Barry Gordon, Gary Lamb, Marisa Chandler, and Hoyt Hilsman. [Courtesy photo]
“A Complete History of The American Musical.. in 90 minutes or less” was conceived and written by Barry Gordon and Gary B. Lamb, the company’s new co-artistic directors. Lamb directs. Gordon handles musical direction and narrates in character as a professor teaching a community theater class the script calls PNCC — Parson’s Nose Community College. Lloyd Cooper is musical accompanist and arranger.
The show runs Saturdays, Sept. 12, 19 and 26 at 7 p.m., and Sundays, Sept. 13, 20 and 27 at 3 p.m.
The premise began as a course outline. Gordon wrote a syllabus for a musical theater history class he wanted to teach at Cal State LA, and it never became a class. “And it was actually that syllabus that became the base, the foundation for our review,” he said in an interview with Lamb this month. The two staged it first as a theater fundraiser about eight years ago and have revised it since. A version played the same room in May 2023.
The arithmetic is the problem the show is built around. The theater’s own copy describes a journey starting 200 years ago and reaching the present, taking in Cohan, Berlin, Rodgers and Hammerstein and Sondheim. Gordon said the pair gave up on completeness early. “It’s more about we focused on the cultural, social and musical changes that happened during each of these periods,” he said, choosing songs that exemplified each shift rather than trying to include every well-loved show, “because that would have been 90 hours, not 90 minutes.”
Neither director could give a firm count of the songs. Lamb said he had tallied “about 79 different snippets of musical theater songs in our show, and that might leaving out three or four,” putting the range at 80 to 83. Gordon offered a different figure from his own materials: “the count on my audio references I think is 87.” Some run a full verse and chorus, some a chorus, some a single line. Medleys carry the eras that would otherwise swallow the clock — one for Sondheim, one for the golden-era writers. Gordon wrote the medleys and the connective material between songs, and the two wrote the narration together.
Gordon said the comedy is aimed at the periods rather than the music. “It doesn’t make fun of the songs in any way, but we find humor about talking about these different eras, these different periods,” he said. His own assignment, he said, is to “go as fast as I can without anybody losing the thread.” Two singers were added for this staging, bringing the ensemble to nine performers alongside Gordon. “I think it’s really going to be the way we always kind of envisioned it, but never quite got to do,” he said.
The leadership arrangement took its current shape only recently. In April the company said it would carry on under Gordon. When the question described the new leadership as three directors working with volunteers, Lamb interrupted to reject the premise. “It really is a foursome that is bringing this together,” he said. “And the person who really made this happen was Marisa Chandler Jameson. And she’s the one who brought us all together to create this group.” He added: “Marissa was the driving force.”
Gordon described what happened when Davis stepped back to concentrate on the company’s audio drama division. It was Chandler, he said, who argued the theater could not be allowed to close. “We can’t let this die. We have a wonderful theater. We have a wonderful audience base that comes back time after time,” he said, recounting her position, and added that “she gets all the credit in the world for that.”
The theater’s staff page lists four: Lamb and Gordon as co-artistic directors, Hoyt Hilsman as managing director and Chandler as associate managing director, with Davis as co-founder and director of the audio dramas division. Chandler is also performing in the show, shooting its rehearsal photographs and running the company’s social media accounts. The first full-cast rehearsal was held Aug. 26.
Underneath the personnel question is a working one the company has not settled. Since the pandemic Parson’s Nose has produced mostly staged readings and reader’s theater, and the season Lamb describes deliberately mixes those with full productions as a step back toward the latter. He draws a distinction he wants kept. “Reader’s Theater is an actual production, but done with scripts in hand,” he said — props, sets, lighting, and a script in the actor’s hand. Rehearsed properly, he argued, the scripts stop registering: “their mind starts to forget about the scripts in the hands and they really get involved in the stories.”
The company told the California Arts Council it intended to return to three fully staged productions a season beginning in 2025-2026, its first since 2019. Gordon said audiences have pushed in both directions, some preferring what reader’s theater leaves to the imagination and others asking for full productions, and that the room sets the ceiling either way. and that the room sets the ceiling either way: “our theater is small. It’s always going to be minimalist, but with some costumes and a couple of set pieces, we can do a lot.”
