BREAKING UP IS HARD TO DO

Two major Los Angeles theater partnerships have broken up. Civic Light Opera won’t be presenting shows at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion after next season. Center Theatre Group won’t be co-running the James A. Doolittle Theatre with UCLA after this summer.

Each parting is painful. Civic Light Opera --which, from 1981, has meant the Nederlander Organization--feels as if it has been squeezed out at the Music Center in favor of yet more performing-arts groups that can’t pay their way. “Last year we paid the Music Center $470,000 rent,” said CLO’s Stan Seiden. “How can they afford to walk away from a tenant like that?”

Center Theatre Group--in particular, Gordon Davidson--feels chagrined that it can’t afford to carry on at the Doolittle, its second attempt at running an outside theater. (It also had to give up at the Aquarius.)

Still, there’s been no general damage. Civic Light Opera isn’t going under (“No way,” said Seiden), just changing its address. The Doolittle isn’t going under, just changing its management. The Music Center isn’t going under--although it’s going to have to reach deep to cover CLO’s departure. Life in Los Angeles theater will go on. More abundantly than before, it could be.

It has already started. Take “Nicholas Nickleby.” Why did it play the Ahmanson this summer? Because CLO had previously given up its time slot there, preferring to concentrate on the larger and potentially more profitable Pavilion.

True, “Nickleby” might have come to town anyway. But it seemed particularly right and festive to have it at the Music Center, with people picnicking all over the Plaza. It was certainly a more rewarding use of a community stage than, say, Joe Namath in “Sugar.”

Pardon the low blow. But when CLO brought in “Sugar” from Atlantic City, N.J., or wherever, in 1984, it was clear that the Nederlanders still hadn’t gotten the message, after three years, that bus-and-truck standards didn’t cut it at the Music Center.

Granted, “Sugar” was a last-minute substitution for an aborted “On Your Toes.” This summer, we finally got “On Your Toes.” The show was fine. But the ad campaign was a disgrace. “NATALIA MAKAROVA IN ‘ON YOUR TOES’--2 and 8 P.M.” Not a hint that Makarova didn’t appear at matinees.

CLO rectified the ad, but again you saw the bus-and-truck mentality, as if the show would be playing another town by next week anyway, so why not cut a few corners? This from an organization whose founder, Edwin Lester, used to write personal letters to patrons who objected to one of his shows.

Whether or not the Music Center squeezed out CLO, it has been an uneasy relationship ever since the Nederlanders took over the organization. Questions were raised (by the Shuberts, certainly) as to whether the Nederlanders weren’t using the nonprofit CLO for their own purposes.

All that can be said for sure is that CLO under the Nederlanders has lost its sense of being a Los Angeles institution and now feels like the West Coast branch of a Times Square operation. It knows something about public relations, but nothing about community relations, and that’s essential for a resident arts group. Perhaps it will be more sensitive to its patrons at the Pantages--while it has some patrons left.

What will the Music Center do without CLO? For one thing, it will be freer to book and to produce musicals on its own. CTG/Ahmanson has already booked “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” for its third show this season, and producer Robert Fryer is looking for another major musical for next summer.

Another player enters the game as well: the new Music Center Opera Company. It’s bringing in “Porgy and Bess” from the Houston Opera next spring and its artistic director, Peter Hemmings, isn’t opposed to producing the occasional operetta--Gilbert and Sullivan, Offenbach. So, ironically, the departure of Civic Light Opera may lead to more actual light opera at the Pavilion. But not to more musicals, we hope. The house has always been too big for them.

The Pantages is also too big for musicals, and has grown just a little tatty around the edges. But if it’s glamour that CLO subscribers want, the Pantages has it, starting with its wondrous arched lobby. There’s no reason CLO patrons should avoid this house, if they’re made to feel welcome there.

The Nederlanders may end up delighted to have CLO under their own roof at the Pantages. Their ability to book shows won’t suffer--only the Shuberts have more clout in the theater marketplace--and they’ll have more flexibility when it comes to scheduling them. The change could also bring more shows to their other big house, the Wilshire, not often lit last season. Meanwhile, the Pavilion gets the chance to prove that it can be a full-time concert hall, which was the hope from the beginning. If the Music Center can raise the money--where’s the tragedy?

Center Theatre Group’s withdrawal from the Doolittle is more painful. CTG/Taper began its life in Westwood in the 1950s as the UCLA Theatre Group, and this looked like a fruitful reunion of that old partnership. But CTG’s pockets gave out after losing upwards of $500,000 during the Doolittle’s first season (some say as mucha as $1 million).

Three factors relieve the sting a bit:

The money mostly went to shows that were well worth bringing to town: Martha Clarke’s phantasmagoric “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” Lee Breuer’s jubilant “The Gospel at Colonnus” and Jose Quintero’s superb revival of O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” with Jason Robards. If these shows didn’t pay off (“Iceman” alone lost $200,000), they enriched the lives of those who saw them, and that’s the real bottom line.

The CTG-UCLA relationship hasn’t soured. Unlike the Nederlander-Music Center situation, nobody’s mad at anybody. In fact, it’s possible the Taper Rep will play at the Doolittle this spring.

The Doolittle will go on. UCLA now becomes the sole partner, and its chancellor, Charles E. Young, sounds confident the university can keep the theater lit without running up an unconscionable deficit and without stooping to schlock programming.

It helps that James A. Doolittle sold the Huntington Hartford Theatre to the UCLA/CTG consortium for a bargain price in the first place: less than $2 million. (Part of the deal was that Doolittle’s name was to go on the building.) It also helps that Doolittle is still involved with the operation as an adviser and an occasional producer. Say what you will about Mr. D.--and we all have--he kept the Hartford going for years and he knows how to read a contract. A good man to have on your side.

This season’s mix at the Doolittle will include some touring shows (Clarke’s new piece, “Vienna Lusthaus,” among them), some UCLA productions (possibly a series of summer musicals) and a blockbuster that nobody wants to mention until it’s set. It could be Lily Tomlin, who is obviously going to want to bring her “The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe” to Los Angeles, and who likes playing the Doolittle.

Most actors do, and most audiences enjoy being there. The theater’s new facade is an eyesore and its auditorium is darker than it used to be. But it remains the sweetest theater in town, one of the sweetest in the United States--a house where a play can have scope and intimacy.

Most modern theaters are buildings, period. The Doolittle seems to have a soul, and everyone connected with it speaks of it with a kind of truculent tenderness, as though it were a younger brother or sister who is slightly too pure for this world. Touch one hair on that kid’s head, and you’ve got a fight on your hands.

All the more reason for Davidson to regret his withdrawal. But the Taper also needs defending, and perhaps it’s enough that he has put all his energies there for the next couple of seasons--casting and directing plays, working out plays for the Rep, working on new scripts, checking out the season in London, tending to staff matters and making sure his board feels on the team. There are, after all, only 26 hours in the day.