Reactions to Arts Council Evaluations, Cuts; California Music Theatre Sets 1990 Program

Some of Southern California’s largest and most important theaters are reeling from the poor ranking they received last week from the California Arts Council.

The La Jolla Playhouse, South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa and the Los Angeles Theatre Center are incensed at large cuts each sustained in CAC grant awards, cuts that are the result of a modified evaluation procedure that the theaters say they don’t completely understand.

“I’m outraged by the CAC’s lack of comprehension (of artistic excellence),” said the Theatre Center’s Bill Bushnell. “No one is going to convince me that La Jolla, LATC and South Coast are not among the best theaters in the state.”

CAC funding for the Los Angeles Theatre Center, which has had a stormy financial history, took a modest tumble from $37,982 last year to $33,671 this year, because of “ongoing managerial problems,” the CAC report said.

“The drop is the least of my concerns,” Bushnell added. “What’s abundantly clear is that if you don’t play by established rules you don’t score.”

More perplexing were the cuts suffered by South Coast Rep and La Jolla. The former, an award-winning theater with what California Arts Council theater-grants administrator Ray Tatar described as “a model administration,” saw its 1989 award drop to $81,950 from $106,400 in 1988, while La Jolla was slashed from $47,363 to $22,949.

In so radically slicing La Jolla’s grant, the CAC cited (among other things) a deficit that “seems out of control” and an outreach program whose artistic quality “could be developed” and currently shows a lack of “ethnic diversity on board, staff and audiences.”

“The deficit ($703,000) is obviously a concern of the CAC,” said La Jolla managing director Allan Levey. “It’s a much larger concern of ours. It’s not easy to find money for deficit reductions,” he added, reiterating that a three-year $250,000 National Endowment for the Arts challenge grant awarded La Jolla in February will be used to bring the deficit down.

“We have the shortest playing season and smallest number of seats” of any regional theater, he said, explaining that because of the playhouse’s tie-in with UC San Diego, on whose campus it resides, seasons--and therefore earning power--have been limited by the university’s needs.

The first of two new on-campus theaters is expected to be ready by March, 1991. “That will allow us to expand to a nine-month season and generate more funds,” Levey said.

South Coast, meanwhile, which suffered a 23% cut in funding over last year, is hard put to understand why. “In the past, we had been told our outreach was exemplary,” said producing artistic director David Emmes. “This year we were slammed. If they want us to do an outreach program--which we want to do--they are paradoxically cutting the funds that make it possible. It’s a curious sort of message.

“We were also told that representation of minorities on our board and staff were low. What doesn’t compute mathematically is why other theaters with similar characteristics received funding either equal to last year or more.

“What concerns me most is that the apparent emphasis on the different criteria seems to change every year. The nice thing about the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) is the sense of consistency about how you’re being evaluated. My only hope for the future is that, once these things are set, the criteria will be better understood and will be applied with some consistency from year to year.”

The source of these inconsistencies apparently lies in the change in the CAC’s evaluation system. Two seven-member peer panels--a discipline panel and a newly created LBO (Large Budget Organization) panel--rank theaters on two bases: managerial soundness and artistic achievement (the discipline panel) and the quality and multi-ethnicity of outreach programs (the LBO panel). Because, as Tatar explained it, the new LBO panel this year ranked all theaters near the low end of a 1-4 scale, the level of some of the awards fell accordingly.

But neither Emmes nor Levey is content to let things lie there.

“The information we’ve received,” Emmes said, “has not satisfied us so far. We’re attempting to get more data and understand how we received the money we received, to see if we have grounds for an appeal.”

“What’s tricky is the change in procedure,” Levey said. “We don’t agree with the panel’s comments. We’re contemplating an appeal. Des (McAnuff, La Jolla’s artistic director) is out of town. I want to talk to him. I want to talk to them (council members). And then we’ll see. They smacked our hand, for sure. It hurts, but when push comes to shove, we’re still providing the goods. . . .”

MUSIC MAESTRO: Three revivals and one new musical make up the California Music Theatre’s 1990 season at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. It kicks off with “On the Town” (Feb. 14-March 4), featuring Lorna Patterson, the music of Leonard Bernstein and book and lyrics of Betty Comden and Adolph Green.

Next up will be the Mitch Leigh-Joe Darion-Dale Wasserman “Man of La Mancha” (June 6-24) starring Robert Guillaume, followed by “Clothespins and Dreams” (Aug. 8-26), a new piece set in a family-owned laundry yard in Harlem, 1911, before the advent of the electric washing machine began to wreak havoc. The show, with music by Ken Hirsch and book and lyrics by Ron Miller, will feature Barney Martin and Eloise Laws.

Finally, that perennial favorite orphan, “Annie,” with John Schuck, Tom Hatten, Marcia Lewis and Lisa Robinson, will close the season (Nov. 28-Dec. 16, 1990).