Profits Make Debut in Arts Program at El Camino College

A little history was made at El Camino College this month.

At 10:22 a.m. May 1, the college’s performing arts program got word that box office receipts had matched the $646,394 it cost to stage its most ambitious season ever.

It’s the first time the arts program has ever broken even, and officials expect at least $15,000 in profits. Of the season’s 88 attractions, 18 were sold out, in contrast with four during the previous five years. As of mid-May, the season had drawn 128,010 people.

But that’s nothing compared to the coming season, which starts in September. The Torrance college plans the biggest lineup in its history--153 attractions, some in multiple performances.

Next year’s budget will be $1.25 million, almost double the current season’s. A concert series will include pops performances, children’s concerts, country-Western shows and a classical series that will feature some of Europe’s leading orchestras. The names include Tony Bennett, Cleo Laine, Sarah Vaughan, Johnny Cash, Tammy Wynette, the Rotterdam Philharmonic and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa.

Television humorist Andy Rooney will kick off a lecture series, something that Robert Haag, dean of community and cultural services, said is new for the college. Other speakers will include Dr. Ruth, Ann Landers and Pearl Bailey.

Change Threatened Program

Ironically, the rapid expansion of performing arts, and the financial security they are beginning to enjoy, grew out of a change in community college financing that, if anything, threatened to gut a program that El Camino had spent two decades building.

The 1978 property tax-cutting Proposition 13 sharply reduced the college funds available for the arts, El Camino officials said, and the college reduced its program by 50%.

“Ever since then, we’ve been working to make the production program self-supporting,” Haag said.

Another blow came four years ago when the state community college system was faced with criticism in the Legislature that many college offerings were not focused on academics or vocational subjects. The system directed that such programs either be cut or made self-supporting through fees. Community service activities--such as concerts--were included, and this accelerated El Camino’s drive to make the arts solvent.

“We would have had to cut the program if we could not make it self-supporting. And the loss of that would have been a disaster,” said El Camino President Rafael Cortada.

Conductor and Composer

If Haag spent years building up the program, it was Cortada and Philip Westin, dean of fine arts, who put it on a business basis. “Bob brings tradition and history, and I bring the entrepreneurial approach,” said Westin, a conductor and composer who once headed an ambitious performing arts program at Cerritos College until budget-cutting curtailed it. He came to El Camino in 1985.

Last year, they coined a name, South Bay Center for the Arts, for what goes on in the college’s main auditorium, art gallery, campus theater and recital hall.

“Some of it was glamour,” Westin said of the new name. It was also a way of putting what he called an umbrella over the fine arts program, which includes music and arts education and student performances.

Along with the new name came the decision to expand the program and increase audiences through a $100,000 advertising and publicity campaign.

The college ran advertising in The Times and the Daily Breeze, put out what Westin called “an enormous amount” of public service radio announcements and mailed 250,000 brochures within the college district and to people on the mailing list of the Music Center of Los Angeles.

Officials at El Camino, as well as arts observers in the South Bay, say the success of the college as a big-name performing arts center stems from having built the right-sized auditorium--2,054 seats--at the right time. No one in the South Bay has built a hall that large since, and no community college could do it today because of the cost.

The auditorium was built 20 years ago as a gamble by then-President Stuart E. Marsee, whose name it now bears.

“He didn’t know whether it was something the South Bay needed, or whether it was a white elephant,” Haag said. “But he decided the college’s mission was to provide an intellectual and cultural center for the South Bay.”

According to an anecdote, when the first artist appeared--pianist Artur Rubinstein, playing for the then-whopping fee of $7,000--one of the college’s trustees wondered if they were going to lose their shirts. Another said that if it was a bust, they hadn’t made a $7,000 mistake--they had made a $2-million mistake. That’s what the auditorium cost.

It was no mistake, something Haag and Westin attribute to the auditorium’s location. It is close enough to other arts centers--such as UCLA, the Long Beach Convention Center and Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena--to share in multiple bookings by artists appearing in Los Angeles, but far enough away not to have any real competition.

Orchestras Shared

Haag said that when Benny Goodman visited in the late 1970s, he played Ambassador and El Camino. More recently, El Camino shared the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam and the Cleveland Orchestra with other theaters, including the new Orange County Performing Arts Center.

“We are unique where we are,” Westin said. “There is no other large-size theater near us. The closest is Long Beach. “Some arts observers say that because of the size of Marsee Auditorium, El Camino stands alone in the South Bay in being able to afford high-fee attractions such as a world-class symphony orchestra, which can cost almost $50,000.

