SCR’s Season Features Old and Newman

A new Randy Newman musical will cap South Coast Repertory’s 1999-2000 season, which also will feature premieres by Howard Korder and Jose Rivera as well as the company’s first production of an August Wilson play.

The theater is announcing nine of the 11 shows that will make up the subscription season.

The Mainstage season so far:

* George Bernard Shaw’s “The Philanderer” (Sept. 10-Oct. 10), to be staged by SCR artistic director Martin Benson. This seldom-seen comedy was first published as part of Shaw’s “Plays Unpleasant” in 1898 but wasn’t performed until 1905.

* Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” (Oct. 22-Nov. 21), the Pulitzer Prize-winning play set in the ‘40s, about two siblings engaged in battle over a family heirloom.

* The premiere of Korder’s “The Hollow Lands” (Jan. 14-Feb. 13), which follows an Irish immigrant westward from Manhattan, beginning in 1815. Korder’s “Search and Destroy” was the first play South Coast produced in the ‘90s, and “Lands” will be the first of the year 2000. “Search and Destroy” won raves and awards for both the text and the staging by David Chambers, who’ll also direct this one. “It’s fortuitous that we will begin this decade as we did the last one, with a play from Howard Korder,” said South Coast producing artistic director David Emmes.

* “All My Sons” (Feb. 25-April 2), Arthur Miller’s modern classic about a World War II aircraft manufacturer and his postwar confrontation with his son, recently returned from the war. Benson will direct.

* “The Education of Randy Newman” (June 2, 2000-July 2), with old and new songs by the sardonic singer-songwriter-film composer Newman serving as the complete text, but also with a narrative overlay about a Newmanesque Everyman, from a Louisiana childhood through adult life in Los Angeles. Newman, South Coast’s dramaturge Jerry Patch and composer Michael Roth share the “conceived by” credit, but they cite the classic “The Education of Henry Adams” as their model. Newman’s last venture into musical theater, “Randy Newman’s Faust,” drew mixed reviews or worse at La Jolla Playhouse in 1995 but is being revised for a production next February at the Kennedy Center in Washington. In 1984, La Jolla presented a revue of Newman songs, “Maybe I’m Doing It Wrong,” which transferred later that year to a commercial run at the Roxy in West Hollywood.

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SCR’s Second Stage season so far:

* Sam Shepard’s “True West” (Sept. 24-Oct. 24), his frequently staged depiction of the evolution in the relationship between two brothers--one a screenwriter, the other a thief.

* The California premiere of John Olive’s “The Summer Moon” (Nov. 5-Dec. 5), about a Japanese executive who visits Long Beach in 1960 to test the U.S. marketplace for Japanese cars. Mark Rucker will direct. Olive’s best-known work is “The Voice of the Prairie.”

* The premiere of Jose Rivera’s “References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot” (March 10-April 9), a surrealistic fable about a soldier and his romantic wife, set in Barstow. L.A.-based Rivera is best known in the Southland for “Marisol” and “Cloud Tectonics” at La Jolla Playhouse, “The Promise” at Los Angeles Theatre Center and “The Street of the Sun” at the Mark Taper Forum.

* The premiere of Tom Don-

aghy’s “The Beginning of August” (April 28-May 28, 2000), about an American family in transition. Donaghy wrote 1997’s off-Broadway play “Minutes From the Blue Route.” This production will be in association with the Atlantic Theatre Company of New York.

South Coast also will present its traditional seasonal productions of “A Christmas Carol” and La Posada Magica,” though they’re not part of the subscription packages.

Season tickets sell for $126 to $255 for the Mainstage and $115 to $200 for the Second Stage. Information: (714) 708-5555.