1988: Year of the Arts? : San Diego’s Ups and Downs, as Rated by The Times’ Arts Staff

It got off to a nice, upbeat start, with Mayor Maureen O’Connor declaring it “The Year of the Arts in San Diego” and promising to bring an international festival that would put San Diego on the cultural map.

For a while, enthused members of the arts community had the silly notion that the year of the arts--and the stride toward prominence on the cultural map--might involve them. As it turned out, the mayor had organized a party at which she intended to hog the punch.

O’Connor aimed the klieg lights on the arts, which was good, then stepped into it, which was bad. To her credit, the mayor did get the city to pony up another $1 million for local arts, but, instead of seeking someone who was both knowledgeable about the arts and an experienced organizer to run the whole show, she played with the controls herself.

The Soviet Arts Festival, with a price tag of $6 million, is apparently going to happen next October, with events and exhibits handpicked by the mayor. Not surprisingly, what she sees as breakthrough attractions, scholars see as relatively mundane. Generally ignoring Russia’s rich traditions in ballet, literature and theater--and altogether ignoring contemporary Soviet artists--O’Connor returned from her tour of Russia with commitments for Faberge eggs, religious icons, a puppet show and a variety of Georgian folk culture and music.

Few people at any level in the San Diego arts community believe the festival will put San Diego on the cultural map. With a far more extensive and prestigious lineup of Soviet arts already set for a Seattle festival in 1990, the mayor’s expectation of a cultural media blitz of San Diego seems unlikely.

In any event, the festival does not involve many people in the local arts community, and monies that small groups might have expected from the city’s increased bed-tax fund are instead subsidizing the big gamble.

If there was a Woman of the Year in the arts, it was philanthropist Muriel Gluck, who, with a few strokes of her pen, targeted $3 million in arts education for San Diego schoolchildren. The money will pay for the hiring of 50 visual artists who will teach children in each of San Diego’s 107 elementary and five middle schools.

With that gesture, Gluck stimulates two vital organs in the art body: the local art community, through employment, and the minds of the city’s future artists and patrons.

Discounting the political hyperbole, 1988 was less “the year of the arts” than one more step in a gradual evolution. The city’s exploding population is inevitably adding to each art’s base of patronage, but the new migration is as fragmented in its tastes as the old.

The city is a promoter’s nightmare. Other than the professional theaters, which now fill themselves on sheer momentum, there is no telling who or what will cause either a run or a yawn on tickets. Major pop acts cause a bulging of the seams at the Sports Arena, but you could have held Dizzy Gillespie’s concert in your living room and had a chair left for yourself.

Miles Davis, one of the great jazz trumpeters of the past 30 years, had his show canceled at Sea World when only 50 tickets were sold. One of two performances scheduled this fall by the Ballet Folklorico de Mexico was canceled for lack of interest, and North County’s Batiquitos Festival barely skirted bankruptcy as it limped to the completion of a shortened festival program.

Still, there was plenty of good news. The theater circuit continued to thrive. The symphony, with a little help from its friends, got back on its feet (even held a press conference to announce that it had broken even). And, though one of the city’s two dance promoters ended the year with serious financial problems, dance fans had an unprecedented range of performances to choose from.

For the most part, it wasn’t a matter of not having enough good things to see or do in 1988. The problem was the curious lack of motivation by residents of America’s Finest (and Fastest Growing) City to see and do them. Some highlights, thoughts and trends:

THEATER

It is no longer news that San Diego is recognized as one of America’s hottest regional theater towns. Nonetheless, let us count the ways.

Three plays that premiered in San Diego in 1987 competed for Tony awards on Broadway in ’88. Two other new plays first produced here this year--A. R. Gurney Jr.’s “The Cocktail Hour” and Neil Simon’s “Rumors”--are on Broadway right now.

