Managing Director Will Leave Playhouse

Alan Levey, managing director of the La Jolla Playhouse will resign from the theater, effective Dec. 31.

“There are things we do in our lives that we do for personal reasons,” Levey, 43, said Monday from his Playhouse office. “Ten years is a long time. These are difficult jobs. I have made an enormous investment here, and I’m very proud of that investment, but it’s time to move on.”

Levey, who has been with the theater since 1981, was the financial architect who helped rebuild the Playhouse into a fully professional theater in 1983. He also shepherded the Playhouse through a 1989 crisis campaign, during which the 1990 season was threatened. The theater raised the needed $500,000 in three months, and the season went on, but when Levey sought another $500,000 to offset a deficit of $703,000, the Playhouse confirmed in 1990 that it had raised only $200,000 toward that goal. No figures have been released since.

Levey acknowledged that there is considerable stress in his job.

“It’s the manager’s job to manage the resources, and there’s enormous pressure on those resources these days,” Levey said.

When Levey was hired as head of the Theatre and Arts Foundation of San Diego’s summer program at UC San San Diego in 1981, in essence he became managing director as well as the first employee of the new La Jolla Playhouse, which in its previous incarnation had closed in 1964.

Levey’s triumphs lay in facilitating artistic excellence at the Playhouse. He supervised the search for an artistic director that culminated in the hiring of Des McAnuff in 1983, and he supervised and planned the design and construction of both the $5.5-million Mandell Weiss Theatre and the newly opened $5-million Mandell Weiss Forum, both on the UC San Diego campus.

Levey said he stayed for the first season of the new Mandell Weiss Forum because he felt a personal investment in it.

“The most significant thing for me is the opening of these two buildings, which I was basically responsible for, and being part of the team that brought this artistic vision to the public. That artistic vision couldn’t have been implemented without these facilities, and the institution isn’t what it would be with the artistic vision.

The Playhouse produces from May through November, sharing the facilities with the UCSD graduate theater department, which produces there the rest of the year.

Since the Playhouse opened under McAnuff’s leadership, it has distinguished itself as one of the leading regional theaters in the country. Its production of “Big River” went to Broadway, winning seven Tonys including one for McAnuff as best director of a musical in 1985. The Playhouse production of “A Walk in the Woods,” also under McAnuff’s direction, played on Broadway in 1988 and in Moscow and Lithuania in 1989-90.

The Playhouse’s chronic financial problem, according to Levey, has been a short season that made expensive production costs difficult to offset, exacerbated by a shortfall in contributed income and poor single ticket sales in 1989.

Levey is a graduate of City College of New York and Ohio State University. He managed performing arts centers in Ohio and Texas before becoming managing director of the critically acclaimed but financially troubled California Shakespeare Festival in the San Joaquin Valley, a position he had held for two years until 1981, when he took the job as managing director of the Playhouse.