ARTS CENTERS: COMPARING COSTS IN L.A. AND CALGARY

From Nova Scotia to the Yukon Territory, Canadians recently watched the grand opening of the Calgary Centre for the Performing Arts via a four-hour live broadcast.

But the TV signals didn’t reach Bunker Hill in Los Angeles, where the issues surrounding the Calgary Centre are probably of greater significance than anywhere else outside Southern Alberta.

Calgary Centre--an austere complex consisting of a music hall and two theaters with a total of 3,000 seats that its architect said cost the equivalent $70 million U.S.--illustrates how expensive performing arts complexes have become.

In addition, Calgary Centre provides a comparable model to examine the Music Center expansion plans because they, too, call for a music hall and two theaters. Further, the cost of erecting identical masonry buildings in Calgary and Los Angeles is the same, according to Marshall Valuation Index, the most widely used construction industry guide for comparing cost estimates in different cities.

The proposed Music Center expansion wouldn’t, of course, be identical to Calgary Centre. The Music Center expansion would have 73% more seats and it would require vast underground parking that Calgary Centre lacks. And to mesh even modestly with the grandeur of the existing Music Center complex, it would require costly appointments that Calgary Centre does without.

But despite differences in size and style, Calgary Centre provides the best available new facility to examine as a rough indicator of what the Music Center’s plans would cost.

When the Performing Arts Council, the Music Center’s umbrella fund-raising organization, proposed in May, 1982, to build a music hall and two theaters with a total of 5,200 seats, it put the price at $40 million.

One year ago, Michael Newton, the Performing Arts Council president, increased the estimate to $50 million.

But the Calgary Centre experience suggests that the Music Center expansion would be far more costly than anyone has imagined, or at least publicly acknowledged.

The new 1,220-seat Los Angeles Theatre Center cost just $16 million, but it has extreme economies, such as bare concrete walls. It also did not require the expensive orchestral hall acoustics. Even so--and assuming costs move up evenly with the increased number of seats--building such a facility with 5,200 seats is estimated to cost $68 million.

Current cost estimates for the 4,000-seat Orange County Performing Arts Center--under construction--also suggest cost underestimates. The 3,000-seat multipurpose hall for music, ballet, theater and dance and a 1,000-seat theater are currently budgeted at $65.5 million, but upward revisions for the Costa Mesa facilities--sans parking garage--are expected soon, a spokesman said.

Asked about Newton’s $50-million estimate, Martha Cohen, the Calgary Centre board chairwoman, said:

“No way could you do that now. If we had tried to build the whole Dorothy Chandler complex (including the Ahmanson and Taper theaters) with the fountains and chandeliers and all, it would have cost at least $100 million.”

Indeed, examination of the Calgary Centre, interviews with its fund-raisers, architect and various consultants and with theater experts in Los Angeles indicates that building the proposed Music Center expansion would probably exceed $150 million.

Some, but by no means all, Music Center leaders favor expansion because the existing theaters--the 3,197-seat Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the 2,071-seat Ahmanson Theatre and the 752-seat Mark Taper Forum--are booked to near capacity.

Demand for time in the Pavilion is so tight, with the current tenants desiring 70 weeks of performing time in a 52-week year, that the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which wants to expand its Pavilion schedule, must cut back from 26 weeks at the Pavilion to 25 starting in 1987.

This year, the Civic Light Opera cut its 18-week Pavilion schedule by one week to allow more time for the Joffrey Ballet, and in 1986 it will give up another week, this one to the Music Center Opera Assn. (The Civic Light Opera also pulled out of the Ahmanson Theatre, moving to the Pantages in Hollywood, but for reasons unrelated to scheduling.)

The original expansion plans called for a 3,200-seat theater for the Civic Light Opera, Joffrey Ballet and opera, a 1,500-seat proscenium theater for a repertory company and a 500-seat experimental “black box” theater.

Donations would finance the project; no tax dollars would be used, Music Center officials said. This announcement stirred deep concern among many of the 19,000 other charitable organizations in the county that a Music Center capital campaign will make it harder to raise money at a time when government support of charities is tightening.

