City Council Votes Interim Support for L.A. Theatre Center : Arts funding: An upcoming report on the Spring Street facility will be a key indicator of the future.

Los Angeles Theatre Center got a new lease on life--through October--when the Los Angeles City Council voted 9 to 3 Tuesday to approve $750,000 for the building’s operating costs and debt service.

At the same time, it was clear that a report on the future of the four-theater facility at 517 S. Spring St., due by the end of September, looms ever larger as the key indicator of what will happen to LATC.

Council members who voted with the majority repeatedly referred to the importance of hearing what’s in the report, which is being written by a study group appointed by Mayor Tom Bradley, before making a long-term decision about LATC.

“We need to re-visit our commitment” to LATC, said Councilwoman Gloria Molina, but she also spoke of “maintaining this important theater in this city and having experts tell us how to do it.”

Councilmen Robert Farrell and Michael Woo tried, without much success, to extract hints of what the study group is doing out of William Wingate, the consultant who heads the group. Wingate maintained that “it’s too early to come to conclusions.”

Three councilmen--Zev Yaroslavsky, Marvin Braude and Ernani Bernardi--were unwilling to wait for the report and voted “to pull the plug,” in Yaroslavsky’s words. “What are you going to have in four months (the amount of time the study group is taking to prepare its report)? It’ll cost more to close it down in four months,” Yaroslavsky said, adding that another $990,000 will be required to keep LATC’s doors open from October through January.

Councilman Nate Holden offered an amendment that would stop city support after Dec. 31, but no action was taken on it, and Holden finally voted to approve the interim funding.

The theater center’s defenders said blame was being misplaced. “They haven’t failed,” said Councilman Hal Bernson. “The city council and the CRA (the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency, which has channeled $20 million into LATC as part of a plan to redevelop the surrounding neighborhood) have failed (to revitalize the area). The Theatre Center is a very accomplished group. We should be proud to have them.”

If the theater were located elsewhere, Bernson noted, it wouldn’t ask for so much city money. “Are we willing to pull the plug on Spring Street?” he asked.

Braude took seriously the suggestion that LATC should move to a better neighborhood. “Perhaps some programs should be housed elsewhere, not where we have this terrible indebtedness.”

“I don’t think it’s reasonable to ask any theater group to handle the debt burden of that facility,” said Councilwoman Joy Picus, an LATC subscriber, “particularly one that’s operating in an area that’s less than desirable. I don’t love being in that area at night. . . . It’s a wonder you have the audiences you do have.

“Some serious errors were made in the original calculations” of when LATC could be self-sustaining at its current address, Picus said. But such errors are not sufficient reason to reverse course now, she added. She commended theater officials for doing “a noble job in making the (programming) operations reasonably self-supporting.”

Yaroslavsky expressed confidence that the city could continue to revitalize Spring Street without LATC, and he questioned the extent of the city’s commitment to the facility. “No one had the nightmare that it would end up costing $21 million. If the commitment is to the building,” he suggested, “we could do something more profitable with it or sell it.”

He also criticized LATC advocates’ separation of the theater’s programming costs from its building costs. When measuring city support of other arts groups, he said, “we don’t segregate the rent subsidies from the salaries of the artists.”

As he did at a committee meeting two weeks ago, Yaroslavsky claimed that “other legitimate arts organizations” are protesting the amount of city money requested by LATC. “In the arts community,” he said, the issue has become “a cryingstock.”

Yet he didn’t name any protesting arts groups, nor did his spokeswoman respond to a request for names.

The only representative of another arts group who showed up to address the council Tuesday came to praise LATC, not to bury it. Nobu McCarthy, artistic director of East West Players, called LATC “a burning light in an otherwise dark and unfriendly area” and “an institution that is not afraid to take chances and break new ground.”

IRVING AT DOOLITTLE: Amy Irving will star in “The Heidi Chronicles” when it opens its national tour at the Doolittle Theatre on Oct. 14, as part of the Ahmanson-at-the-Doolittle season.

That season generated nearly $1.3 million in subscription renewals on Monday alone, easily breaking the theater’s previous one-day subscription-renewal record of $604,017, set on July 3, 1989. Apart from enthusiasm for the programming, which was announced more than a month ago, a theater spokesman had no explanation for the jump in sales.

The Doolittle has a new general manager, Douglas C. Baker, most recently company manager of “Prelude to a Kiss” on Broadway. He replaced Veronica Claypool, who took a film industry job.

MORE MANAGER NEWS: The Nederlander-owned theaters--the Pantages, Wilshire and Fonda--also have a new general manager: Norman Maibaum, formerly the manager at the Westwood and then the Coronet. The Nederlander theaters were formerly managed by Dixie Burton, now Nederlander’s director of special events.

FROM PIER TO PARK: Santa Monica has moved its city-sponsored summer theater from the Santa Monica Pier to a beachside park just north of Ocean Park Blvd. At 6 tons, the city’s new $50,000 mobile stage is too heavy for the pier, said a spokeswoman for the city’s Cultural Dept.

This year’s show will be “Late Breaking Muse,” conceived by Mums co-founder Nathan Stein. It will open Aug. 4 and play Saturdays and Sundays at 4 p.m.

PAY WHAT YOU CAN: You may choose your own ticket price for the July 29 and Aug. 1 evening performances of “Miss Evers’ Boys” at the Mark Taper Forum. Tickets go on sale Sunday at the Taper box office on a cash-only basis, limited to two per person.