The Great Welk Way: Pleasing the People : Stage: Late bandleader’s family-run theater carefully presents newer fare, keeping its loyal older crowd in mind.

ESCONDIDO — Lawrence Welk’s motto for his television show was “We try to please our audience.”

The same could be said of Welk’s family-run theater in Escondido.

Like the famed bandleader, who died May 17, 1992, the Lawrence Welk Resort Theatre caters to an older crowd, but an extremely loyal one.

They come from Orange County (25% to 30% of them, according to Welk figures), from across the country and from Canada. They travel in tour buses and by car to northern San Diego County and the 1,000-acre destination resort. They can get their pictures taken with their arms around the life-size bronze statue of Welk, stroll through the Welk museum memorabilia in the lobby of the theater, catch up on Welk’s latest great-grandchildren in the Lawrence Welk Show Musical Family News and to see a musical--a show they know in advance will never shock or offend them.

The conservatism of the Lawrence Welk Resort Theatre comes from more than an artistic desire to please--it’s a business decision. The theater, founded July 31, 1981, is the only Equity for-profit theater in Southern California. The year-round theater doesn’t solicit or get contributed income. It stays open because it makes money--pure and simple.

Yet, a subtle change is blowin’ in the wind.

Where the shows were once invariably warm, corny versions of “Oklahoma,” “Camelot” or “The Sound of Music,” all of a sudden “A Chorus Line” and the little-known “70, Girls, 70,” currently running through March 13, have made it to the stage. “Nunsense,” Off Broadway’s satirical talent show featuring actresses as fund-raising nuns in a talent show, is up next, March 16-May 8.

Frank Wayne, the company’s artistic director since 1987, is responsible for nudging the theater from the 1950s to the 1970s with an eye toward more contemporary fare. He pushed for “A Chorus Line” to be put on the boards three years before it finally happened last year. But even he acknowledges doing it carefully, the Welk way.

He added an intermission and eliminated four-letter words. He hired Terry Bartolo, born in Westminster and raised in Huntington Beach, to create new choreography. And because it proved to be one of the company’s more popular shows ever, selling 90% houses (surpassed only by the dependable “Kiss Me Kate”), he has gotten green lights for other shows that are not exactly the old standards.

Today, the resort is presenting a show, “70, Girls, 70,” also choreographed by Bartolo, that comes as close as anything the theater has done yet to challenge its audience. Though this rarely done John Kander and Fred Ebb musical is pretty lightheaded overall, its casting makes the audience look at themselves.

“70, Girls, 70,” which played briefly on Broadway in 1971, is about senior citizens living in a retirement home, who take to shoplifting to bring a little excitement and luxury into their sparse lives.

And because the average age of the cast, 65, is the average age of the audience, Wayne has directed his actors to address the audience directly, sometimes using names he gets from the tour directors.

The instigator and leader of the shoplifting ring at one point turns to the patrons and says, “If I’m going to meet my maker, it’s not going to be as part of a group tour--no offense.”

At one Sunday matinee, the audience was particularly amused by a pointedly funny scene in which the seniors throw a policeman off their track by playing stereotypes of old people, pretending they fall asleep mid-sentence, can’t hear well, can’t see well, can’t remember anything.

“This is probably the perfect show for the Welk audience,” Wayne said after that show. “There’s no vulgarity, no nudity and everyone in it is not young anymore. They’re looking at themselves in the mirror.”

And yet, ironically, what many come to the theater for is to escape the present to go back into the past. Riding on the tram from the building with the plentiful buffet to the building that houses the theater, a look at the serene, green rolling hills of Escondido gives the sense of being in an idealized world. A woman on the tram rhapsodizes happily out loud about being in a place somehow apart from the cares and concerns of the 1990s.

“Lawrence Welk was just like Walt Disney,” she said. “They both had a vision.”

As one strolls through the Welk museum in the lobby, the sensation of being in a time warp continues. A Muzak version of “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” is piped in. The silver-haired patrons strolling or sitting on the long couches beam as they look around at the giant crystal champagne glass created for Welk’s 25th anniversary television show, the life-size cut-outs of Welk and the scenes from his North Dakota childhood.

Esther Williams, 78-year-old matron from Sacramento, came to the Lawrence Welk resort on a tour bus.

“I was born only 50 miles from where he grew up,” she said dreamily. “His music was fantastic. He played our kind of music. When you get older, you don’t go for that rock ‘n’ roll. This museum is beautiful--something to remember him by.”

Madonna Nissen, an escort for a Yuma tour, said she happily sees each show several times. Her company draws clients from Washington, Oregon, Illinois and Northern Ontario, and they all request a trip to the Welk resort, run by Lawrence Welk Jr.

“They love the theater and the brunch and the scenery all around it. The older people are really interested in anything to do with Lawrence Welk.”

Even the younger performers in this show have fond memories of Welk.

“When I was little, growing up in the Carolinas, it was a rule in my house that on Saturday nights we would watch Lawrence Welk,” recalled Mary Louise Grimes, who plays a waitress in the current production. “My mother thought it was cultural.”

And Wayne, who will balance out the rest of the season with the more familiar fare of “Sugar,” “Cabaret,” “Oliver!” and “Flower Drum Song,” shrugs about what he calls “the trade-offs.”

The bottom line at the Lawrence Welk, he said, is that people come to this theater because: “They’re going to eat decent food and see something they don’t have to think about that much and it won’t upset them.”

But at the same time, he added, he takes a lot of pride in putting these works on stage and being part of the Welk family.

“If my folks were alive today, the biggest thrill they would have is that I worked for Lawrence Welk.”

* Performances of “70, Girls, 70” are 8 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays-Saturdays with a dinner buffet at 5:30 p.m.-7:30 p.m and 1:45 p.m. Tuesdays-Thursdays and Sundays with a lunch buffet at 11:45 a.m.-1:15 p.m. Tickets are $29-$31 for matinees with buffet and $26 for matinee performances only, $32-$36 for evenings with buffet and $26-$31 for evening performances only. At 8860 Lawrence Welk Drive, Escondido, (619) 749-3448 or (619) 749-8501 for group reservations. Take Interstate 15 and go east onto the Mountain Meadow Road exit to Champagne Boulevard. Go left to Lawrence Welk Drive and take a right.