Music Center officials announced their expansion plans without having made a study of market demand for theater and orchestral hall seats. But in January, the Harrison Price Co. completed a study, sought by the Los Angeles County Community Development Commission in 1984, on the commercial viability of the expansion proposal.

Price concluded that the Music Center “clearly needs” either a 2,800-seat theater for musical theater and dance productions or a 3,000-seat orchestral hall “if the programs of the existing resident companies are to continue to grow and thrive.”

But Price found it “impossible to justify at this time” either the proscenium theater or the “black box” theater for experimental works.

Price’s findings did not impress most Music Center leaders. Richard Sherwood, the O’Melveny & Myers partner who is president of the Center Theatre Group, which runs the Ahmanson and Taper theaters, and who is a Performing Arts Council member, promptly announced that he disagreed “1,000%” with Price’s conclusions.

Calgary Mayor Ralph Klein put municipal tax money into Calgary Centre as part of an effort to “create a vital theater district in the downtown core” of this oil city of 592,000 people, which he likes to call “the frontier metropolis.” In all, Canadian taxpayers put up $55 million of Calgary Centre’s $70 million cost.

The performance halls, together with a restaurant and some candy stores and other small retail shops, take up an entire block between the new City Hall with its skin of bright-blue windows and staggered roof line that creates a step effect, and the Calgary Convention Centre and the local Glenbow Museum. A park, named for the 1988 Winter Olympics, which will be held here, will replace all but one of the old brick storefronts across the street from Calgary Centre.

For decades, some Calgary civic leaders have worked to make sure that Calgarians would not be cultural barbarians. Over the years, Calgary hosted Sarah Bernhardt, Lillie Langtry and a singer named Jennie Wimp, who left for New York and changed her name to Sophie Tucker.

But proper facilities for theater and music have long stifled the hopes of patrons and performers.

Alberta Theatre Projects, for example, for years called the Canmore Opera House home. But despite its impressive name, Canmore Opera House is but an oversized log cabin.

This dearth of facilities, not to mention knowledgeable audiences--including the opening night one that struggled to quiet down for the start of each musical piece--may have been what prompted a touring opera company manager named William Riley to proclaim decades ago that “I would rather go to jail than go to Calgary!”

But with the opening of Calgary Centre, Alberta Theatre Projects, the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra and visiting performers have a modern facility whose largest hall fills with clear, bright sound.

The 1,800-seat Jack Singer Hall is named for a Calgary real estate entrepreneur who bought Francis Coppola’s old Zoetrope Studios and renamed it Hollywood Center Studios. Singer’s sons, Alan and Stephen Singer, gave the equivalent of $1.2 million U.S. to have the hall named for their father.

Alberta Theatre Projects will perform primarily in the 750-seat Max Bell Theatre, which is named for the late Canadian newspaper publisher whose chain included the now-defunct Calgary Albertan. The Max Bell Foundation gave the equivalent of $750,000 U.S. to designate the theater name.

The third stage, the 450-seat Martha Cohen Theatre, was named for Calgary Centre’s board chairwoman. Harry Cohen, the Sony distributor in Canada, donated the equivalent of $750,000 U.S. to have the theater named for his wife.

These theaters plus offices, a moderate sized scene shop, 150 underground parking spaces and some small retail spaces including a planned restaurant and bar cost the equivalent of $70 million in American money, architect Joel Barrett and others said.

The proposed Music Center expansion, as originally proposed, would have 73% more seats than Calgary Centre. A variety of contractors and building experts, none of whom wished to be identified, said they believe building a facility with 73% more seats would increase costs by one-third to one half. This suggests that the expansion would cost $93 million to $105 million.

But there’s more. The proposed Music Center expansion called for at least 2,000 underground parking spaces. The recent experience of high-rise developers in downtown Los Angeles indicates deep underground spaces may cost $17,000 each or $34 million, which would bring total costs to between $127 million and $139 million.

But even that does not cover the full costs because Calgary Centre is, in a word, Spartan. The economies required to complete Calgary Centre after the oil boom went bust in 1982 would never be acceptable in a premier Los Angeles performing arts complex.

“It looks very opulent,” Martha Cohen said of Calgary Centre in the lobby of Singer Hall after the opening performance.

