Tony Award-winning actor-singer-director Paul Sand will remount his hit show, “Kurt Weill at the Cuttlefish Hotel,” Friday July 8 in Santa Monica – which will also launch his newly formed Santa Monica Public Theatre.
The show – a vivid and theatrical revue infused with Weimar-era collaborations of composer Kurt Weill and lyricist/playwright Bertold Brecht – will run July 8-30 Thursdays-Saturdays at 8 p.m. at Miles Memorial Playhouse.
“I’m thrilled to be remounting this critically acclaimed show with my stunningly talented and beautiful original cast members singing Kurt Weill’s songs of revenge, murder and broken hearts,” Sand said.
Sand, a Santa Monica resident, said the Westside waterfront city is the perfect location for the revue, and he noted that Weill and his friend and collaborator Brecht lived in the city during their Hollywood period.
“Kurt Weill at the Cuttlefish Hotel” premiered in December 2013 at the Santa Monica Pier. In the cast were Paul Sand, Megan Rippey, Shay Astar and Sol Mason. The show, which Sand directs, was moved to the Actors Gang Theatre in Culver City in 2015, with one cast change (Kalean Ung substituting for Megan Rippey, who will return for the upcoming production). Both productions received rave reviews.
Some of the songs to be performed include some of Weill’s best-known works: “Mack the Knife,” “Pirate Jenny” and “Barbara Song” from “Threepenny Opera,” which Weill penned with Brecht; “Surabaya Johnny” from “Happy End;” and “Luck Song,” also known as “The Insufficiency of Human Behavior.” The finale will be “The Alabama Song” from “Mahagonny,” also written with Brecht, performed by the entire company.
Michael Roth, a Weill expert who lives just a block away from Brecht’s former house in Santa Monica, is the music director.
As excited as Sand is to be bringing back his hit show, he is equally enthusiastic about future productions he is considering for his new Santa Monica Public Theatre. They include reviving the old French horror plays from The Grand Guignol Theatre in Paris, an interesting spin on Noel Coward’s Private Lives, a story theatre format for a French literary classic, and a two-act drama with music that he has written, called “Possible Dangerous Side Effects.”
Sand was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Santa Monica and Silverlake. He has a particularly strong attachment to the Santa Monica Pier, which he can see from his apartment. His parents met at a dance on the pier, he took his first steps as a baby on the pier, and at one time as a teen he actually lived on the pier for a summer with his first girlfriend, Joan Rose, above the carousel.
Sand has had a long and impressive career on stage and in film and television. At a young age he ran away to Paris, auditioned for and got a job performing with Marcel Marceau’s company in Paris.
His first paid job (in dollars) was singing and dancing with Judy Garland in her classic, “We’re a Couple of Swells,” that toured the west coast. Then he joined The Second City Co. in Chicago. They opened on Broadway and played for a year, which got his foot in the door of show business.
In 1966 he co-starred with Linda Lavin and Jo Ann Worley in the off-Broadway hit production, “The Mad Show,” inspired by Mad Magazine.
Five years later, he received a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play for his work on Broadway in “Paul Sill’s Story Theatre.” That led to the guest role of the Tax man, the boyfriend in “The Mary Tyler Show,” then as the star of the CBS sitcom, “Paul Sand in Friends and Lovers.”
“After that I spent years being everybody’s boyfriend, from Mary Tyler Moore to Carol Burnett to all the brilliant funny ladies,” he said.
He has appeared in dozens of television shows and a few movies (his favorite, he says, is “The Hot Rock”) dating back to the 1980s, including “Taxi,” St. Elsewhere,” “The X Files” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
“In the beginning I did everything in my career by instinct and intuition and had all these great adventures and met and worked with such amazing people,” he said. “Creating the Santa Monica Public Theatre feels like the right thing to do. I will do my best, and I will also invite works by other artists whom I admire, not just my stuff.
“I believe we will be a more humble version of the wonderful Broad Stage, which is just down the street from Miles,” he added. “I love the way this city has grown since I was a wet and sandy kid hitching rides on the back to the trams that traveled the boardwalk. Nicely enough, I live just off this same boardwalk. It’s nice to be back.”
Miles Memorial Playhouse is located at 1130 Lincoln Blvd, Santa Monica, 90403. Tickets range from $20 to $40 and can be ordered online at Eventbrite.com, seatch Kurt Weill, email at SantaMonicaPublicTheatre@gmail.com or phone 424.372.7678.
