It’s showtime for Arkansas
Posted on Sunday, February 12, 2006
Two New York theater producers and an insurance consultant turned treasure hunter are trying to accomplish Arkansas entertainment firsts : debut a Broadway-bound play in Little Rock and found a reality-television production house.
They have some of the biggest pieces in place, but are still facing obstacles.
For starters, the plans call for reuniting the cast of Designing Women — a sitcom that went off the air in 1993 — and locating a Spanish treasure fleet that sank off the coast of Panama 350 years ago.
The Arkansas Repertory Theatre plans to debut a $ 3. 5 million stage adaptation of Designing Women during its 2006-07 season. After a threeweek run in Little Rock, the show would go on a national tour, aiming to become the first Arkansas play to reach Broadway.
If it reaches New York, Designing Women has the potential to transform the Rep into a regional theater capable of staging one or two Broadwaycaliber shows a year.
The co-creators are midway through a script, and the producers, Elizabeth Williams and Anita Waxman, have a 20-year track record of Broadway hits.
The five original cast members have expressed interest in working around their schedules, but none has signed a contract, Williams said.
In the meantime, Williams and Waxman are shopping a reality show based on Steve Parks’ search for the “golden fleet.” Parks, a former Little Rock employee benefits consultant, believes his team has pinpointed the location of the four sunken ships laden with gold and jewels.
But he must wrangle permission from the Panamanian government before he can remove any artifacts — no sure thing, though he has worked with officials there on other salvage operations.
Other underwater finds, including a Civil War-era submarine, are providing fodder for a documentary series that will begin filming in April. Emmy-nominated producer Les Guthman is on board.
All would be shot in Panama — but produced, edited and scored in Arkansas, Parks said.
Parks is raising money to kick off both operations, while Williams and Waxman are us- ing their theater and television connections to bring both stories to viewers. “We’re going to make history in Arkansas with the biggest theater and entertainment projects there have ever been in the state,” he said.
DESIGNING WOMEN The Rep is counting on it. Designing Women’s producers see such a high-profile production as a way for the Rep to cement itself as an incubator for Broadway shows — part of the farm system of regional venues such as the Tennessee Repertory Theatre in Nashville or Alliance Theatre Company in Atlanta that have developed productions for New York’s major leagues.
“This would be a new venture for us,” said Robert Hupp, the theater’s producing artistic director. “Many of the most prominent nonprofit theaters have a history of developing work that have moved to commercial runs, Broadway being the most prominent.”
The 30-year-old Rep already attracts actors from out of state, and every two years awards the Kaufman & Hart Prize for comedic playwrighting. Hupp said his theater has been capable of putting on a show of Designing Women’s scale for several years, but to make it happen needed the kind of help that Williams and Waxman can provide.
An Arkadelphia native, Williams hit it big as a Broadway producer by helping to get the musical Les Miserables to New York in the early 1980 s. Between them, she and Waxman have won 16 Tony Awards — theater’s highest honor — and received 74 nominations for shows they produced. The play has been in the works for more than a year. Designing Women’s husband-andwife creators, Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, agreed to the project early last year, Williams said. Although the show is set in Atlanta, one aspect of Designing Women’s geography provided a natural link to Little Rock. The Villa Marre — a 125-yearold mansion about half a mile from the Rep — was used for exterior shots of the fictional Sugarbaker’s design firm, where the main cast members all worked.
“I loved the idea of going back to Designing Women 20 years later,” Williams said. “[Bloodworth-Thomason’s ] incisive writing could transfer so easily to the stage. I missed her voice.”
Thomason, who grew up in Little Rock, said his wife is in the middle of the script.
But assembling the original cast — Delta Burke, Dixie Carter, Annie Potts, Jean Smart and Meshach Taylor — will be a challenge, Thomason said.
“To work out everybody’s schedule is just a monumental task,” he said. “We’ve been working on this for months and it may take months longer.”
Parks said Carter and Burke are enthusiastic supporters of the project, and that he is optimistic about getting everyone but Jean Smart, who is starring in the Fox series 24.
“For her to be in the play, we feel like we may have to write her into the play in a unique way,” Parks said.
Although Designing Women went off the air in 1993, constant reruns on Lifetime Television, a cable channel aimed at women, have kept the show from fading away.
Lifetime, which snapped up syndication rights in 1994, shows Designing Women four times a day. A 2003 Designing Women reunion special scored 3. 3 million viewers, huge numbers for the network.
The stage show’s backers are counting on what they believe is the show’s still substantial fan base to draw in the audience. Parks said Designing Women must go on tour for it to be a financial success, as the Rep is too small for an expensive show to recoup its production costs at the box office. But the Rep will continue to earn money off the show when it tours, he said.
TREASURE HUNT Although Designing Women may take a year or more to reach the stage, Williams and Waxman have set up a production office in downtown Little Rock, funded by Parks. Across the hall, Parks manages his salvage operations, under the name Sea Heritage Investments. “It’s a treasure hunt,” he said, holding up a dirty clay bowl in his office.
Though a far cry from the chests of emeralds and 20-foot-long gold chains Parks believes he’s close to pulling out of the Caribbean Sea, the pottery represents one of his salvage team’s first discoveries — a wreck he believes to be a Spanish slave ship.
