Seth Siegel’s alive and well

“Fred’s Dead” may be alive somewhere.

Seth Siegel doesn’t have on hand a copy of the script he co-wrote with a pair of Newport Harbor High School classmates in the late 1970s. The show’s program eludes him too. He surmises that if he kept digging through storage bins, he might find them.

Still, he remembers the musical vividly, and here at a Starbucks by the UC Irvine campus, he offers a reenactment of one of its songs. The tune, “Money and Words,” is sung by the soon-to-be-dead Fred, a philandering senator whose murder sparks the whodunit plot. Seated at an outdoor table in shorts and a buttoned T-shirt, Siegel does his best to evoke an orchestra and backup singers.

“Money and words have made me king of the hill,” he warbles, then imitates the waa-waa sound of trombones. “Oh, baby, standing here still — king of the hill, that’s me.”

He breaks into a jazz-like scat and then notes that Fred’s three secretaries, who function as a Greek chorus of sorts, would echo his lines with high harmonies.

“Fred’s Dead” never had another production after its 1978 run at the Newport Theatre Arts Center, but Siegel has more than one reason to remember it. For one, it capped off his high school career. And for another, it marked one of the first productions at the Cliff Drive theater, which was still under construction when Siegel and his team went into rehearsals.

Now those old memories are just a tad more vivid. Siegel, an Irvine resident, will be back at the theater for the first time in 36 years Friday, playing the randy Maurice in the Noel Coward comedy “Fallen Angels,” the first offering of the venue’s 2014-15 season.

His mother, who sat in the opening-night audience for “Fred’s Dead,” will be there. So will other friends and family members. Still, plenty of things have changed in the intervening years — not least the theater, which was still in the process of being converted from a church and now sports a spacious lobby and backstage area.

“During the rehearsal process, they said they were building the stage,” Siegel says. “So it was really like watching a theater come alive because prior to a stage, a theater is a room, not really a theater. And as they built the stage and then we were able to use the stage, it became a theater.

“Coming back to it, it was like the theater, although it was born when I was there, had come of its own.”

*

‘There wasn’t a seat’

As Siegel remembers, it was a sometimes tough birth.

The church that previously operated in the Newport Theatre Arts Center building had only recently passed the property to the city by the time “Fred’s Dead” prepared for its short run, and the spire still adorned the roof. Siegel says the man who built the stage did the project as community service in lieu of jail.

Still, Newport Harbor High’s auditorium was under renovation at the time, which made the fledgling theater a decent alternative. Whatever the venue, Siegel and his collaborators were eager to show off their creation, which they billed as “the first murder mystery musical comedy.”

For the last year and a half, Siegel and classmates Blair Gust and Randy Cross had worked on the “Fred” script — and with drama teacher Joe Swift happy to support burgeoning playwrights, the trio had control of the show. Siegel co-directed and co-produced the show, helped cast the roles and even conducted the orchestra.

The artistic team had freedom in another way: One of the play’s characters was openly gay, a topic Siegel considered risky for a 1970s high school production, and the script contained references to another character smoking pot. As opening night approached, Siegel fretted about whether the show would go over with local audiences.

To his relief, it did. The first performance nearly packed the house, and word of mouth spread from there.

“The principal showed up the next night without an advance ticket, and we turned him away,” Siegel says. “There wasn’t a seat. It was absolutely sold out.”

It was the kind of success that might spark a playwright’s career. To date, though, it remains the only play Siegel has written.

After high school, he studied acting and singing at Orange Coast College and UCLA, then went on to sing professionally in Japan and perform in Southern California community theater. He has one acting credit on IMDb.com: playing “Doctor #2” in the 1993 thriller “Suture,” co-directed by his brother, David Siegel.

Even with those credits, he never entirely settled on show business as a career. Siegel and his wife have co-run several businesses over the years, with enterprises running the gamut from solar energy management to jewelry to natural food. He is active on community boards and serves as vice chair and philanthropic partnership chair of the Bureau of Jewish Education in Orange County.

*

Back in the lights

Still, at least one person at the Newport Theatre Arts Center never forgot Siegel’s thespian side.

Rae Cohen, the theater’s president, knew Siegel’s family when he was growing up, and her children were among his friends. Recently, when the two of them met at a funeral, she mentioned the upcoming “Fallen Angels” production and urged him to audition. In the end, Siegel netted the part of Maurice, the former French lover of two upper-class English women who encounter him again while their husbands are away.

“I didn’t recommend him for any role,” Cohen says. “I just said, ‘You should audition.’ I had no suggestion for him for any role, because he would have been good for any of the male roles.”

It may be Siegel’s return to the Newport Theatre Arts Center, but he’s hardly been an unknown face in the Newport Beach theater scene. For more than a decade, he’s served on the board of the Balboa Performing Arts Theater Foundation, a community group seeking to reopen the Balboa Performing Arts Theater, a vaudeville-era establishment that closed in 1992 and has been rechristened the Balboa Village Theatre.

That goal may be a ways from realization, but when Siegel steps back onstage at the Newport Theatre Arts Center, it will fulfill a more modest dream: getting back into performing. He hasn’t appeared in a production in the last decade — a few shows at his place of worship, Congregation B’nai Israel, notwithstanding — and he’s relishing being back onstage.

And though some in the audience Friday may recall his moment of high school stardom, Siegel hopes that won’t be the main story.

“I really hope that they’re there to see ‘Fallen Angels,’” he says. “I don’t think, necessarily, remembering ‘Fred’s Dead’ is integral to their experience of being there.”

If You Go

What: “Fallen Angels”

Where: Newport Theatre Arts Center, 2501 Cliff Drive, Newport Beach

When: 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, Sept. 12 through Oct. 12

Cost: $16 ($21 for Sept. 12 opening)

Information: (949) 631-0288 or https://www.ntaconline.com