Money Problems Plague Two Theaters in Orange County

As the year draws to a close, two of Orange County’s major theatrical institutions--the oldest and the youngest--have been afflicted by a common disease: broken promises and unfinished business.

The 70-year-old Laguna Playhouse, which produces an amateur season at the Moulton Theatre, has given up on its planned purchase of the vacant General Telephone Building on Mermaid Street, where it had expected to establish a second, smaller theater for a professional troupe.

The phone company “scuttled the deal by raising its price almost a million dollars,” says Douglas Rowe, artistic director of the Playhouse, which had had “an informal agreement” to purchase the property for about $1.8 million.

The new price tag of nearly $3 million is beyond the theater’s reach, Rowe said, making it unlikely that his hope of bringing professional productions to this coastal town would be realized any time soon. “It’s the most frustrating thing I’ve ever been involved with in my life,” he said.

Because the deal has fallen through, the Laguna Playhouse also lost “the most valuable board member we had,” Rowe said. John von Szeliski, a Newport Beach theater architect who had been recruited especially to oversee a second-theater project, recently resigned from the Playhouse’s board of directors.

Meanwhile, the 4 1/2-year-old Irvine Theatre Operating Co., which will run the 750-seat Irvine Theatre now under construction at UC Irvine, has failed to raise even half the money that its officials had vowed to raise in public testimony at an Irvine City Council meeting a year ago.

At that time, the council had to decide whether to ante up $1.8 million to meet the city’s share of a $5.4 million gap between the lowest construction bid of $17.6 million and the $12.2 million initially estimated as the building’s cost.

The theater, which is expected to open in October, 1990, is a joint venture of the city, the university and the nonprofit operating company. Each partner has agreed to share costs equally.

The council wanted assurances from the company that it could afford its additional share of the construction costs. Thomas H. Nielsen, chairman of the theater’s board of trustees, had said that the operating company would raise $3 million by the end of 1989.

That amount would bring its fund-raising goal to at least $4.5 million, including the $1.5 million that the operating company asserted it already had raised mainly through corporate pledges during the six months before the city council meeting in December, 1988.

To date, the operating company has received total of slightly less than $2.3 million in “verbal commitments,” according to the latest figures provided by Douglas C. Rankin, general manager of the operating company. And only $840,000 had been collected, as of Sept. 30.

Rankin denied that the shortfall posed a problem.

“Our revised target is to achieve all the fund-raising before the theater opens,” he said. “I don’t know that there is any difficulty that anyone else doesn’t experience (in fund-raising). It’s a challenging task. You always want it to go faster than it might seem.”

The city council has not been notified of this revision, said Cameron Cosgrove, one of the council’s five members. “I wouldn’t get worried until February or March,” said Irvine city manager Paul Brady.

Theater construction continues on schedule, Rankin said.