But Calgary Centre is not, in fact, at all opulent.

The lobbies feature industrial grade carpet, brick tiles and a plain wooden bar where patrons buy drinks, which are dispensed into plastic cups from machines that assure exactly one shot. Patrons must then carry the plastic cups to a fountain and add their own mixer from a fast-food restaurant-type dispenser.

Singer Hall’s lobby centerpiece is a delicate gray wire sculpture that cost $35,000, a fraction of the price paid for each of the crystal chandeliers that hang in the Grand Hall of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

A more dramatic sculpture is “Endless Totem,” a prismatic plexiglass work in the Bell Theatre lobby by Los Angeles sculptor Michael Hayden. But because of economies, a stairway landing bifurcates the view of the two-story-high sculpture.

More economies can be seen in the Singer Hall passageways, which lack paneling or wallpaper. Decorating them are six-foot-square swatches of burgundy carpet framed in thin strips of oak.

“The visual aesthetics depend, principally, on how much the fund-raisers decide to raise,” said Russell Johnson, president of Artec, the Manhattan acoustics consulting firm. “In this particular project, there has been a constant Spartan element throughout the process.

But visual aesthetics do not have to reduce sound quality, Johnson noted.

Opening night in Singer Hall, the sound was crisp and clean.

Singer Hall is “one of the better concert halls in the hemisphere,” Harold C. Schonberg, the retired New York Times music critic, wrote in the Calgary Herald. Schonberg said the hall has an “unusually even throw” and “extreme clarity.”

The plaster walls are painted gray and burgundy, with blue accents. Above the open stage, which is 79 feet wide, hangs a 60-ton acoustic canopy of Canadian fir and U.S. steel that looks like it is about to take flight in the next “Star Wars” episode as a Howard Hughes-designed Spruce Spaceship. The canopy is raised and lowered on cables to fine-tune the volume of sound produced on stage so it fills the hall.

The hall is rectangular, with balcony seats lining the walls up to the edge of the open stage, a distinct shift in design from fan-shaped, cinema-style halls like the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

“This hall exemplifies a major trend in theater design,” said Richard Pilbrow, the London theatrical consultant who designed the Calgary Centre theaters with acoustic consultant Russell Johnson of Artec Consultants Inc. in Manhattan, and Calgary architect Joel Barrett.

The seats themselves were bought for just $155 each, architect Barrett said. The thin cushions have fabric matching the carpets; burgundy in Singer Hall, rich green in the Bell Theatre and bright blue in the Cohen Theatre. They lack the luxurious feel of Music Center seats.

These economies were necessary even though the fund-raisers still brought in nearly $16 million U.S., one-third more than their goal, Cohen said.

Barrett said making Calgary Centre as opulent as the existing Music Center in Los Angeles with marble, crystal chandeliers, plush seats, paneled walls and other appointments, would have added $10 million to the cost.

Even if that $10-million figure remained unchanged for the larger facility proposed in Los Angeles, it would raise the likely cost to between $137 million and $149 million.

But there’s even more.

Calgary Centre bought its land from the City of Calgary for just $1.

In Los Angeles, where the County Board of Supervisors believes taxpayer-owned real estate downtown should produce revenue, the Music Center will probably have to lease the expansion land from the county government.

“We don’t have any claim on the land,” said Newton, the Performing Arts Council president, explaining that lack of control over the 3.6-acre site has held up progress towards actual construction.

“The problem for us is we feel we can only go so far without that (control) so we have said to them (the county) ‘let’s focus on the land issue. How much land? Under what conditions?’ ”

He added that the Music Center wants the county to operate and maintain any new theaters, as it does the existing complex.

“If we get agreement (with the county) we will go back to our building program and resubmit to them for their approval the expansion.”

In addition to the unknown costs for land another factor will influence costs: inflation.

Calgary Centre construction began in 1981. The earliest the Music Center could begin construction is 1987. Even at the current 4% annual inflation, that would mean about a 24% increase in construction costs, which could push the price to $170-$185 million, based on the assumptions cited previously.

Asked about all of this, the Music Center’s Newton said: “I would have no comment on that. We have not run cost figures for several years.”