Mean Seasons : Barclay Theatre Has Trouble Finding Identity, Big Audiences

Within a span of 30 minutes on a recent afternoon, five people walked up to the box office of the Irvine Barclay Theatre to buy tickets to three different shows: “West Side Story,” folk-pop singer Don McLean and “Babes in Toyland.”

The mix--of people and programs--randomly illustrate what the theater’s supporters have been claiming ever since it opened 14 months ago as Irvine’s premier arts venue: that offerings at the Barclay by university troupes, professional entertainers and community performers would serve the public across a broad spectrum of tastes.

Fausta Lui, a research physician here from Italy for a two-year project at UC Irvine, bought a ticket to the “West Side Story” revival presented last week by the UCI departments of theater, music and dance.

“I saw big posters for the show,” said Lui, noting she’d never been to the Barclay before but had heard of the classic Broadway musical and decided to come on the spur of the moment.

Larry Brownson of Costa Mesa, who teaches math at Cal State Long Beach, was also a first-time Barclay-goer. He bought a pair of tickets to the Don McLean performance being presented Dec. 14 by the theater’s operating company.

And Irvine homemaker Gilda Rinkel, a part-time nurse who had been to the Barclay once before for a Girl Scouts event, bought several tickets to “Babes in Toyland,” which is being staged Dec. 13 through 15 by the amateur Irvine Ballet Co., where her children take dance lessons.

For all the activity at the box office that afternoon, however, attendance at the 756-seat theater has averaged only 64% of capacity for its first 14 months of operation--62% during the first nine months through June 30, 1991, according to Barclay records, and 67% between July and November.

By contrast, attendance at the 2,996-seat Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa averaged 91% of capacity for the first four months after it opened in 1986, and 79% over the past five years.

Moreover, two ambitious music organizations--the Irvine-based Mozart Camerata and the Costa Mesa-based Orange County Chamber Orchestra--have canceled most of their scheduled 1991-92 seasons at the Barclay because of financial problems partly due to poor attendance.

A third group--the Irvine Civic Light Opera--is also on the financial ropes and may either cancel its previously announced offering of “Cabaret” in February or, more likely, substitute a show cheaper to produce. (A decision is due on Dec. 15.)

“I don’t think we’ll cancel, though backing out is an option,” said ICLO artistic director Daniel R. Trevino. “We don’t want to walk away, and we have a moral obligation not to. But we lost $50,000 on ‘The Music Man’ (in September). We have to pay our old bills before we can go on.”

In addition, there is a real prospect of further defections.

For the 1992-93 season, the Orange County Philharmonic Society is considering canceling its Festival Series, one of two chamber-music series it is presenting at the theater this year.

“I’m not sure we’re building a subscription audience there,” said OCPS executive director Erich A. Vollmer. “I’m embarrassed to tell you we sold about 90 subscriptions to the series this year.”

Another chamber series that OCPS presents jointly with the Laguna Chamber Music Society, however, is 90% subscribed. “We had to turn people away on the first two concerts,” Vollmer said.

Irvine Barclay president Douglas C. Rankin says he is not discouraged by fluctuating attendance. He points out, moreover, that attendance averages 65% nationwide at similar theaters.

“I would say we’ve had modest success in meeting our mission statement and programming goals,” he maintained in a recent interview at his office.

Rankin, who is also the theater’s executive director, takes heart from the “promising” increase in overall attendance during recent months, coming as it has in the teeth of difficult economic times.

And he cited more than a few “stunning artists” as major programming highlights.

Among them were last season’s New York-based Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (presented by UCI) as well as the Chicago-based Hubbard Street Dance Company (presented by the Barclay management), and this season’s Beaux Arts Trio and Tokyo String Quartet (co-presented by the Laguna Chamber Music Society and OCPS).

Nevertheless, Rankin conceded what even the theater’s most fervent admirers contend: The Barclay lacks an identity in the Orange County community at large and has not been able to mount the kind of marketing campaign needed to raise public awareness of the venue, which presumably would draw larger audiences.

“Realistically speaking, I don’t think we have a high enough profile,” he said. “But that is something that takes years. In point of fact, we spent close to $100,000 last year on marketing. For this marketplace that’s just not enough. It’s a drop in the bucket.”

“If you’re talking about initial thrust, getting the place on the map, you can spend $200,000 to $300,000 a year--easily. And that’s just to reach some sort of critical mass, a certain level to identify that the theater does this, this, this and that, to get the audience to say, ‘Gee, let’s see what’s happening there.’

“I knew it would be difficult, a challenge. But this much of a challenge? Establishing the identification of the theater as a viable performance space within this market has been much tougher than I thought it would be.”

Part of the problem is related to the high expectations generated by the county’s experience with the 5-year-old Performing Arts Center, which gave the impression of being born full-grown and thus created the public perception that a new arts venue need only open its doors to draw an audience.

“OCPAC had so much more glitz and money that the Irvine Barclay continues to live in the shadow of that legacy,” said Micah Levy, founding director of the Orange County Chamber Orchestra, which has canceled three of six performances at the Barclay this year.

But, as Rankin, Levy and other arts leaders are quick to point out, any comparison of the Barclay with the Center in terms of attendance or identification is inherently lopsided.

The privately financed $72.8-million Center opened during boom times to a steady drumbeat of advance publicity. As a much larger venue with a very different cultural mission, it also hosts larger events with better-known performers who have greater drawing power.

