‘The Alex is a prime candidate to be given new life.’

The ornate Alex Theatre, naturally, was the venue Saturday morning for what turned out to be an unexpectedly dry discussion by community leaders on what should become of the Alex Theatre.

That something will be done with the 1920s Egyptian-revival movie house on Brand Boulevard is clear enough. It stands amid the city’s downtown redevelopment project, just across the street from a vacant lot that will most likely one day contain a hotel and upscale shopping complex.

Its owner, the Mann Theatres Corp., has said it cannot maintain the Alex as a single-screen movie house and would like to trade it to the city for another piece of land on which to build a multiscreen theater.

The Redevelopment Agency wants to shape that facing block of Brand Boulevard into a cultural arts center, with the Alex, or at least some reconstituted part of it, as the centerpiece.

Fair enough, so far.

The tension arises from the question of whether the Alex will be retained whole, as a rare and pure example of Los Angeles Egyptian revival design, or whether only its spacious arcade entrance will remain as a reminder of the past and a symbolic walkway into the future of a new era of Glendale culture.

The Glendale Arts Council, host of Saturday’s discussion, invited proponents of both viewpoints.

As a sparse audience of at most 50 suggested, however, this was not to be the time and place for tough questions to be resolved. It appeared, rather, that the major groups with an interest in the Alex have come around to a consensus that the theater is destined to return to performing arts, where it began in its 1925 opening as a vaudeville house.

A few times Saturday, the Alex seemed to be trying to speak for itself, stirring up a little raucous vaudeville in place of the hum of consensus.

This began as Vonnie Rossman, chairwoman of the Glendale Historical Preservation Commission, delivered something of an ode to the Alex and its hometown.

In a white wool suit, she stood at a lectern on stage beside a row of metal chairs where panel members sat, their knees and faces savagely illuminated by a row of stage lights pointing upward from their feet.

“We like to show off to the state of California and the nation that Glendale is the best place in the world; there couldn’t be anyplace else,” Rossman was saying when a strain of rock ‘n’ roll music became vaguely audible.

It grew louder as Rossman recalled happy days when the Alex was premiering such shows as “Going My Way.”

Soon several technicians appeared, moving about silently in the shadows under murals of soldiers slaying Minotaurs, in search of the hidden transmitter.

Eventually a young man settled grimly into a front-row seat and waited through a couple more songs and a commercial or two. As soon as Rossman concluded, he ran to the stage and began disassembling the microphone. Moderator Robert Haueter, executive assistant to Assemblyman Pat Nolan (R-Glendale), filled the empty time with some light stand-up.

“I didn’t know if I was supposed to be the morning disk jockey at a local radio station,” Haueter said.

A couple of minutes later the music stopped abruptly. The grim young man did a vaudeville bow on his way off stage and Haueter looked relieved.

“I don’t feel like I’m in a doctor’s office any more,” he said.

Dramatically, the event peaked with the talks of John Hedlund, president of the business group Glendale Partners, and Robert Newcomb, president of the Glendale Historical Society.

Their groups have been antagonist and protagonist in the debate, the Glendale Partners promoting a performing arts center and the Historical Society demanding strict preservation of the Alex as a movie house.

On an upbeat tone, Hedlund reasserted his support for a performing arts center, with a new, conciliatory twist.

“While structural changes would be needed to bring that about, we should keep in mind historical significance of this building and, wherever we can, preserve that which needs to be preserved and doesn’t affect the size or the effectiveness of the resultant structure,” Hedlund said.

Newcomb first reminisced about the midnight Champagne gathering in 1979, when the historical society “rose like a Phoenix from the ashes” as it watched the Victorian house called The Dr.’s House, trucked from a condemned lot to its present location in Brand Park.

Then he got to the point, conceding that the society’s position has changed.

“Continuing change in the entertainment market have render the single-screen movie house impractical at this particular site,” Newcomb said.

“The Alex,” Newcomb concluded, “is a prime candidate to be given new life.”

No doubt more will be heard from both camps as individual bricks began to fall. For now, though, compromise is alive in Glendale and humor is doing OK in the hands of a politician.

But maybe Roger Barkley will host the next show.