The Bottom Line Rises to the Top : Culture: Fiscal considerations have clouded the future of both the Los Angeles Theatre Center and the Joffrey Ballet.

That was a strong, clear bottom line that was drawn in the artistic sands of both the Music Center and the Los Angeles Theatre Center this week.

Wednesday morning the City Council voted to take over the Theatre Center’s building with a buyout payment of $5.2 million, and a one-time $750,000 subsidy to the resident performance group. Plus a strong message that that was all the company could expect from the city.

Later that day, the governing organizations at the Music Center told the Joffrey Ballet/L.A. that its four-week season starting May 7 would be its last in the Chandler Pavilion.

And now what?

For the planners at the Music Center, the ending of the Joffrey connection is more a fiscal necessity than an artistic need. “It’s all about money,” one Center official said. The ballet company had failed to draw large-enough audiences. For the past few years ticket sales were flat, neither growing, but not exactly shrinking, ranging from 42% to 49% of capacity. “Papered houses” (complimentary tickets) gave the illusion of a larger-than-reality following.

At the same time Joffrey officials failed to meet another Music Center demand: audited statements of its financial health. When after waiting several months for the dance company to produce these statements, the Music Center set a March 4 deadline for the company’s report. The deadline passed and with it possibly the future of the Joffrey in Los Angeles.

The lack of audience growth spilled over into related areas. Even performance companies don’t operate in economic vacuums. Other revenues at the complex were flat during the Joffrey seasons. Small audiences produce smaller number of spenders at the two big Music Center restaurants, its outside dining area, its gift shop, and the county’s parking facility. Even the pretzel vendor’s business was in a downward curve.

Other ballet companies are ready to fill the Joffrey dates. There is talk among some Music Center officials of undoing “the mistake” of several years ago when the Joffrey was chosen over the American Ballet Theatre. Preliminary talks have been made with ABT officials in New York regarding Music Center dates. At the same time the Bolshoi has also been mentioned as a possible replacement. Even without another ballet company, the four spring weeks and the two winter weeks reserved for the Joffrey could eventually be filled by the Music Center Opera Company, the Philharmonic or some other local organization.

Ironically, the cutting off of the Joffrey ties came at a time when the company had been receiving high critical and audience ratings in its recent East Coast dates (and before that, its tour of Europe). The company artistically had survived and seemed to be flourishing after the internal struggle last year over who would manage the company and how it would respond to a tax audit.

At the same time the company had just received a major grant from the Absolut vodka company commissioning three new ballets this spring for the company’s spring dates in Los Angeles and to revive Robert Joffrey’s 1980 ballet, “Postcards.” Three American choreographers, Christopher d’Amboise, Charles Moulton and Edward Stierle, were the recipients of the Swedish company’s grants.

But it was not enough to assure the Music Center officials, who also had given sizable grants to the Joffrey, that there were other Swedish or American angels in the wings to rescue the dance company. In the end it was “all about money.”

Signs of the Joffrey’s money problems were first seen five years ago when figures obtained by The Times indicated that the dance company’s expenses were rising 47% faster than its revenues from ticket sales. Then contributions from major donors kept the company liquid. Only contributions and grants prevented the company then from a deficit situation. The same continued until the March 4 deadline

At the Spring Street Theatre Center, the story is also “about money.”

Where to find more of it. How to use it.

Clearly two things will have to be done if that downtown multi-stage complex will survive with the city as landlord:

--Box-office revenues miraculously will have to be improved.

--Fund raising will have to be stepped up.

Plans have already been made on new fund-raising efforts through corporate sponsorships and through direct-market subscription ticket sales. The current spring season will not change and Bill Bushnell, the theater’s founder and artistic director, hopes to continue what he calls his “large, broad based programming. Our mission when we began this dream 10 years ago was to develop a multicultural theater as well as a populist theater. I don’t see any changes in that.”

Where there will have to be changes if the city and the Theatre Center traditionalists are to survive is in the future of the surrounding Spring Street area. When Bushnell brought his actors and playwrights from his previous Santa Monica and Western location, the hope was that the theater would be an anchor for the city’s redevelopment plans for the declining former financial district on the edges of downtown’s Skid Row. That never happened. Nothing really improved on Spring Street except for the Theatre Center itself, the relocation of the library after its fires and the eventual long-delayed completion of the Reagan state office complex three blocks from the theater.

The Spring Street location has become a discouraging, unbeatable factor in audience building. The theater estimates it has lost 20% to 25% of potential audiences because of the problems of the surrounding area. With the center averaging 65% to 75% of capacity those missing audience members might have produced a profitable 90% capacity and the dream realized.

Bushnell is currently in Oslo where he is directing the Saturday night opening of Tennessee Williams’s “Night of the Iguana” at the National Theater. “I just walk across the street from my hotel to the theater to work,” he says by telephone.

“This city didn’t allow its center to collapse.”

Next weekend, the Theatre Center stages its 12th annual “festival of premieres,” new works, workshops, readings, along with its current offerings of “My Children! My Africa!” “Veins and Thumbtacks” and “Absalom’s Song.”

It’s advertised as “Culture Bash.”

That will be a bash. Not a bashing.