The theater already had audience enticements - flexible subscriptions at about 30 percent off the $35 ticket price with access to all shows, or bunching tickets together to bring friends to shows. Pay-what-you-will nights pop up, and in a town with a substantial senior year-round population, special rates are a draw.
One of the most attractive deals partners the theater with 10 notable restaurants, mining the town's culinary cache - dinner and a show, often at substantial savings on both.
This year, Cape May Stage, operating on a $460,000 budget to produce monthlong runs from May through December, is trying to boost the subscriptions it began selling only three years ago; the number now stands at 200.
Steinberg, 58, a Yale drama school graduate, worked in the theater for more than two decades, much of that time as an actor and director "in every state in the union." He was long associated with New York's fabled Circle Rep, which nurtured actors, playwrights, and new works for 27 years. As a director, he once had four plays running Off-Broadway simultaneously.
An executive of broadcasting's marathon runner, Guiding Light, saw a Steinberg-directed Circle Rep production in the late '80s and invited him to direct on the show, which ends its stint in September after 57 years. "I said, 'I don't know how!' " he recalls. "So I observed and leapt in."
He became a Guiding Light producer for a decade, then moved as a director to One Life to Live for a short time before teaching at Muhlenberg College in Allentown.
"Though I loved the people, it was not something I wanted to do the rest of my life," he says of college teaching. He wound up in Los Angeles at Days of Our Lives.
Now he has moved from L.A.'s Studio City to a rental near the Coast Guard station in Cape May with his wife, Marlena Lustik, who has acted and danced on Broadway and is writing two books - a novel about her time at Manhattan's Copacabana and an acting guide for dancers. Their daughter, Alexa, 18, is a student at New Jersey's Montclair State University.
Steinberg has met with several regional artistic directors - "the people in Philadelphia have been so generous," he says - to familiarize himself with the talent pool and get a feel for the scene. Like the heads of many Philadelphia companies, he's looking to produce new work as part of his season "because that's what I love working on. And for a community, new work is another opportunity to engage a person's intellect."
In the nation's oldest seaside resort, he talks about "the idea of doing something new and really discovering it" on the stage. "That's what makes me feel alive and excited."
Contact staff writer Howard Shapiro at 215-854-5727 or hshapiro@phillynews.com. Read his recent work at http:// go.philly.com/howardshapiro.
