatre. “I was Chairman of the Theatre Board at age 17. The Theatre Now producers and stage manager really took me under their wings; when I announced I was moving to New York, they set me up as assistant house manager at Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village for a fantastic run of Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein starring the brilliant Pat Carroll.”
He continued acting and singing for several years in New York while developing his taste in theatre. “I saw a lot of great work come out of some of the tightest budgets and ramshackle theatres. I was cast as the title role in All American Boy, a promising new musical that unfortunately lacked producer/writer vision and faded away before its time. And I learned about important theatre and how to do it under challenging circumstances.”
Viverito relocated to LA where he met his life partner, actor/director TL Kolman. They both joined West Coast Ensemble and later the Attic Theatre. Eventually Kolman became its managing director and Viverito artistic director. “I talked my way into the job,” he says, “bringing its waning membership back from the brink and producing a string of money-making shows. I met Gregory Blair who was really good at writing to spec. One crazy morning, I talked him into writing a new adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby. He, TL and I produced it; I directed. We rented the Complex and got a beautiful cast. The eight week run in 2006 was brilliant and I was once again invested in creating great theatre. The Production Company was born. Next TL and I joined with Hutchins Foster and Michael Shepperd to mount John Gay’s mournfully beautiful Oscar Wilde: Diversions and Delights. If I couldn’t act anymore, I could apparently direct.”
He left the Attic for more artistic freedom and looked at available theatres for a single-show rental which is how he found the Chandler. The choice of material is significant. He says, “A dear old director friend once told me, ‘If I want to deliver a message, I’ll send a telegram.’ I couldn’t agree less. If I can’t at least make people think about the human condition and the consequences of our actions, then I don’t need to do this. The theatre is my pulpit and I try to speak on diverse and disparate topics. The result has been those of like mind who recognize great writing and important messages have joined forces with TL and me. Our talent pool for such a tiny theatre is unprecedented because of the plays we choose. The works draw the best stage artists to us and the experience is astounding. Sometimes I meet directors of like mind and ask them to pitch me their pet project. If I like it, we do it and the passion those directors bring in is far beyond that of most directors you assign to a play. Then of course, TL and I select plays for us to do as well.”
Viverito says the seating capacity at the Chandler is a challenge. “I have been to great shows at theatres with seven people in the audience. I minimize expenses and maximize the ’sell-out’ factor with my 33 seats. Side result: the actors are inspired by a full house regardless of the actual seat count. But how do I pay for the show? The simplest answer is vigilant management but in all honesty there’s a fair measure of work from individuals. In the course of my acting career, I became a waiter (surprise!) and then I started working as a restaurant manager. In the years between moving to LA and starting The Production Company, I was promoted to Director of Operations for the corporation that owned Johnny Rockets. One thing that industry teaches you is how to predict what your patrons want and be sure to count the pennies; the dollars will follow. Never sell anything for less than what it costs you. So I study play availability, staffing possibilities, ‘hooks’ (like doing the play version of Spring Awakening while the Broadway musical was sizzling) and costs against likely audience draw. In a nutshell, I balance the budget.
“At least equally important, in my view, I refuse to go dark. When the financial downturn became evident in funding, the NEA was quoted as saying the thing you absolutely do not want to do is cut programming. That was great advice so long as you are clever about it. You need the weeks to build momentum so rather than cut productions, I looked at the track record. Shows had weak houses the first few Sunday matinees so I saved substantial losses by trimming just those performances. The result was stronger houses for the rest of the run and reduced expenses without dropping productions or shortening the number of weeks. That said, you can’t let quality slip; we are in the trenches with the production team ensuring that. I believe the right cast and director can make a black box version of nearly any play equal to or greater than a larger production. I honestly think some plays are substantially more powerful stripped down in the hands of great stage artists.”
Viverito has attempted to interest other theatres in moving his productions. “I am dying to do a co-op with another company that extends the show indefinitely. I tried that with Breaking the Code [done prior to Equus]. I welcome a co-production in the future. I’ve looked into producing an unlimited extension on ‘the other side of the hill’ but many theatres are renting at prohibitive rates. I have had more than one play with a cast so strong I reached out to the larger venues in town to take a look. I’ve even offered my part of the production for free but it is hard to get a return call, much less a serious look. I dream of a day when the larger stages have a genuine program for submission and evaluation of the great work done on some smaller stages that supports this as a matter of course. Can you imagine if being in a great hit show meant you were at least considered for a major production? What a turnaround that would be for companies in LA.”
Patrick Stafford and Jim Hanna
When scheduling a season Viverito asks directors to suggest their pet projects. “I find the result can be amazing so I am always planning the future. With so many productions a year, I decided to utilize flexibility in my programming to reflect the times, tastes and ever-changing availability of plays. LA is one of a few major markets where ‘hot’ plays are not available because there remains hope of a major production. Equus is the prime example of this. It was unavailable in LA until the Broadway revival closed. When the rights became available I jumped on it. That pushed my existing season around a bit.”
As a result, Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive, directed by Viverito, will open in January instead of November. In March, Sam R. Ross will direct The Diviners by Jim Leonard, Jr. Says Viverito, “If you’ll allow me the caveat that our season is fluid, I am currently planning Copenhagen, then a classic and our next musical, both to be announced soon. Two shows I have not yet been able to get the rights to that I love are The Pillowman and the musical See What I Wanna See by Michael John LaChiusa based on three short stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. I’m working on it.
“I love theatre as an art form. Clichéd but true. I think it is the actor’s medium and I have respect for the skill it takes to bring emotion to every moment of every performance. The power is undeniable when it works. I think it is not only my right but my responsibility to start conversations about difficult topics so we as viewers can know new sides of old subjects. I also love succeeding as a businessman. What do I aspire to in Los Angeles theatre? I’d like to run Center Theatre Group and use it as a platform for developing local productions upwardly. Oh yes, did I mention I have a bad habit of answering candidly?”
Feature and story images by TL Kolman
