Copious Notes

Timothy Hull, seen here with Allie Darden in the On the Verge production of "Another Part of the Forest" in May, will star as the Elf in Actors Guild of Lexington's production of "The SantaLand Diaries." Photo by Rich Copley.

Yes, Kentucky, there will be a Christmas production by Actors Guild of Lexington.

The troubled theater’s next show will be a site-specific staging of David Sedaris’ The SantaLand Diaries at the site of the former Portabella Restaurant on Locust Hill Drive. It will run Dec. 10 to 20.

The show comes in the wake of a stormy summer and uncertain fall for the theater, whose funding from LexArts was eliminated and whose top two directors resigned. LexArts cut the funding, which had been about $70,000 in recent years, saying it had concerns about the fiscal management and overall viability of the theater, Lexington’s only semi-professional stage troupe for adults.

The SantaLand Diaries is Actors Guild’s first production since Beguiled Again, a Rodgers and Hart musical revue that had a two-weekend run at the Downtown Arts Center in early fall. The season schedule that Actors Guild announced last spring was to include David Hare’s The Vertical Hour and, for the holidays, a one-man version of It’s a Wonderful Life.

Associate artistic director Eric Seale, currently the theater’s only paid staff member, said SantaLand is a signal that AGL will continue presenting shows.

“If people are wondering, ‘Is there an AGL?,’ Yes, there’s an AGL,” Seale said. “If they are wondering, ‘Are they putting on shows?,’ Yes, we’re putting on shows.”

He said the theater is not ready to announce any productions after SantaLand.

A site-specific production is staged in a venue that relates to the subject matter. It’s not a new concept and has been popular in Lexington in the past year. On the Verge Productions presented Lillian Hellman’s family dramas The Little Foxes and Another Part of the Forest in historic homes downtown.

SantaLand, a one-person show about a man who plays an elf in the Christmas display at Macy’s, will be presented in the vacant retail space formerly occupied by Portabella, next to the Kroger at Richmond Road and Man o’ War Boulevard.

It will star Tim Hull, an emerging Lexington actor who recently was in Another Part of the Forest. Co-directors will be Seale and Leif Erickson Rigney, an actor last seen in Studio Players’ production of The Unexpected Guest.

AGL previously staged SantaLand in 2004 at the Downtown Arts Center.

Seale said the site-specific nature of this fall’s production was an aesthetic decision inspired by ideas he had heard at theater conferences. He said AGL explored several retail-space options before settling on the old Portabella location.

The play, based on Sedaris’ 1992 essay, looks at how people try to find holiday happiness in retail experiences, including visiting a department-store Santa. Seale said the Portabella site will be done up like a mall-Santa display to make the show “an experience.”

Seale said he expects tickets to go on sale early next week through Actors Guild’s Web site, www.actorsguildoflexington.org, or by calling 1-866-811-4111.

Richard St. Peter is no longer working as the artistic director of Actors Guild of Lexington.

Now-departed Actors Guild of Lexington artistic director Richard St. Peter and managing director Kim Shaw, who remains in her job, at Actors Guild's new Manchester Street offices. Photos by Rich Copley | LexGo.com.

Two weeks ago, St. Peter had announced he was resigning and would leave by the end of the forthcoming season to work on a doctorate in theater. But Friday afternoon, St. Peter said that the financial strain of working without pay and the prospect of being a lame-duck director prompted him to go ahead and leave the organization.

He also said he believed removing his approximately $45,000 annual salary from the theater’s financial picture might help it recover from a loss of funding from LexArts. In June, the united arts fund declined to give the theater an annual allocation for general operating funds, citing concerns about the theater’s ongoing financial difficulties.

“I’ve got kids, and I need to find work,” said St. Peter, who said he has only received one partial paycheck since July 1.

Actors Guild board president Jennifer Miller said two weeks ago that theater employees had been working without pay so the theater could concentrate on settling accounts with outside vendors and other creditors.

