New Performing Arts Center Will Be Aiming for the Stars : Theater: General manager of the unfinished facility says he is working on a lineup of high-quality performances in a variety of styles.

Skeptics said it would never work in the competitive Southern California performing arts market.

Critics wondered what a bedroom city like Cerritos, with 53,000 residents, was doing lavishing millions of dollars on a shrine to the arts.

Not even the economy was kind, taking a tumble during the two years that construction crews have been at work on the huge concrete, glass and marble performing arts center rising in the middle of the Cerritos Towne Center development of offices, stores, restaurants and a hotel.

But late this year, officials hope to prove the naysayers wrong and put the city--heretofore noted mostly for shopping and auto malls and community parks--on the performing arts map.

Although the management won’t say who, big-name entertainment is promised for the gala opening of the city-owned $46-million Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts in November.

“They’ll be top-flight artists, names everyone will recognize,” said Victor Gotesman, the recently appointed general manager of the center, who has come to Cerritos after seven years as head of the performing arts program at the University of Massachusetts’ Amherst campus.

“Our goal is to present high-quality performances in all categories--pop, country, classical, jazz, dance, Broadway musicals, symphony--offering an experience in all aspects of the theater,” he said.

The variety of attractions is also intended to show off the versatility of the theater itself, which has a flexible seating system modeled after a theater in England that is unprecedented in the United States.

Banks of seating “wagons” float on jets of air like Hovercraft and permit the auditorium to be used as a flat exhibition space or as 950- and 1,850-seat theaters. The seating, proscenium and floor are movable, allowing for a range of events, including symphony performances with the audience on four sides, trade shows and cabaret-style musical performances with people seated at tables.

Gotesman said the caliber of performers booked for the gala opening will set the style for the full season, which also will include ballet and opera.

He said that Cerritos will present the level of artists seen at such Southern California locales as the Long Beach Convention and Entertainment Center, the Orange County Performing Arts Center, El Camino College’s South Bay Center for the Arts and the Music Center of Los Angeles County.

“There is a potential for Cerritos to have a regional impact, to put this community in the forefront of artistic communities,” he said.

But art center audiences will not be getting many avant-garde performers on the cutting edge of theater. Instead, Cerritos plans middle-of-the road programming aimed at a traditional audience that does not care to be startled by theatrical trends such as nudity or graphic sex.

“There’ll be no far-out stuff, nothing that will appeal to a small minority of theatergoers,” said Councilman Sherman Kappe, a member of the advisory committee of council members and city staff that will oversee management of the theater and the booking of talent.

“We’re going for the broad mass appeal, not presenting anything that will be offensive. . . . You won’t see ‘Oh, Calcutta,’ (in which the cast appears nude) or anything that resembles an R-rated movie.”

Gotesman’s willingness to cooperate with the city’s vision of the center was an important factor in the City Council hiring him for the $65,000-a-year job. Mayor Paul Bowlen said he was concerned about someone “thinking he had all the answers” coming in and saying “let me do my thing.”

“He was not that way at all,” the mayor said. “He was willing to work within (the council’s) parameters.”

Gotesman comes to Cerritos with a reputation in Amherst as a strong, low-key administrator who knows what he wants, but who also listens to colleagues and accepts their ideas. He also has a talent for booking up-and-coming performers before they become famous. Bobby McFerrin, the Kronos Quartet and violinist Joshua Bell were among his Amherst finds.

The council and its advisory committee is exerting considerable control over the operation and design of the center, but the jittery economic times are beyond even the city’s reach. Still, city officials are determined to make the new cultural landmark work.

“We’ll be feeling our way along as we go. A lot of what we do will be trial and error,” Councilwoman Ann Joynt said. “If you come in as second-rate in the first year, that becomes known throughout the industry. We don’t want that to ever happen.”

The theater, which plans a regular season running from September to June, has a $4-million budget for talent during the first season. Councilman Kappe said the city already is prepared to absorb what could be a $1-million annual subsidy to cover anticipated box office losses. “Fiscally, we’re a very sound city with an ample revenue base,” he said.

Southern California is in the grip of a national recession, but Gotesman does not expect it to affect the center’s ability to attract audiences. “We will have to look at our market picture and get a (ticket-pricing) structure that can accommodate this particular economic situation,” he said, adding that Cerritos will fill a “niche in a void” existing in the Los Angeles theater market.

Apart from its lineup of professional entertainment, the arts center will book everything from corporate conferences to fashion shows. A large atrium lobby--with flying stairways and rows of columns suggesting ancient Greece--is suitable for small performances and even weddings. There also is a large, high-ceilinged meeting room that may be divided into six smaller rooms. It will be used for meetings, conferences, small performances, fashions shows and other events.

The city expects to draw audiences from within a 25-mile radius, which would extend to Orange County, Los Angeles and the South Bay. In a 1983 feasibility study for a Cerritos performing arts center, the London-based Theatre Projects Consultants concluded that the city “is located in the middle of a vast potential urban market for the arts” based on opinion surveys in which respondents were asked about their theatergoing habits.

The Cerritos theater will share a vast audience with the Orange County Performing Arts Center and the well-established La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts. But directors of competing performing arts centers take the view that more theaters benefit everyone.

“We will feel some waves, but we have no concern,” said La Mirada Executive Director Tom Mitze. “Going to the theater is an acquired habit. If people go and see something they like, they’re more likely to come back or go to some other theater to see something else. In that sense, extending the opportunity for people to become involved as patrons is good.”