‘Shrew’ Gets Tamed in Spanish and Sign Language

Here comes Shakespeare in Spanish. Edgar Landa, who translated “The Taming of the Shrew” for the Will & Co. production opening next week, said he doesn’t believe a home-grown company (as opposed to touring companies) has ever before done Shakespeare in Spanish in L.A.

This production, with the slightly altered title “The Taming of la Shrew,” isn’t just in Spanish. It will open Friday in English, in Spanish on Oct. 28, then will alternate languages a week at a time. One of the actors will sign his lines--alternating weeks in American sign language with weeks in Mexican sign language.

There are six native Spanish speakers in the cast, said Landa, including himself. Four others had a working knowledge of Spanish prior to this production. But five of the actors didn’t speak Spanish--and that includes Colin Cox, the Will & Co. artistic director who is not only directing this production (assisted by Benito Martinez) but also is playing the leading male role of Petruchio.

They’ve been studying, said Landa. “For the most part, I’m satisfied, but now I’m being really picky.” However, he said it won’t matter if some accents vary, because the play has been set in Alta California in the 1840s, and some characters are presented as non-native Spanish speakers. Petruchio, for example, will be said to have arrived from Vancouver.

RAH RAH: William Freimuth is the new executive director of Theatre LA, which represents more than 120 of L.A.’s theaters and producers and is sponsoring the Ovations, L.A.’s first peer-judged competitive theater awards.

Freimuth, 32, moved to L.A. 18 months ago, “just in time for the riots,” he noted sardonically. He came here specifically because friends told him that “L.A. was the place,” theatrically speaking. “There is more theater going on here than just about anywhere.”

Freimuth produced and directed one show since his arrival, a four-performance run of “Black Velvet Pastures,” at Theatre Krill, a tiny space in Silver Lake. But he said he’s glad to be working now as an administrator and cheerleader.

Before he moved, he spent three years as artistic director of Theatre Project Company, a St. Louis nonprofit based at a 265-seat theater. “My mission there was to move into non-linear, non-realistic theater,” said Freimuth. “They weren’t getting much of it in St. Louis.” But he decided that “quantity was overwhelming quality.”

His mission here? In his first week on the job, he didn’t want to be too specific. But he said his “main priority is spreading the word that we’ve got a great theater town.” And that mandate includes helping theaters become “more self-sufficient in a market economy” and moving theater “out from the shadow of movies and TV, its ‘big brother’ art forms.”

Or, as his father--who worked in the auto industry--taught him, the task facing both auto marketers and theater marketers is “to get the right ass in the right chair.”

HELP WANTED: Seattle Repertory Theatre has lured away the Center Theatre Group’s director of development, Christine Fiedler, who boosted CTG’s annual contributed income from $1.2 million in the year ending in June, 1990, to $2.2 million in the year ending in June, 1993, despite recessionary pressures. Fiedler and her husband, Thomas O’Connor, theater critic for the Orange County Register, will be in Seattle by December.

STAY TUNED: “Cole,” the Cole Porter revue that was to open at the Henry Fonda last week, will now open there on Nov. 17. The L.A. version of the San Francisco hit will feature five (out of six) new actors, plus a new design and a budget that has grown to $600,000 from $100,000 in San Francisco, said general manager Chuck Eisler. He attributed the postponement to delays in casting and design.