LOS ANGELES FESTIVAL : FITZPATRICK REVIEWS THE FEST--SO FAR

From his office at the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank on Thursday, Robert J. Fitzpatrick, director of the Los Angeles Festival, confessed to being “a little battle weary. The festival is less than 10 days old, and it feels more like 10 weeks.”

The canceling of last Saturday night’s performance of Michael Clark & Co. after the 25-year-old British choreographer and dancer came down with a high fever was a downer, Fitzpatrick acknowledged. Because the company had been tightly scheduled for three performances, the festival was not able to substitute a makeup performance, so money is being returned. Sunday night’s performance had to be shortened so that the still-ailing Clark could dance 15 minutes less. And, after all that, Fitzpatrick was awakened at 5 a.m. Tuesday to help solve a last-minute crisis involving visas for the Monnier-Duroure French dancers.

As the festival approaches midpoint, Fitzpatrick, who leaves for his new post as president of Euro Disneyland next month, says he is pleased, despite the difficulties.

“The response to the circus--the way we opened the festival--has been beyond belief,” he noted. “People were very much caught off guard as to how spectacularly good they (Le Cirque du Soleil) are. There’s a real buzz in the city.”

Indeed the festival announced Thursday that the circus’s run was being extended to the end of the festival (Sept. 27).

The festival is on target with ticket sales. As of Friday, ticket sales were $1.2 million. Leigh Drolet, associate director and general manager, estimated that the break-even point of $1.4 million would be reached by the end of next week. Anything beyond that becomes a surplus for the next festival.

Amid bunches of sellout performances, ironically prompting some observers to wonder why there weren’t more performances or larger theater spaces, some events have not done as well. The classic jazz evening last Friday night at the Embassy Theatre was a little more than half full: 908 seats sold in a 1,600-seat house. And for Susan Marshall, who performed Wednesday and Thursday nights at Japan America Theatre, the house was only three-quarters full, Fitzpatrick said.

There have been glitches, and festival-goers have raised questions regarding security and seating policies. A batch of tickets for Japan America Theatre on San Pedro Street were printed with a Spring Street address, prompting operators of a parking lot on South Spring to hang a sheet telling patrons where to find the theater.

On Sept. 4 (the festival’s second night), when the classic jazz concert at the Embassy Theatre went well past midnight, a visitor who left shortly before midnight found the large southeast corner parking lot across 9th Street on Grand Avenue dark and deserted.

The next night on the way to Rachel Rosenthal’s performance at Los Angeles Theatre Center, another festival-goer said she was accosted by a panhandler who repeatedly asked her for a quarter. The panhandler followed her from the parking lot to the theater, she added, until he “finally gave up on me and pursued another theatergoer.”

Fitzpatrick noted that “around all our (festival) spaces, we have security wandering in and out, in parking lots too. We have people driving by. We don’t want (security) so highly visible that it looks like a police protection thing.”

Andrea Randall, festival operations manager, said security officers apprehended someone breaking into a car directly across from the Embassy Theatre at 11:30 p.m. Sept. 4, but that the far lot across 9th Street is not festival territory. However, many patrons parked there, and there were no signs indicating it was not a protected lot.

There were also complaints about having to line up at Raleigh Studios in advance, as at the movies, for the Saturday marathons of “The Mahabharata,” a $90 ticket, which runs 11 hours, 1 p.m. to midnight, with two intermissions. A spokesman for the festival said simply that this is “festival seating. If people don’t want to wait in line, they’ll have a seat close to the back and perhaps on the side.”

Fitzpatrick noted that in a 3 1/2-week festival it’s difficult to extend performances. As for not having larger theater spaces, he said, “You put companies in theaters that work for them. ‘Bopha!’ is a very intimate family drama, and it works spectacularly well at the Theatre Center, and there is a great sense of intimacy.”

At the same time, Fitzpatrick took a poke at “no-shows-- press no-shows,” leaving empty seats in the front rows of a full house, seats that might have gone to the public.

The Clark company was one of about a dozen that sold out in advance. “There really isn’t a larger house other than the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and that was busy,” Fitzpatrick said. What about the Pasadena Civic Auditorium (3,000 seats), where Pina Bausch opened the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival, he was asked? “No, I wanted this theater (the Doolittle, 1,000 seats) and we used it,” Fitzpatrick answered. “And also we wanted to concentrate in a small number of sites, and we chose Hollywood and downtown.”