In 2003, Parks was working as a benefits consultant in Little Rock. A friend, Memphis businessman Joe Montesi, whose family founded the Liberty Cash grocery chain, approached him about a salvage operation Montesi had started three years earlier in Panama.
Intrigued, Parks founded Sea Heritage to help fund Montesi’s treasure hunt. Parks secured financing through the Arkansas Valley Regional Industrial Development Co., which was set up through a 1999 state law allowing public-private partnerships to offer tax incentives to companies willing to be based in Arkansas, and to create instate jobs.
It was through the program that Parks hit upon the idea of using the search for shipwrecks to boost Arkansas’ entertainment industry.
“All of the production impact of Waxman-Williams is the child of the economic development piece,” Parks said.
In December 2003, the Panamanian government granted Sea Heritage exclusive permission to search for wrecks in waters off the Pacific Coast.
Less than a year later, they found their first ship.
“It was a ship full of pottery... there were hundreds of these pots there,” Montesi said. “That’s when we decided we needed to have a larger boat.”
So Sea Heritage bought an 89-foot retired U. S. Coast Guard cutter.
They also invested in a shipwreck researcher, who pored over 350-year-old papers in Spain’s national archives in Seville. Panama was the departure point for ships carrying gold and jewels from Spain’s territory in the New World, and has long been a focus of treasure hunters.
The researcher, whom Parks declined to name, found documents from the sole surviving vessel of a five-ship fleet that sank off Panama’s Atlantic coast in the mid-1600 s.
Included were the cargo manifests and location of the four lost ships.
“Two tons of gold bars, 2. 35 million silver pesos... eight chests of pearls, 23 chests of emeralds... if everything that went down on this one is still there, the ship is worth over $ 1 billion,” Parks said. “It was overloaded, that’s one of the reasons it didn’t make it.”
A Sea Heritage ship equipped with a magnetometer, a hightech metal detector, recently found a large object under the sea floor at the approximate spot the Seville documents labeled as the site of the wreck, he said.
“We know we’re on top of something,” Parks said. “You take unknown variables and come up with a hypothesis, and it’s logical to assume we are on top of our research.” Sea Heritage still needs a permit from the Panamanian government to salvage in the waters they believe contain the sunken treasure fleet. Parks said he expects to get the permit soon. But he acknowledged that maintaining a good relationship with local officials there can be tough. Wrecks in the Caribbean are frequently plundered by “wildcatters,” who damage ships in their search for valuable artifacts, making the government cautious about who it allows to salvage in its waters, Parks said. In June, for example, the minister of culture accused his government of allowing foreign “pirates” to scavenge historical wrecks, according to Panamanian news reports.
TWO PROJECTS Parks and Williams are moving forward on two television projects based on the treasure fleet and other shipwrecks. Last summer, Parks, Williams and Waxman approached Guthman, a filmmaker whose Farther Than the Eye Can See, about a blind man who climbed Mount Everest, was nominated for two Sports Emmys in 2004. They asked Guthman to create a documentary about a sunken Civil War-era submarine commissioned by the Union navy near an uninhabited Panamanian island. Although it wasn’t a Sea Heritage discovery, Parks’ company had contracted with the Panamanian government and moved the sub to a different part of the ocean, where it will become a tourist attraction for divers. “It was completed too late to really see service in the Civil War,” Guthman said. It wound up in private hands and “they used it for pearl diving... then it sat there.” He said he wants to tell the story of the sub’s history, as well as Sea Heritage’s partial restoration and towing of the sub to deeper water. Guthman said he likes to do as much work as possible on his documentaries in the directors’ hometowns. He visited Little Rock in October to look for editing facilities and a composer, and is planning more trips to Arkansas once production begins. “Equipment is so computerized, it’s far more portable than it used to be,” Guthman said. “So you can edit really anywhere and have the same degree of quality that you used to have to achieve in a milliondollar edit studio.” Guthman said his documentaries have appeared on the Outdoor Life Network and Discovery Channel, both networks where his work with Sea Heritage could air. Production should begin in April and take six months, Parks said.
REALITY BLUES On the Caribbean side of Panama, Williams and Waxman’s production company will simultaneously be shooting a pilot for a reality series tracking Sea Heritage’s search for the treasure fleet. A pilot is a single episode filmed in order to pitch a television show to network executives. “It’s a potential network show being developed with a major [reality television ] producer,” Williams said, who declined to name her partner.
The television projects would be an enormous boost for Arkansas’ entertainment industry, said Joe Glass, the film unit leader at the state Department of Economic Development.
“We’re doing an excellent job of training our kids in the production business, but what we’re sorely missing is... employment to keep them here,” Glass said. “This can’t do anything but help enhance our opportunities here.”
Waxman and Williams are relative newcomers to reality television.
Their first foray, The Scholar, was a critical success when it premiered on ABC in June, but ended up a commercial flop.
The six-episode series, where high school seniors competed for a college scholarship, had the backing of some of the biggest names in reality television, but finished with 3. 9 million viewers. By comparison, 22 million watched ABC’s biggest reality hit of the summer, Dancing With the Stars.
“Unfortunately we didn’t get the demographic ABC was looking for,” Williams said. “Even if we didn’t get the demographics, we got the reviews. It’s the kind of programming we want to do.”
As for the treasure hunt show, “we’re working with top professionals in the industry,” she said. “That’s the major thing you do, is you try to work with the best.”
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