San Diego theatergoers proved to be better revelers than New Yorkers, making the locally produced “Suds” the box office champion at the Old Globe before it got the cold shoulder at the off-Broadway Criterion. If you missed “Suds,” Happy New Year; it’s coming back to the San Diego Rep in January.

It was a year of growing diversity in theater and of social consciousness in the theater community. San Diego theaters hosted productions of “The Colored Museum,” “Black Nativity” and the bilingual “Burning Patience.” There was an autobiographical play (“Tea,” at the Old Globe) about the cross-cultural stress on children of Japanese war brides, the Streisand Festival of Jewish Plays (at the Gaslamp Quarter), plus shows for the hearing-impaired and fund-raisers for victims of AIDS.

Smaller companies struggled but survived. The Bowery Theater put on some marvelous small productions before being evicted from the Palace Hotel building. It has since found a new home in the Onyx Building. The Progressive Stage Company also found a new home, and the San Diego Rep, thanks primarily to the continuing popularity of “Six Women With Brain Death or Expiring Minds Want to Know,” went from red to black ink.

The North Coast Repertory Theatre enjoyed sellouts, despite doubling the size of its house by moving from a 99-seat venue to one with 200 seats in the same Lomas Santa Fe shopping mall.

Some applause is due as the curtain draws on ‘89:

To the Old Globe Theatre for the stimulating collaboration of its artistic director Jack O’Brien and playwright A. R. Gurney on “The Cocktail Hour.” For allowing such talents as Stephen Sondheim (“Into the Woods”) and Neil Simon (“Rumors”) to develop plays in a relatively critically pressure-free climate. For the daring interpretations of Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus” and “Timon of Athens.”

To the San Diego Actors Co-op, which held its first citywide auditions in January to show local theaters what San Diego actors can do. Since then, the organization has flown in artistic directors from across the country who brought contracts with them.

To the local companies and theater talent who raised funds to benefit AIDS sufferers through various performances.

To the San Diego Theatre League, for its promotion of theater through its half-price Arts-TIX and Post-TIX programs, and for its introductory series of interpreted performances for the hearing-impaired. And to the San Diego Rep for starting its own interpreted series with “Heathen Valley,” and then doing the same with its current shows.

To the producers and stars of “Suds,” whose success proved that cooperation between local artists and theaters can make for a winning product.

CLASSICAL MUSIC

It was not a banner year for classical music, but hey, we’ve seen worse. And recently.

The San Diego Symphony survived its first full season after being locked out for a year, and though the performances were less than inspired, they were music to the ears of famished classical music lovers.

While its summer pops series at Hospitality Point was tepid, and not well attended, the orchestra started its fall season on more hopeful notes, namely the addition of several new players in key positions, including three long-vacant “first chairs.” The new players are first-rate and have strengthened the orchestra’s ensemble.

With a visit by the highly touted St. Louis Symphony in September, the La Jolla Chamber Music Society inaugurated its International Orchestra series in downtown San Diego. The series continued with the Moscow State Symphony in November. Not only will this series bring some of the finest world-class orchestras to the city, the repertory heard has been fresh and stimulating.

St. Louis programmed Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony, which it had just recorded, and Joan Tower’s recent “Silver Ladders.” The Soviets brought Scriabin’s Second Symphony, a rarely played early opus by that important Russian composer.

British-American Composer Gina Leishman provided knockout musical scores for two San Diego Repertory Theatre productions, “Red Noses” and “A Christmas Carol.” She won a San Diego Critics’ Circle Award for “Red Noses,” and her period music for the annual Dickens holiday potboiler soared above the Rep’s earthbound production. Although Leishman is based in San Francisco, local companies and music groups should keep the welcome mat out for this accomplished composer.

The quality and scope of San Diego Opera’s educational programs under the direction of William Roesch earned high marks in 1988. The “Hansel and Gretel” program and Opera Ensemble program not only brought opera to the schools, it engaged the students actively, surely the best way to cultivate an appreciation for this art form. General director Ian Campbell’s commitment to opera education is surely one of the hallmarks of his administration.

