A Birthday Wish for the Music Center : After 25 years, the time has come to give birth to a resident acting company devoted to the classics

This theater critic would like to add his signature to the Music Center’s 25th birthday card and to add a specific wish for its future. But first, some history.

In 1967, the UCLA Theatre Group moved downtown to become Center Theatre Group, the theatrical wing of the new Los Angeles Music Center. It was announced that the group would present shows both at the Ahmanson Theatre and the Mark Taper Forum. It would offer challenging new plays and the best of the standard repertory. It would bring in great acting companies from around the world.

And it would, “in time, develop its own resident acting company drawn from the great pool of talent available in this city.”

Somehow that time never came. It is time, now, that it should.

Why? A theater can do interesting and valuable work without a resident company. Gordon Davidson has proved that at the Taper. Sometimes even the Ahmanson has proven it.

But for world-class theater-- and the Music Center does use that phrase in its promotional literature--a larger effort is required.

World-class theater requires superbly trained stage actors, not famous faces from the movies and TV. Actors who are alive from the feet up, not from the neck up.

It needs actors who can project a whisper to the back row of the balcony--given a theater of reasonable size. (The Ahmanson is not a theater of reasonable size.)

It needs actors who can catch each other’s light like mirrors.

It needs actors who have had time to think through the play with their director--not just learn the blocking.

It needs preparation. It needs standards. It needs a proper rehearsal period. It needs continuity.

It needs an acting company.

Let’s be clear. We aren’t talking about one of those dinosaur aggregations that one finds in Eastern Europe, with the older actors jealously hanging onto the best parts and everyone gone soft on tenure. Thirty or 40 actors would be enough, and the roster would change between seasons, as on a major-league baseball or football team.

But there would also be a carry-over between seasons. The company would develop a collective memory, an agreed-upon attack, the foundation of a company style.

This has been the aim at the Taper for a long time. Several experiments in mini-rep were tried in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Each worked up a certain amount of momentum, only to see it dissipate in the off-season. Only once was there a sustained attempt to create a performance language. What an irony that the Music Center’s only true acting ensemble--the Taper’s Improvisational Theatre Project--spends most of the year on the road doing shows for kids!

What kind of plays would the Music Center Acting Company perform? Basically, the classics. Because that’s where the city’s major theatrical need lies. From “The Devils” in ’67 to this season’s “Temptation,” the Taper has provided stimulating contemporary programming, even when one disagreed with its implementation. But, in 25 years, the Music Center hasn’t presented more than a handful of world-class productions of the classics. And almost all were imports. (Two that weren’t: the Taper’s “Major Barbara” in 1971 and the Ahmanson’s “Cyrano de Bergerac” in 1973.)

This points to a serious deficiency in our city’s cultural diet. If our music lovers had to wait for the Berlin Philharmonic to come to town to hear Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony played with authority, it would be obvious that there was a gap on the local orchestral scene. If we had to wait for a traveling exhibit from Paris to see a real Monet, we wouldn’t be smug about our museums. Los Angeles has created some memorable theater over the quarter-century, but when it comes to the classics, we’re still a road town.

Not that the situation is any better in New York, where Shakespeare usually means Shakespeare in the Park, performed somewhat less well than in San Diego’s Balboa Park. But nobody these days wants to pattern Los Angeles theater after New York theater, which continues to be dominated by Broadway. The model of choice is London, with its mix of commercial and repertory theater--a town where an actor can be finishing up a TV thriller on Thursday and opening in “Twelfth Night” at the Royal Shakespeare Company on Friday.

This is also possible in Los Angeles. But the “Twelfth Night” is apt to be lousy. In a town full of actors, hardly anybody knows how to do Shakespeare.

One was reminded of the problem when Dustin Hoffman went off to London to play Shylock for Peter Hall last spring. Hoffman first read the play for Hall in Los Angeles, where Hall was directing an opera at the Music Center. Had a classical company been funded on the Hill 25 years ago, Hoffman and Hall might have met in a rehearsal hall at the Ahmanson--not as mentor and student, but as equals.

Where should the Music Center Acting Company perform? At the Ahmanson, if the house can be scaled down to a reasonable size--from 2,100 seats to 1,500 seats or less. One hears that this may happen after “Phantom of the Opera” closes. One has heard this before.

If it doesn’t happen, the James Doolittle Theatre in Hollywood--CTG/Ahmanson’s home this season--is the house of choice. At 1,000 seats, it is an ideal house for the (unmiked) spoken word, as can be heard when Derek Jacobi reads Byron in the current “Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know.”

Who would direct the new acting company? Presumably it will be a wing of Center Theatre Group, under Gordon Davidson’s jurisdiction. But its director needs to have strong classical-theater credentials, which may suggest a Brit.

Let’s be clear again. The intention is not to replace the Taper, but to leave it free to do the work it does best. Nor is the intention to do the classics in a pseudo-BBC accent. An L.A. “Hamlet” shouldn’t sound like a London “Hamlet.” But it should sound . Simon Callow got some magnificent sounds out of a disparate American cast in the Los Angeles Theatre Center’s “Jacques and His Master,” and he’d be an excellent candidate.

How much would all of this cost? Seven- or eight-million dollars a year, if we’re being serious--that’s how much it costs to run the RSC. One source of support would be the class of patron who is usually approached to underwrite a new building. An acting company could be maintained for a decade or more on what it costs to build an auditorium these days--and would be a living, breathing memorial to its donor, rather than a mere structure.

A specific source of support could be the Getty Trust. One of the items high on its agenda is the preservation of great works of art, not only by removing the encrusted grime of the past, but by protecting them from future decay.

There’s an analogy with the great works of the theater, threatened by the new illiteracy of TV and the media. These deserve the same preservation as a great painting or sculpture. In an age of margarine commercials, a superbly spoken production of Shakespeare reminds us what a shining thing the English language can be.

But first, you need the actors.