LATC Trims $1-Million From Budget as Plans Stall : Stage: An ambitious three-year, $5-million campaign, expected to be headed by the mayor, has ‘not come to fruition,’ the theater’s artistic director says.

Los Angeles Theatre Center officials have instituted rigorous new measures to cut the theater company’s budget by $1 million--to approximately $6.6 million--and to increase earned revenue by 9% during the upcoming year.

At the same time, a $5 million, three-year LATC fund-raising campaign that Mayor Tom Bradley was slated to co-chair has “not come to fruition,” said LATC artistic director Bill Bushnell. “This is not to say that it can’t jell in the next 60 to 120 days. . . . Other issues in the city (that have occupied the Mayor) need time to calm down.”

The campaign has been billed as an essential ingredient of the downtown theater company’s plan to meet the demanding financial responsibilities mandated by the City Council when it agreed to buy the LATC building last March.

A prominent CEO was supposed to co-chair the fund-raising effort with Bradley. “Everyone had agreed on a particular individual,” said Valerie Fields, the mayor’s arts and entertainment coordinator. “But there was a series of delays on his part in getting back to us, and we just very recently heard that he is unavailable. The mayor is pursuing other avenues. This is something that’s quite important to him.”

Bushnell believes it may be easier to find a co-chair “this summer in a calmer climate,” when he expects LATC to have demonstrated its commitment to survival despite the budget-trimming.

Among the cutbacks under way or planned by LATC officials:

* The suspension “until further notice” of all commissions of new plays, the annual “Festival of Premieres” scheduled for March and its attendant “Big Weekend,” and the theater’s labs devoted to classic theater, playwrights and young playwrights.

* The elimination of 16 out of approximately 100 full-time staff positions, “fairly evenly across the board,” Bushnell said. Perhaps the best-known figure to be laid off, at least temporarily, is Alan Mandell, the theater’s consulting director.

* Six fewer days of technical and dress rehearsals for mainstage productions. Less “down time” will add 14 revenue generating weeks to the fiscal year, providing time for extra one-man productions from Spalding Gray and John Fleck, which will require little additional rehearsal time.

* A $1 increase in the average single ticket price (including all discounted tickets), to $14.50.

* An average of seven instead of nine actors in each production, especially in the winter/spring season--”when we tend to do more new work, which is being written for small casts because of the economics of the American theater,” Bushnell said. Don’t brush up your Shakespeare for next spring at LATC; the Bard’s large casts are prohibitive, he added.

* A one-year salary freeze.

* A change in the commission structure for the theater’s telemarketers and less general-reader newspaper advertising. Bushnell expects to target audiences more precisely with ads on radio or even cable TV.

* An already announced plan to cut travel costs by using fewer artists from outside Los Angeles.

* A merging of the marketing and development departments and consolidations of several administrative jobs.

“We’ll come out of this leaner and more efficient,” Bushnell said.

In addition to immediate cutbacks, LATC is examining longer-term possibilities for greater financial stability. Among them could be an affiliation with a college-level academic institution. Two schools “that shall go unnamed” have been contacted, Bushnell said.

Theater officials are also exploring the option of one longer season of 10-11 plays instead of two annual seasons of seven plays each, in the 1992-93 fiscal year. This could reduce marketing and production costs. And it could facilitate the theater’s co-productions with the city’s Cultural Affairs Department during the 30% of LATC stage time alloted to that department, under the municipal ownership plan tentatively approved by the City Council in March.

Final approval of that plan encountered a roadblock in the City Council Tuesday. Details of the plan, as outlined by the City Administrative Office, were endorsed in a 8-3 vote, but the plan’s chief sponsor, Richard Alatorre, delayed the vote on actual enactment of the ordinance until next week. Two council members who have usually voted for LATC funds, John Ferraro and Robert Farrell, were absent, and some of the council members asserted that 10 votes were necessary to approve the ordinance.