UC San Diego’s New Music Forum, the successor to the old Atomicafe, has provided a consistent level of engaging, well-crafted and well-performed new music. Most of the composers are still university graduate students, but organizer Frank Cox has an ear for works that deserve a wider audience. If new music performance appears to be an endangered species in San Diego County, this series is a hopeful sign.

On the other hand, much was dubious about the musical achievements of 1988.

There was the major black eye given the arts community by the disastrous Batiquitos Festival at the beginning of summer. Promising a grandiose festival and educational program--an instant amalgam of Aspen and Tanglewood perched on the edge of the Batiquitos Lagoon--Batiquitos skirted bankruptcy two weeks into the five-week festival. It hobbled to completion, dropping concerts and begging noted musical educators to remain and teach for nothing.

The San Diego Symphony’s programming this season was cautious and predictable, if not downright banal, avoiding American composers and contemporary music with a vengeance. In May, 1988, Gunther Schuller brought his “Concerto Quartenio” to Symphony Hall, but works by his American colleagues have been sadly absent.

For sure, the symphony’s new administration under Wesley A. Brustad has its work cut out in rebuilding the symphony’s audience, but patrons have not been flocking to the meat-and-potatoes fare offered thus far. Here’s a New Year’s resolution suggestion for you Wes: How about a little vision and imagination in 1989 symphony programming?

VISUAL ART

The story of the year, as noted, was Mayor O’Connor’s Soviet Arts Festival, but the scandal of the year was the San Diego Port District’s rejection in June of two public art proposals for the city’s waterfront.

After more than a year of deliberation and dissent, port commissioners succumbed to personal prejudice and ignored the recommendations of their arts advisory committee, voting to kill not only Vito Acconci’s revised version of “Sea of Green” and Roberto Salas’ “Victory Palm,” but also any hopes for a courageous, challenging use of the district’s funds for public art.

Apropos of everything, the commissioners ended the year by turning their unused public art budget over to the mayor’s fund for the Soviet Arts Festival.

We should pause, briefly, to acknowledge the year’s most controversial sculpture, William Tucker’s “Okeanos.” The cast bronze sculpture, named for the Greek god of the sea, wowed the critics, some of whom thought it looked like a wave. But passers-by at Scripps Clinic, where it is installed, wondered if it hadn’t escaped from one of the clinic’s labs, or if it weren’t, in fact, a scatological joke.

Anyway, the real news at Scripps was the announcement of Muriel Gluck’s $3-million donation to the San Diego Unified School District. It was a nice counter, 10 years later, to the damage done to arts education by Proposition 13 and is the year’s consensus MVP. But there were other good deeds and deeds well done in visual arts during the year.

The steady growth of the Stuart Collection of outdoor sculpture on the campus of UC San Diego. Under the thoughtful and imaginative direction of Mary Beebe, the collection has commissioned eight site-specific works in the last five years, from a range of internationally acclaimed artists.

In 1988, William Wegman’s witty “La Jolla Vista View” was installed, as well as Bruce Nauman’s provocative “Vices and Virtues.” Funded by a private foundation, the Stuart Collection has quietly but diligently pursued its aims “to integrate artistic thinking into the fabric and life of the campus and to enhance the university’s physical and social environment.”

The success of its efforts has brought about a welcome turn of events: next spring, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles will be bringing members of its support group down to La Jolla to view the collection.

The continued evolution of a downtown “arts district,” further enhanced this year by the opening of the Oneiros Gallery, the ABC--Art+Architecture/Books/Catalogues--store, and several small clothing and jewelry boutiques.

The appointment of Kathleen Stoughton as director of the Mesa College Art Gallery, a move that brings an ambitious new vision to the community college’s art program and bolsters the city’s serious art offerings.

The San Diego Museum of Art’s “Cultural Currents” exhibition, a refreshing sign that innovation and insight have not been permanently banned from the programs of the city’s largest art museum.

