Play it again, Kevin

TOWNHALL_068_KK.JPG Playwright/director Kevin Morales, foreground, and D'Arcy Erokan, rear left, Jason Carden, rear right r.eheare for the Townhall comedy "Let's Go to Casablanca" at the Diablo Light Opera Co. in Pleasant Hill. Photo by Kim Komenich/The Chronicle Kevin Morales, D'Arcy Erokan, Jason Carden. �2007, San Francisco Chronicle/ Kim Komenich MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOG AND SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE. NO SALES- MAGS OUT. less TOWNHALL_068_KK.JPG Playwright/director Kevin Morales, foreground, and D'Arcy Erokan, rear left, Jason Carden, rear right r.eheare for the Townhall comedy "Let's Go to Casablanca" at the Diablo Light Opera Co. ... more Photo: Kim Komenich Photo: Kim Komenich Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Play it again, Kevin 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

When a show's called "Let's Go to Casablanca," like the one that opened at Town Hall Theatre Company of Lafayette on Saturday night, it's obvious there's a nostalgia kick going on. What's less obvious is that for Town Hall audiences, the "Let's Go" part of the title may be a bigger draw than the "Casablanca" bit.

Three years ago, the community theater had a problem.

The outgoing artistic director had to leave suddenly, and the season-closing musical revue he was to create and direct was left unfinished.

The show had been in the season brochure for nearly a year, so it had to be called "Let's Go to the Movies" and feature favorite songs from the cinema.

Board president Dennis Erokan, founder of the late BAM magazine and its Bammie Awards, called an old friend, Danville native Kevin T. Morales, now 30, who had been in youth theater with Erokan's daughter D'Arcy.

What Morales came up with was much more than a musical revue. Because the original concept was such a cornball idea, he addressed it head on, writing a hilarious satire in which a New York director was hired by a suburban community theater to write a musical called "Let's Go to the Movies" featuring favorite film songs, and then has to deal with a ragtag cast of wannabe starlets and board members who fancy themselves actors. Some of the dialogue was plucked directly from real-life negotiations about the show, and the cheesiest movie songs were pulled off as particularly appalling audition pieces or production numbers gone bad.

Morales had to come up with a cast quickly, so he called in some old friends such as D'Arcy Erokan, who's now part of a comedy duo called Frowned Upon in New York City. Jason Carden, who worked with Morales' wife at a hotel in Santa Monica and has since moved to New York, was called in to play the author's fictional alter ego, Darin.

"Let's Go to the Movies" was a smash success for the theater, sold out and extended. Over the next season, Morales was brought back to direct several previously selected comedies and in 2005, he took over as artistic director of the oldest continually running theater in Contra Costa County (launched in 1944 as the Dramateurs.) Ever since, he's been working hard to try to turn what was more or less a hobby for its participants into more of a professional theater.

His first two seasons have mixed familiar fare like "Gypsy" and Noel Coward with contemporary plays such as "Copenhagen" and "Wit," which required stage nudity that's more than a little out of the theater's usual line. Other unusual selections included "The Rocky Horror Show" and a superhero "Macbeth" that had Green Lantern and Wonder Woman plotting to kill Superman.

Next season promises a similarly eclectic mix: "Bleacher Bums," "The Weir," "Miracle on 34th Street," "Moonlight and Magnolias" and the musical "Triumph of Love." Morales has also written several shows for Town Hall including the play "Love Lafayette" and the holiday shows "Peter and Wendy" and "Carol of the Bells." First, however, he kicked off his directorship with a revamped "Let's Go to the Movies Redux."

"The first one was like a joke," Morales says. "I had nothing to lose. The second time, I wanted to put more of my voice into it." Only four of the original "Let's Go" cast returned for "Redux," and of those only two remain for the "Casablanca" chapter: Carden as Darin and Erokan as crass and clumsy bombshell Kitty, never mind that they both had to fly out from New York to do it. "It's a hard decision to put everything in storage for two months and come out here," says Erokan. "But I'm telling you, it's hard to resist when Kevin asks."

The wheels toward a sequel were already in motion by the time "Redux" rolled around, so much so that he inserted an older board member who remembered how things were in the old days, setting up a possible "The Godfather: Part II" story line for the next show. But originally Morales had simply proposed returning to the Town Hall tradition of a musical revue to end the season, because musicals are a crowd-pleaser but the rights alone for a full musical are expensive.

Appalled by the recent tidal wave of Broadway musicals based on successful movies, from "Legally Blonde" and "High Fidelity" to "The Color Purple," Morales decided to take his original concept to the next level, having his fictional Town Square Theatre Company base its next musical on a classic movie, using songs from other movies.

"The rationale was that the best musical would come from the best movie, so I picked 'Casablanca,' " Morales says. "But the biggest problem in the show is that 'Casablanca' shouldn't be a musical, so interestingly enough the problem I set up is a problem I actually have. And we've butchered it. I've destroyed the thing I love."

Not only do all the hilariously clueless characters from the first show return to be cast in key "Casablanca" roles, but entire subplots and characters from the movie are cut to make room for a bunch of Moulin Rouge showgirls who escaped Paris with Rick, and absurd musical moments such as Rick and Ilsa singing "(I've Had) The Time of My Life" from "Dirty Dancing." Because there are more women in "Let's Go" than in "Casablanca," Erokan's Kitty has to play the lecherous Renault, requiring a "just friends" chaser to the iconic last line about a beautiful friendship. "Because we're whores for ticket sales, we're doing alternate endings on different nights," Morales says.

"There's a 'Titanic' ending, a 'Breakfast Club' ending, a 'High School Musical' ending, and then I don't know what the other ending is yet."

This he says 19 days before opening night.

"In the show they're changing things up until the last minute, and it actually isn't all that different in rehearsal," Erokan says. "The first time we did it, he gave us a new scene opening night, and last time again we were cutting things up until opening night. I love that." In fact, it's a lot like the way "Casablanca" was originally filmed, with much of the story as yet undecided when they started shooting. Like the first "Let's Go," a lot of the action is based on things that are said while the play's in progress.

The board rejecting the original title "Everybody Comes to Rick's," after the unproduced play on which "Casablanca" was originally based, because the "Let's Go" title would sell more tickets? Put it in. A dancer complaining that her left hand won't jazz? That's gold. "I mean, the show writes itself in a way," Morales says.

"If you make a really bad mistake in rehearsal, because that's the place to make mistakes," Carden says, "the difference is in this play, we all crack up and go, 'Keep it!' "

"It'll knock 'em dead," Erokan adds. "Or it won't, but you know, it's funny to us."

"Let's Go to Casablanca" runs through June 23 at Town Hall Theatre, 3535 School St., Lafa- yette. $23-$32. (925) 283-1557, www.thtc.org