“They can do what others can’t do, bring in the Berlin Philharmonic or London Symphony, because they have the seats to make it pay,” said Robert Billings, chairman of humanities and fine arts at Los Angeles Harbor College in Wilmington.

“El Camino does a remarkable job of bringing the top quality performers to the South Bay,” said Esther Wachtell, a Rolling Hills resident who is executive vice president of the Music Center of Los Angeles. She credited the auditorium and Haag for the college’s success.

Haag, a music teacher and pianist who said he learned to be an impresario by plunging into it, gets a lot of credit for building the arts program over two decades. He has traveled regularly to New York and formed longstanding relationships with talent agents and artists.

“Haag has an enormous sense artistically of what’s going on, being a musician himself,” said Thom Hill, community services dean at Citrus College in Azusa and executive director of the Western Alliance of Arts Administrators. The alliance is composed primarily of colleges and universities and promotes artist tours.

‘They Could Do Things’

“I watched it grow,” said Billings of Harbor College. “Marsee was a man of vision, and he was lucky to select Bob Haag. Because they were an independent college district, they could make decisions on the campus and do things that we cannot do here.” (Harbor is part of the Los Angeles Community College District.)

These days, Marsee is a frequent member of the audience in the auditorium that bears his name, favoring classical concerts and jazz. He retired from the college in 1982 after 24 years as president and lives in Torrance.

“People didn’t think there was a future for an auditorium, largely because of television,” Marsee said. “But the thing that made me confident was the fact that we didn’t have a first-rate auditorium in the whole South Bay.”

He said the performing arts program has succeeded because the community has supported it and the college has never backed away from it, even in the face of financial cutbacks.

But Billings and others say South Bay Center for the Arts is a misnomer if it implies that El Camino is the only place to go.

The Norris Theater in Rolling Hills Estates has only 450 seats, but managing director Michael Putnam said it has presented some of the same artists as El Camino, including Sarah Vaughan and Cleo Laine, as well as national touring companies of Broadway musicals.

Billings said that for chamber music, no one can beat his college’s recital hall. “We specialize in that,” he said.

Putnam said that El Camino, as an educational institution, can afford to present less popular works.

“Their charge and responsibility is to offer enrichment, even if it is not commercially successful,” he said, adding that the college has been on the “cutting edge” of the performing arts, offering such things as modern dance companies. “A dance audience is one of the hardest to generate,” he said. “Grand opera may be the other.”

This year, the college began a residency program involving dance companies and jazz groups. Performers spend a day working with students before their presentations. Harbor College and Cerritos College sent students. When the Jubilation Dance Co. recently visited El Camino, 1,100 South Bay children in kindergarten through 12th grade were brought to the campus.

Next year, this program will see the likes of Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Wynton Marsalis and the Modern Jazz Quartet. “We will be a real center for jazz,” Westin said.

The college’s Joy in Music program, aimed at senior citizens, has enrolled 1,443 since it began a year and a half ago. College teachers go out to senior centers and speak on an upcoming musical event at the college, which the seniors then attend.

The college’s primary mission, of course, is education. The coming season will include 22 student events, including plays, musicals, and choir, dance and jazz events. In addition, music appreciation students will attend some of the professional concerts and do critiques as part of their class work.

Haag agrees that one function of El Camino’s arts center is developing an audience, not just presenting what is popular.

But one of the auditorium’s greatest smashes occurred recently when actress and television personality Oprah Winfrey re-created her interview show, Haag said.

“It was sheer dumb good luck,” he said, recalling that she was booked a year ago before she became a hit. “It was a very happy night.”

On the other hand, a big audience is not expected for next year’s Portraits in Music series in the recital hall where, for example, a pianist will re-create an evening with Chopin, wearing period clothes, playing Chopin compositions and reading from his letters.

“We could fill the house every night with rock music, but that’s not our charge,” Westin said.

Over the years, some of the most popular performers have been Ella Fitzgerald, Andres Segovia, Hal Holbrook, who has appeared several times as Mark Twain, and Peter Schickele, better known as PDQ Bach.

But there have been miscalculations. Haag recalled the time he booked a Yugoslav dance group for two nights, counting on the large Yugoslav community in San Pedro to turn out. It did not.

Haag and Westin said that when it comes to what the public wants, there is no lack of opinion. “We have a loyal public and they keep us advised, saying, ‘Why don’t you do this?’ or ‘Why did you have that?’ ” Haag said.

And in deciding what brand new things to do? Said Westin: “We’re the two biggest South Bay gamblers.”