By FIELDING BUCK
The Press-Enterprise

Los Angeles County will be alive with the sound of Richard Rodgers this month.

An ambitious theater project is looking at the composer's work through a number of cultural prisms, beginning tonight.

It is spearheaded by the Reprise Theatre Company, which began life a dozen years ago reviving rarely seen musicals. Under the leadership of actor Jason Alexander, it is branching out. This is its most ambitious project.

"We wanted to branch out and do something a little more adventuresome, and so we decided we would spend a month focusing on one theater artist," said Susan Dietz, producing director for Reprise. "We started at the very beginning, to quote Oscar Hammerstein."

It culminates with Alexander starring in a staged reading of one of Rodgers' last musicals, "Two by Two."

Before that, there are events such as a jazz, blues and gospel concert; a symposium on musicals set in Asia; a revue combining Rodgers' collaborations with lyricists Hammerstein and Lorenz Hart; dance performances; a screening of "South Pacific" with star Mitzi Gaynor; and memories of Rodgers' other leading ladies in an evening called "Nothing Like a Dame."

Among them is Patricia Morison, best known for being the first leading lady in Cole Porter's "Kiss Me Kate" in 1948.

"I'm such a fortunate woman, you know?" she said in a phone interview from her home in Los Angeles. "I'm 94 and I still can sing -- not as well as I used to, but I still can. And I have such wonderful friends and such lovely memories that keep coming back. People bring them back to me."