The Barclay, by contrast, is a $17.6-million joint venture of public and private partners: the city of Irvine, which put up $11.3 million for construction; UCI, which put up $1.8 million and the 2.3-acre site, and the theater’s not-for-profit operating company, which initially raised $4.5 million in private contributions.

More significant perhaps, both the theater’s low profile and blurred identity may be the inevitable result of its programming mandate.

The agreement between the city and UCI stipulates that the Barclay must provide a third of all performance dates for UCI presentations and two-thirds for community groups. The theater’s operating company may keep up to a third of the dates, to be subtracted from the allotment to community groups, for its own presentations. (So far it has presented about 10% of the dates on the schedule.)

Thus, among 27 non-UCI presenters during the Barclay’s first season, organizations as different as the Irvine Valley Theatrefaire for Children and the Festival of Britain produced their own shows. And while their audiences may have overlapped, the overwhelming majority of presenters offered productions that targeted audiences with special interests and were not likely to appeal to a wider public.

This is particularly true of ethnic organizations, such as the Arpana Foundation, Bravi 9, the Friends of Jewish Music, Hath Rang, the Irvine Chinese Chorus, Natya Prya and Pan Pacific Performing Arts, among others, which sponsored about 12% of all the shows on the non-UCI side of the ledger.

Irvine Mayor Sally Anne Sheridan, a longtime force behind the theater who also sits on its board of trustees, exults over the Barclay’s boon to cultural diversity. “This theater plays an incredible role for ethnic communities. Can you imagine having a play done in Mandarin? Not only that, there were Indian dancers, Persians, the Ballets Africains. Our ethnic communities find the Barclay a very comfortable place.”

While such multicultural programming may be exemplary, it means by definition that the theater is bound to project a kaleidoscopic, even fragmentary, identity. Further, the problem is compounded by an apparent perception that the Barclay functions as part of UCI rather than as an independent institution.

“It’s a really first-rate theater,” said Larry Granger, music director of the Santa Ana-based South Coast Symphony, which has performed there seven times to date. “But sometimes people have the sense that, because it’s on the university campus, events are not first-class. They think they’re college events. That happens any time you’re on a college campus. And because it’s a community-based theater, there’s such a variety of groups in there. It confuses the public.”

ICLO’s Trevino, for one, wishes some kind of delineation could be made among community, professional and college troupes.

“No matter how hard we try to get the word out,” he said, “we keep getting calls about UCI events. People think we did ‘West Side Story,’ for instance. I understand why. They think we’re part of the university. What identity has been created for the theater is UCI’s. The university is the tail wagging the dog. The drawback for us is that nobody knows we’re around, and that’s the bottom line.”

The partial ownership of the theater by UCI also creates the perception among some community presenters that the Barclay management is prone to giving UCI arts groups preferential treatment. One common complaint is that UCI gets the biggest share of weekend dates, another that its groups get longer rehearsal time even to the point of keeping the theater dark on nights that might have been used by others, a privilege non-UCI presenters would never be granted.

The complaint about weekend dates is demonstrably untrue.

This month alone the Barclay management has reserved one Saturday night for itself (Don McLean), a full weekend--this Friday through Sunday--for the Philharmonic Society (the Salzburg Marionette Theatre) and a Friday night and a Saturday afternoon for the Irvine Ballet Co. (“Babes in Toyland”). Those are the only scheduled weekend performances in December, and none are UCI presentations.

The complaint about rehearsal time is also untrue but more complicated.

Rankin concedes he is not likely to grant any community group exclusive use of the theater for 10 days of rehearsal, as he did for UCI’s “West Side Story.” But, he notes, an equivalent number of performance dates were deducted from UCI’s total allotment so that no community group would lose any dates at the theater.

“The university simply elected to forfeit one of their other presentations,” Rankin said.

Community groups do not have the luxury of large blocks of performance dates to trade for rehearsal time, however, nor the financial resources to pay for extended periods of rehearsal. (At the rate of $50 an hour for the use of the building, plus crew wages, it cost UCI about $4,500 for the “West Side Story” rehearsals, Rankin said.)

Finally, there is grousing that the Barclay’s community programming is skewed toward troupes personally favored by Rankin.

After he rejected requests from various ballet companies to schedule their holiday offerings of “The Nutcracker,” for instance, a rumor spread that he had turned them all down because he wanted the semiprofessional Ballet Pacifica from Laguna Beach to present the Barclay’s first “Nutcracker.”

Ballet Pacifica artistic director Molly Lynch says she wishes it were so. She, too, submitted a request, she said, and it was rejected without explanation like everyone else’s.

Admittedly no fan of “The Nutcracker,” Rankin says the real reason he turned them all down was he had so many requests to do it. “I stopped counting the number somewhere about 10,” said Rankin. “It had to be none or all.”

What’s more, the county is not exactly starving for “Nutcrackers.”

“You can see it at the Center, at Orange Coast College, at the Laguna (Playhouse), in Mission Viejo,” he said. “Is there an obligation to present one ‘Nutcracker’ every 5 miles?”

Irvine Barclay Theatre Attendance (Oct. 1, 1990, to June 30, 1991)

In the nine months beginning Oct. 1, 1990, a total of 62,270 people attended 133 performances at the 756-seat Irvine Barclay Theatre. Attendance averaged 62.4% of capacity for all events. Theater averaged 73.4% of capacity. Dance averaged 65.4% of capacity. Music averaged 52.1% of capacity.

Source: Irvine Barclay Theatre