Lamb tied the running time to what the house has always sold. Cutting classics down and making them clear was the company’s signature, he said, and the standard for every title this season, he said, is that “you’re in and you’re out within two hours” — the show, a short curtain speech, one intermission.
Seven mainstage productions follow the opener, along with two special events. The New Plays Project runs Aug. 30-31; “A Nightmare on Poe Street,” billed as a reader’s theater production, Oct. 17-25; “Shakespeare On Love,” Nov. 7-22; “A Christmas Carol,” Dec. 12-20; The Women’s Project, Jan. 24-25; “An American Slave: Frederick Douglass in his own words,” Feb. 6-21; “The Butter and Egg Man,” March 20 to April 4; and “Rumpelstiltskin!,” billed as a world premiere family musical, May 8-23.
Gordon was frank about the constraint behind the programming. that “none of us are getting any younger,” and that “the core of our company are people that have been doing this work for 40 years and doing it brilliantly. We want to keep that core, but we want to build on it.” The company began a Latinx reading series in 2024-2025 with the Amapalo players, and Gordon said the aim is “a Parsons Nose for the 21st century that honors everything that Lance and Mary started.” He said the theater drew a younger audience last season, on balance, than in the past. Lamb guessed the cast of the current show is the youngest by average age at Parson’s Nose in about a decade.
Both men landed on the same argument for live performance from different directions. Gordon cited what he had heard about younger audiences returning to movie theaters: “people want the sense that they’re part of a community and an audience is a community.” Lamb credited pickleball with getting him out of the house during the pandemic and expects a broader correction. that “one of the things that got me out of my house and mixing with other people during the pandemic was pickleball.” He added: “I think theater is going to have this really great renaissance happen because of it.”
The two came to the work from opposite ends. Gordon, born in 1948, began performing at three, placed second on Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour singing Johnnie Ray’s “Cry,” and recorded the novelty record “Nuttin’ for Christmas” at six; it sold over 2 million copies. At 14, in 1963, he was nominated for a Tony Award for the Broadway production of “A Thousand Clowns,” and he repeated the role in the film. He was the original voice of Donatello in the animated “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.” He succeeded Patty Duke, whom he had known at New York’s Professional Children’s School, as president of the Screen Actors Guild in 1988, and held the office until July 1995, when he resigned to prepare a run for Congress. By his own account his first musical came at eight, in San Francisco: the 1957 Los Angeles Civic Light Opera staging of Irving Berlin’s “Annie Get Your Gun,” which starred Mary Martin and John Raitt. “I’ve been in love with musical theater, oh my gosh, probably since I was four or five years old,” he said.
He has never run a theater. “I have never been an artistic director or a co-artistic director or an assistant artistic director,” he said. Lamb has been doing it since he was 20, when he started his first company in Chicago; he began acting at 14 and songwriting at 13. In Los Angeles he founded La Petite Musicale, which became Crown City Theatre Company in North Hollywood, run with William A. Reilly. He arrived at Parson’s Nose sideways, after a company member named James Calvert passed his name to Davis, who offered him a role.
The division of labor follows from that. Gordon said that “my area, particularly in this show, is the music. I wrote the medleys, I wrote the way songs connect to each other.” Lamb takes the set and the lights. They have also co-written a full-length musical, “Forever.”
Lamb offered the stools as the illustration. He had planned tall stools for the revue; Gordon had assumed chairs. Lamb said no, then went home and reconsidered the stage picture. “I went with his idea along with mine, and I think it improves what we’re going to see on stage a great deal,” he said — back row on stools, front row on chairs. Gordon was hearing it for the first time. “Yes, we argue sometimes, and I think that’s a good thing because we’re both passionate about the work,” Lamb said.
Gordon put it more simply. “We laugh a lot, we play a lot, and yet the work gets done.”
Parson’s Nose Theater is at 95 N. Marengo Ave., Suite 110, with the entrance on Holly Street. The company restored the building’s former Turner-Stevens Mortuary Chapel, built in 1922 and designed by the architects Marston and Van Pelt, into a 50-seat house, and has performed there for roughly a decade.
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The theater’s general number is (626) 345-5116.
