Arts Spring to Life in Autumn

Since the subject is fall, we’ll drop some names.

Bruce Springsteen.

Richard Diebenkorn.

Ian McKellen.

Esa-Pekka Salonen.

Michelle Pfeiffer.

Bonnie Raitt.

Paul Taylor.

“Aladdin.”

Those are just for openers. Except for “Aladdin,” an animated movie, they are just a few of the people who will stretch our endless autumn across Southern California’s bountiful concert halls, theaters, arenas, galleries, amphitheaters, clubs, lounges, theme parks, malls, fairgrounds and streets (the Doo Dah paraders and the Hollywood paraders). The more incisive details about them and others--the who else, the where and the when--you’ll find on these several pages.

But there is more to any Ode to Autumn than mere celebrity. There are the yet-to-be-celebrated, too, getting their first whacks in all of those halls, theaters, arenas, etc. They may not be on the A-list, but they are just around the corner.

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Autumn, unfortunately, has suffered its share of bum raps, its poetic illusions stuck on falling leaves, sagging sap and months that dwindle down to a precious few. Even the word fall has a regressive clang to it.

For this year’s cursed and abused cultural elite autumn is just another way of saying redemption, of starting all over again. Fall, in show-business sense, is for many the first season of the rest of the year.

Television, following the ancient rite of renewed labors after a summer of wantonness attempts to reshape itself in September, redesigning old shows, squeezing out new ones, hoping they will last beyond the fall.

Hollywood’s film studios shake off their summer camp amusements in mid-autumn and get serious, lumping their dreams of Academy Award nominations into mid-fall and early winter, hoping enough marketing attitude will keep their movies alive until springtime’s Oscar ceremonies and the trailing home video sales.

For live--as opposed to taped or filmed--entertainers and performers, there is another sense of renewal. It comes in the mail, as in subscriptions. Here we discover the least generally known but perhaps most crucial part to the commercial play of the seasons:

The fall subscription campaign.

The preseason season.

For many in the marketing of symphonies, theaters, university and college programs (90% of bookings nationally were by colleges, before the cutbacks), dance companies, musical theater groups--their most critical time comes in the weeks long before the curtains go up on the fall season. That’s when subscriptions to the year are sold. For some, like the Music Center Opera, it can start as early as February.

Fail in the fall, repent at the box office the rest of the year.

The fall season, in effect, is the ticket-seller’s most crucial period. It sets the year’s activities.

Many of the fall campaign efforts go in different stages. In the case of the opera company, strategic mailings and reminders go out not only to past subscribers but to people the company’s marketers believe might be potential subscribers, such as last year’s single-ticket buyers.

A successful subscription campaign--60% to 70% of the house covered--can almost assure smiles for an entire season, barring bad reviews and acts of God. The size of the return from subscriptions will determine another strategy: how much money there is that will go to getting rid of the remaining tickets through single sales.

Along with the box office, ticket-selling companies like Ticketmaster come into play when the subscription efforts end. Fred Rosen, chief executive officer of Ticketmaster and arguably the busiest ticket seller in the free world, calls one aspect of his efforts a “support service to venues,” providing sales outlets for tickets unsold through subscriptions, a backup for the box office.

“If the opera company sold all of its tickets to season subscribers, we’d have nothing to sell,” he says. “We can only sell what can be sold, only after promoters and arenas and the other venues have decided what can go to the public.”

Ticket sales haven’t exactly been a hot topic of discussion at the box offices of the Music Center’s Pavilion. While everyone else has been hustling up subscribers and single buyers during the fall preseason campaign, that 28-year-old hall has been dark for most of the past two months, an unprecedented time of emptiness and silence for that cultural icon.

The weeks of failed scheduling and nonexistent audiences haven’t stopped the Music Center’s Harry Sherman. Part of his job is getting ready for the certain fall seasons of opera and symphonies and whatever else might be found to be booked there.

Sherman is theater operations manager and without audiences around he’s spent the past two months getting the hall in shape. You won’t see it, but the original intercom system at the Pavilion was replaced, the orchestra shell spiffed up. In the more public place the preseason preparations took care of cleaning the reflecting pools, repolishing floors, detailing the restrooms.

It’s a cleaner, if not less leaner, place.

The Pasadena Playhouse has undertaken a project this fall that may become, if successful, a model for a future Freeway Circuit: a linking of the home base on El Molino to north San Diego County’s new Center for the Performing Arts in burgeoning Poway and Santa Barbara’s Lobero Theater off the 101.

The Preston Sturges play “A Cup of Coffee” settled down in Poway Sept. 3 after its Pasadena run. In late September, the same cast and sets resettle at the Lobero. Two other productions later this year will do the same.

It may be the best use of freeways since car pools, a model perhaps for other performing companies and artists in the land of the perpetual commuter.

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If to every thing there is a season, and for some a preseason, then to every autumn there are certain everythings. We have passed through the year’s earlier periods of recession and retrenchment, rancor and riot, politics and perils, and now discover that there are some new, adventurous enterprises still straight ahead, new worlds of arts and entertainment yet to be explored in 1992.

Some hints of what might be discovered are found in this section where our disparate critics and writers have studied the cultural and entertainment horizons and catalogued the big town’s big times.

Art critic Christopher Knight applies “grand-slam” to “LAX: The Los Angeles Exhibition,” which will involve 60 artists and eight sites in distant December, a citywide effort at celebrating hometown creative efforts.

Then there’s “Angels in America,” the at least seven-hour-long play by Tony Kushner that will be presented in two parts, a stage marathon that our theater critic Sylvie Drake sees as “the jewel in the crown of this fall theater season.”

Seven hours might be dwarfed by the dance and performance event called by dance writer Lewis Segal as “perhaps the most ambitious event this year that embraces dance as well as other disciplines,” this the 10-week series called “Fire in the Treasure House,” in which members of the Asian-American and black communities work together in producing post-riot offerings.

So the fall promises some big, long, all-encompassing events.

And, too, lots of well-traveled names. What would fall be like without. . .

Neil Young.

Billy Ray Cyrus.

Ed Ruscha.

Jose Rivera.

Cirque du Soleil.

Christof Perick.

Amalia Hernandez.

And “The Nutcracker” . . . “The Nutcracker” . . . “The Nutcracker.”