After False Starts, Theater Troupe Finally Will Make Debut in Tujunga

To many in Tujunga Canyon, it seemed that the Tujunga Theatre Project was jinxed. “When I first decided to start a theater group in downtown Tujunga, everybody thought I had flipped,” project founder Bruno Acalinas said. “People would say, ‘Theater in that part of town? There’s nothing but motorcycle gangs up there.’ ”

Acalinas persisted. An actor and sometimes real estate salesman, he knew that movie and TV people roam Tujunga Canyon along with the bearded Harley riders.

“We’ve got all these people from the industry living here and no theater to show for it,” Acalinas said. “It’s ridiculous.”

A theater-friendly landlord agreed and rented Acalinas’ fledgling Tujunga Theatre Project a crumbling old space on Commerce Avenue, which quickly drew local participants for the comedy improvisation and acting workshops. The plan was to eventually turn what was once Tujunga’s post office into a state-of-the-art theater and training complex, similar to Chicago’s Second City or Hollywood’s Groundlings theater on Melrose Avenue.

But, just a few weeks before the theater project was to unveil its inaugural production in October, Mother Nature intervened with an earthquake that registered 5.9 on the Richter scale and turned the project’s seemingly charming fixer-upper into a dangerously unsafe building. It has been estimated that about $125,000 is needed to make the unreinforced masonry building earthquake-proof, too much for either the landlord or the theater project.

Members of the theater troupe, suddenly without a theater, searched without luck for a temporary home in community centers and small theaters as far away as Burbank and Pasadena. Some places didn’t want them; others wanted to charge the group as much as $25 an hour.

“We’re the starving actors,” project member Mark Alan Ford said. “We don’t have a budget. Besides, we wanted to keep the theater group in the community.”

That’s where Dr. Earl Sherburn of Tujunga’s McGroarty Cultural Art Center stepped in. He had heard about the theater project and invited the group to use the center’s facilities free, as long as it didn’t charge admission and asked only for donations.

Finally, after nine months of workshops and false starts, the Tujunga Theatre Project will put on its first public performance tonight at the city-run center.

It is a modest beginning. Only four of the group’s 17 members will sing and dance their way through the tales of love and alienation in “Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.” Still, it promises to be an entertaining evening. Audience members will be seated around candle-lit tables covered with red-checkered tablecloths.

“We wanted to begin simple,” cast member Laurie Woodaman said. “Brel is an easy, one-set comedy, but it’s not just light, frivolous stuff--it makes you think. And the songs Brel wrote have a deep emotional appeal.”

The group originally wanted to perform the play “Pizza Man,” a raunchy adult comedy, but when they toured the art center, everything changed.

The 18-room stone mansion was built in the 1920s by California’s poet laureate, John Steven McGroarty, who was also a Times columnist, playwright and congressman in the ‘30s.

High-Class Ambiance

“The whole ambiance is very high-class, while ‘Pizza Man’ is very street-level,” Ford said. “We decided it would be better to transform the living room of the mansion into a cabaret.”

Perhaps the group was affected by the spirit of its owner, who wrote the “Mission Play.” The play premiered in 1912 at the San Gabriel Mission and got McGroarty recognized by the Pope.

Then again, McGroarty was also the man who wrote that Los Angeles is “the most celebrated of all incubators of new creeds, codes of ethics, philosophies . . . a rendezvous of freak religions.”

“We’re tickled that they’ve chosen us,” McGroarty Center director Sherburn said. “We’ve had chamber music, dance and theater recitals, but this is especially exciting. It’s one more step in making the center a vital cultural force.”

The McGroarty Center is just part of the theater project’s activities. Every Saturday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Commerce Avenue location, the group still holds its comedy improv workshops. Final details are being worked out with a local nightclub, where the group will present a comedy improv revue. Later, the group hopes to find a restaurant with a large reception hall that can be transformed into a dinner theater for its cabaret-style performances.

“Eventually, we’ll have three productions running at the same time,” Ford said. “The only question is, are the people of Tujunga willing to support us? I’m betting they are. It doesn’t make sense for a community this large to have to drive 15 to 30 miles to see a play.”

Founder Acalinas thinks the acting workshops will draw members from all over Los Angeles.

“This is a place for working actors and amateurs to practice their craft without fear of critics, a place to take chances and experiment,” Acalinas said. “I’m always hired as a cop, but, here, I can play an old Polish janitor woman if I want.”

He has played cops on “Hill Street Blues,” “The Twilight Zone,” “Matlock,” “Superior Court” and other TV shows. For variety, he once played a jailer.

“Maybe the motorcycle gangs will come watch,” said Acalinas jokingly.

“Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris” will be performed today, Saturday and Jan. 29 and 30 at 7 p.m. For reservations call (818) 352-8466 or (818) 352-5285. McGroarty Cultural Art Center, 7570 McGroarty Terrace, Tujunga. Donation: $5.