POP MUSIC

It’s been a year of extremes for the San Diego pop music scene. The highs were higher and the lows were lower than in any year in recent memory. A number of outstanding achievements make 1988 a year San Diego pop boosters will always remember, preeminent among them the resurrection of the downtown California Theater as a concert venue, the success of a nightclub devoted to local rock bands that play only originals, and the focusing of the national spotlight on several hometown heroes.

But there were also a number of dubious achievements locals would just as soon forget, such as the failure of two new big-name concert series, the destructive behavior of San Diego reggae and heavy metal fans at a pair of concerts, and the stabbing of local blues legend Tom (Cat) Courtney in the Ocean Beach honky-tonk where he’s been performing, without incident, for nearly 16 years.

We’ll light a match for:

Avalon Attractions. The booking savvy of Southern California’s top concert promoter has given a new lease on life to the California Theater. In 1986, the death of its owner put an end to the theater’s decade-long run as one of San Diego’s busiest pop-concert spots.

But since Avalon entered the picture last April, the 61-year-old downtown landmark has once again been teeming with activity, hosting such pop heavyweights as Ziggy Marley, Belinda Carlisle, the Rascals, Iggy Pop, Steve Miller, and nearly two dozen others.

Rio’s. Owner Cameron Moshtagi’s New Year’s resolution was to turn his Loma Portal nightclub into something of a shelter for the musically homeless--the homeless being San Diego rock bands whose insistence on playing their own material instead of Top 40 covers made them personae non gratae in most other local clubs. Since then, Rio’s has regularly showcased such hot hometowners as the Jacks, Robert Vaughn and the Shadows, and Comanche Moon. And, much to Moshtagi’s delight, the crowds are as big as the talent is impressive.

Red Flag. This local techno-pop duo’s debut single, “Broken Heart,” was released by Synthicide Records last July and promptly soared up Billboard’s dance charts. Brothers Chris and Mark Reynolds subsequently went on a five-month national touring blitz that included gigs with the Information Society, the Escape Club, Thomas Dolby, and Devo.

Mojo Nixon. After six years of flirting with success, San Diego’s manic talkin’ bluesman finally tied the knot last January when he became the official on-air spokesman for MTV. About the same time, Nixon’s humorous debunking of the Elvis Presley mystique, “Elvis is Everywhere,” became his first single ever to get heavy air play on commercial radio.

And turn thumbs down for:

San Diego concert-goers. At a free reggae concert Oct. 22 on the Broadway Pier, they smashed a $65,000 limousine; at the Dec. 5 heavy metal show by Metallica and Queensryche at the San Diego Sports Arena, they trashed more than 100 floor seats.

The guy who pulled a knife on Tom (Cat) Courtney. The venerated San Diego bluesman’s Oct. 6 performance at the Texas Teahouse came to an abrupt end when he was attacked by a knife-wielding assailant shortly after midnight. Courtney had been playing there every Thursday night since 1973; he had previously toured the country with such celebrated blues figures as T-Bone Walker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Jimmy Reed.

JAZZ

Is San Diego a hot jazz town, or are we whistling “Dixie?” Apparently, we’re whistling “Dixie.”

Dizzy Gillespie got shunted from Humphrey’s, where ticket sales were weak, to Sea World, where the turnout was small. Miles Davis got canceled, flat-out, after the promoter sold only 50 tickets.

KSDS-FM (88.3) continues to be the only serious jazz station in the city, and it has the range of a cheap Radio Shack walkie talkie. KSDS, we love you, love you ! But we can’t hear you, man. We have 30,000 wishes for you in ‘89, and they’re all watts.

The La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art hosted a jazz symposium a few weeks ago, a panel discussion aimed at defining the state of jazz in San Diego. There was an illustrious panel of knowledgeable jazz people, but the only thing they agreed on was that the stuff played on KIFM-FM isn’t jazz.

