Pair Dare Rare Fare--Plan to Open Big Playhouse in Valley

So far, none of the drama has taken place on the stage of the theater at the edge of Woodland Hills.

It has been played out in a cubbyhole office above the lobby, where Michael Pickering and Hillary Cole are working on plans to turn an abandoned movie house into the San Fernando Valley’s largest legitimate theater.

The pair hope to open a 900-seat house that by year-end will be showcasing plays, musicals and concerts. They also hope to overcome the Valley’s reputation as a place that will support nothing more than tiny neighborhood playhouses.

On Thursday, they were offered their first contract for what they recently named the Excalibur Theater: a tentative agreement by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra to stage four concerts.

‘Like Christmas’

“It’s like Christmas around here today,” Pickering, 27, said. “We were very excited. We were jumping around.”

He said they had been looking forward to such an event since May 16. That’s when they signed a five-year lease--with two five-year options--to rent the old Valley Circle Cinema, in El Camino Shopping Center on Mulholland Drive, for $10,880 a month.

Investors have been recruited to cover virtually all of the $400,000 renovation of the 16-year-old movie theater and $300,000 worth of stage equipment, Pickering said. He outlined some of the other steps in place.

The opening season’s production schedule has been set, with two musicals and a drama planned between December and May.

Outside groups ranging from musicians to magicians have been signed to rent the theater between stage shows.

Permits have been obtained for construction of a stage, an orchestra pit large enough to hold 20 musicians and the 900 theater seats.

“Michael and I have basically mortgaged our whole lives for this,” said Cole, 26. “We have no doubts that it will be a success.”

If so, it will be the first time that large-scale, professional theater has taken root in the Valley.

The area’s most ambitious theatrical project--a 2,861-seat theater-in-the-round called Valley Music Theater--floundered two years after it opened in Woodland Hills in 1964. It failed despite drawing 600,000 patrons during its first year to 18 musicals, three comedies, a drama and an assortment of concerts.

The $1.2-million concrete-dome facility on Ventura Boulevard between Canoga and Winnetka avenues was eventually turned into a Jehovah’s Witnesses assembly hall after efforts to sell it to the City of Los Angeles as a cultural center failed.

Small Playhouses

Since that theater’s closing, Valley stage shows have been restricted to small private playhouses--none seating as many as 100 patrons--that are allowed to pay professional actors a minimum wage, and to a handful of community theaters that rely on volunteer performers.

A campaign to build a privately financed theater complex at the city-owned Warner Park in Woodland Hills has gotten off to a slow start.

The 6-year-old San Fernando Valley Cultural Foundation wants to build a 1,200-seat concert hall, 650-seat theater and a smaller multipurpose hall at the 20-acre park. The foundation also has proposed building a 2,500-seat theater in the Sepulveda Basin, but has yet to begin raising the estimated $72 million needed for the two projects.

Madeleine Landy, the foundation’s executive director, said she hopes the Excalibur Theater is a success--even though it might eventually compete with her group’s theaters.

“I think there’s room for both of us,” Landy said Thursday. “If it’s successful, it will prove theater is desperately needed here.”

She said the success of the Excalibur Theater will depend on “the product” Pickering and Cole put on its new stage.

Chris Glazier, executive director of the San Fernando Valley Arts Council, predicted Thursday that the new theater will succeed--but possibly at the expense of the cultural foundation’s proposed Warner Park theaters.

“Excalibur will be a brand-new decorated theater in an affluent area. I think they can fill 700 seats,” Glazier said. “But they’re in extremely close proximity to Warner Center, and I think they could be in conflict with the cultural foundation.” Speaking of the proposed theaters there, she said: “Realistically, it’s taken too long to get the Warner Center going.”

Full House Unnecessary

According to Pickering, the Excalibur will turn a profit if it fills an average of 34% of its seats. There will be evening performances Wednesdays through Sundays and weekend matinees, he said.

He said 500 season tickets, priced from $25 to $54.75 for three shows, have been sold for the premier series, scheduled to start in late December with a 40-person musical comedy called “Sawdust in My Shoes.” That production will be followed by the drama “Sleuth” and the musical “West Side Story.”

The circus-themed “Sawdust” was written by Pickering and a friend, Gregg Butterfield of Denver. The pair staged it there four years ago, said Pickering, who acted for 12 years, since junior high school, before turning to production work.

Cole, a one-time dancer and actress, said she met Pickering when she hired him to be musical director for “Grease,” which she was producing for the Venice Community Theater.

The 13,600-square-foot Valley Circle Cinema had been empty and boarded up for three years when the pair found it in March. Unlike other Valley movie theaters that have closed, it had not been converted into retail shops.

“We knew we wanted to open our own theater, but we didn’t want another tiny Equity theater with shoestring productions,” Cole said.

The pair said they will pay all actors and stagehands, although their larger-scale productions will probably be non-union shows. They said they hope to hire name performers for key roles in all their shows, although that would require cooperation of the stage performers’ union, Actors’ Equity Assn.

The problem is that their theater will be nine times too large to qualify for Equity-waiver status, under which the union allows its members to perform for less-than-union wages.

George Ives, senior business representative for Actors Equity, said it will be possible for the Excalibur Theater to rotate union and non-union shows. But, he said, the union will not issue any guest-artist contracts that would allow Equity actors to work in a non-union play.

“We won’t write any of those contracts in the Valley,” Ives said Thursday. “They’re going to be in competition with the rest of L. A. People in the Valley aren’t checked for passports at the Cahuenga Pass, you know.”