In addition to St. Peter’s departure, which St. Peter said the board approved Monday, Actors Guild also lost Bo List as the director of its season-opening production, Beguiled Again, a show based on the music of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. List said in an e-mail, “the agreed-upon terms of my employment were changed dramatically after I began my work in a manner that was unsatisfactory.”

List has been replaced by Stephen Currens, a Lexingtonian who enjoyed Off-Broadway success with Gorey Stories, a musical based on the illustrations of Edward Gorey. He appeared in last season’s AGL production of The Fantasticks.

Eric Ryan Seale.

Beguiled Again has been moved back to Sept. 24-Oct. 11, and AGL associate artistic director Eric Ryan Seale said he is looking at how the date change will affect the remainder of AGL’s season. Seale said that the original dates had been set to accommodate an out-of-town director who had to bow out before List took on the show, and that the date change was partially responsible for List having to bow out.

List said, “I hope that Beguiled Again is the success that AGL needs right now and my best wishes are with the company.”

St. Peter is scheduled to direct Actors Guild’s second production, David Hare’s The Vertical Hour, and he said he still plans to do that.

St. Peter’s departure leaves Seale and AGL managing director Kim Shaw running the company. Despite the challenging nature of the theater, both said they were upbeat.

“Everybody has been picking up the slack,” Shaw said Friday afternoon. “Our first priority is to get Beguiled Again up.”

Seale said, “This is probably going to sound crazy, but I feel pretty good. I’m used to the catastrophe curve of theater, and I have a new office here on Manchester Street, and I like coming in to work every day.

“If people are willing to bear with this initial season postponement and any other season adjustments, we’re going to be fine.”

• Here’s our slide show from Studio Players’ production of John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation, which runs March 19-April 5 at the Carriage House Theatre, 154 W. Bell Court. Mouse over the bottom to get controls. Click on the little comment cloud to the left to activate captions. If you click on a photo, it will take you to a larger version of it at Picasa, and you can click the link at the bottom left for a larger version of the whole show.

Adam Luckey will star in "This Wonderful Life," a one-man version of "This Wonderful Life." Photo by Mark Cornelison | LexGo.

Actors Guild of Lexington has announced a five-show schedule for the 2009-10 season. It’s a lineup that will import a couple of familiar directors and give one of Lexington’s leading actors the stage all to himself at Christmastime.

• Beguiled Again: The Songs of Rodgers and Hart, music by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by Lorenz Hart; music arrangements by Craig D. Ames; conceived by J. Barry Lewis, Lynnette Barkley, and Craig D. Ames — Peggy Taphorn of Temple Theatre in Sanford, N.C., who directed Quilters and My Way for AGL, returns for a program of tunes by the Broadway duo including Blue Moon and My Funny Valentine. Sept. 10-27.
• The Vertical Hour by David Hare — Actors Guild artistic director Richard St. Peter directs this play about the meeting of two people with divergent views of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The Broadway production was directed by Sam Mendes and starred Julianne Moore and Bill Nighy. Oct. 15-Nov. 1.
• This Wonderful Life, by Steve Murray, conceived by Mark Setlock — Adam Luckey will star in this one-man show in which he plays all the characters from the Frank Capra classic It’s a Wonderful Life. Bob Singleton directs. Dec. 3-20.
  
• The New Century by Paul Rudnick — Bo List returns from Memphis to direct this fast-paced comedy from the writer of I Hate Hamlet. The characters include a wealthy Jewish matron, a flamboyant public access TV host and a Midwestern scrapbooker/competitive cake decorator. Feb. 11-28.
• What the Butler Saw by Joe Orton — AGL associate artistic director Eric Ryan Seale directs this risque, door-slamming comedy about a psychiatrist who tries to seduce his secretary. Somehow, Winston Churchill gets involved.  March 25-April 11.

For the coming season, the shows will run for three weekends on a Thursday through Sunday schedule at the Downtown Arts Center. The past several years, the theatre had been going on four-week runs Friday through Sundays.