We would like to hit an E-flat on the fluegelhorn for Art Good, who has gained a huge following for “Lites Out Jazz” and his national “Jazz Trax” show, both featuring soft “contemporary jazz”--better known as “Valium jazz”--and who, when asked about his support of pseudo jazz over straight ahead jazz, said: “There’s no reason we should support traditional jazz. The Padres don’t play football, we don’t do traditional jazz. Do I feel a commitment to educate people about it? No. Radio is not designed to be educational, but entertainment.”

If we are whistling “Dixie,” we must have some company. Jude Hibler gave up her day job as a secretary to launch a monthly jazz paper called the Jazz Link. Hibler sells thousands of each edition of the Link, which makes us wonder, how is it possible that only 50 people bought tickets to the Miles Davis concert?

Good news, bad news, be-bop and blues . . . Elario’s held its head high as San Diego’s only consistent source of authentic jazz. During 1988, Herb Ellis, Barney Kessel, James Moody, Laurindo Almeida, Buddy DeFranco, Terry Gibbs and a host of others were booked to play La Jolla by the restaurant’s entertainment coordinator, Steve Satkowski. . . . But then, the Bella Villa in Cardiff, which provided both good jazz and an ocean view (as close to heaven as we may get), closed its jazz deck at the end of summer, saying business didn’t support the cost of talent. . . . KPBS-TV and Paul Marshall served jazz, the public and history well by taping the “Club Date” jazz series. It raised the level of jazz excitement in San Diego, gave local musicians a chance to appear before a national audience with some big names and preserved several living jazz legacies on tape for future generations. . . . KSWV-FM stole Art Good from KIFM, assuring Valium jazz fans two regular sources of this aural narcotic. Sweet dreams.

THE MEDIA

No sense keeping you in suspense on this beat: the story of the year was the dueling dye jobs of Jerry G. Bishop, host of SunUp San Diego (KFMB-Channel 8) and Mitch Duncan, an on-air reporter for the same station, who dunked their gray-topped noggins in Clairol and looked around for youth.

We liked Jerry’s dye job best (maybe it was the better studio lighting), but somebody must have objected. Both men let nature take its course and ended the year under gray.

Flash: Rolf Benirschke kicked a field goal in the last two seconds of a series of auditions for Pat Sajak’s vacated spot as host of the daytime version of “The Wheel of Fortune” and won the game! Rolf would not say how much the job will pay, but he will certainly be able to afford to buy the vowels that are missing from his last name.

The San Diego Tribune played its version of “The Wheel of Fortune” this year, putting six aspiring staff writers and a couple of outside applicants through two-week auditions for the paper’s radio-TV beat. The winner was staffer Joe Stein, who the editors discovered had been secretly watching television for years.

Tribune columnist Alison Da Rosa wins our Gonzo Journalist of the Year Award for dressing down and hitting the streets with Gonzo Mayor Maureen O’Connor to see how the homeless spend their nights.

If you thought Jack McKeon deserves the Horse Trader of the Year award, think again. KNSD-TV (Channel 39) swapped its rights to “Cheers” reruns to XETV (Channel 6) for Geraldo Rivera’s rock-’em, sock-’em talk show. A few months later, Geraldo caught a chair in the face during a taped riot on his show and KNSD’s ratings--at least for that show--soared.

The Source wanted to establish itself as San Diego’s source for information. Instead, a couple of months after the debut, the combination TV guide and feature magazine joined the long list of publications that have met quick and unceremonious deaths in San Diego.

Finally, to end the show on a whimsical note, there is this item:

After Michael Tuck aggressively denounced Sea World for whining about coverage of its corporate problems in one of his “Perspective” pieces, pointing out that Sea World tries to buy the press by offering the media tickets and throwing parties, Sea World said it would no longer offer freebies to Channel 10 employees.

Contributing to this story were Hilliard Harper, Kevin Brass, Kenneth Herman, Nancy Churnin, Dirk Sutro, Thomas K. Arnold and Eileen Sondak.