Finding Success on Broadway Is Childs’ Play : Theater: At 50, L.A. real estate mogul Timothy Childs decided to become a N.Y. producer. Four years and eight shows later, he says his theatrical stake has grown 554%.

Timothy Childs must know something that has evaded most of us.

There he was a few years ago . . . edging toward 50 . . . owner of his own big-league Los Angeles real estate investment and asset development company . . . bank official, too . . . married, his wife also a financial pro . . . active member and officer of a Music Center board, also of the Foundation for the Joffrey . . . donor of a writing commission for the Taper Forum that went to David Mamet . . . frequent listee by the social journalists of Los Angeles. . . . And here he is now . . . early 50s . . . taken leave of Los Angeles . . . transplanted Manhattanite in a transition . . . Broadway producer with bicoastal and even international plans. . . .

What Timothy Childs knows might qualify as a paradox for our times: Do it right and you might make more investing in theater than in California real estate.

The bottom line for Timothy Childs now reads:

* After leaving his financial enterprises four years ago and turning producer, Childs says he has seen his theatrical stake grow 554%.

* For every dollar he invested in 1988, he has seen $6.54 returned.

* Of the eight shows he has either invested in or produced himself during those four years, only two were losers--not bad, considering that in Broadway’s last full season of ‘91-92, 37 shows opened and six survived.

Childs’ batting average: .750.

Broadway’s: .162.

Operating costs of most big Broadway shows can run up to $350,000 a week. To recoup investments, the shows have to run almost a year with close to sell-out attendance each night, a feat, obviously, that few shows accomplish. “Aspects of Love,” the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that comes to Los Angeles’ Pantages Theater next month, lost its original American investment of $8 million in its 10-month New York run two years ago, considered by some Broadway’s biggest financial failure, certainly the largest involving a Webber production.

Last week’s announcement that “Annie Warbucks,” the long-troubled sequel to the hit “Annie,” was $1 million short of getting to Broadway and would be postponed, was another indication of how tough it is to find and finance theatrical winners.

Investing in the theater has become so risky and hellish that producers no longer speak in terms of angels, those once-mythic figures who somehow provided divine backing to the theater. There are no angels in America anymore. Instead there are such fiscal instruments as limited partnerships, investor groups, joint ventures and co-financing deals, a more equitable way of raising big money and, in many cases, sharing losses.

Show credits can give clues to how shows are now financed. In a style similar to the movies, producer and co-producer credits abound, ranging from Japanese and U.S. TV networks to record companies and corporations. “Cats” required four major-league backers, while David Mamet’s “Oleanna” had a dozen.

Investing in theater has become so complicated and challenging that two different seminars are held annually in New York on how to produce and back a variety of shows and theaters. For many, these seminars become a network, a means of making necessary contacts in the dangerous waters of theater investment. Frederic B. Vogel started his Commercial Theatre Institute 18 years ago with just that in mind.

“My workshops can do two things,” Vogel says. “One, train people how to produce, or two, convince them to go into dentistry instead.

“I always tell investors that when you write the check, kiss it goodby.”

He believes that selling shares in the ownership of a certain bridge is easier than raising money for a show.

But still people dream about becoming a producer or a partner. Some actually do it. Vogel conducts two seminars, one that started earlier this month, meeting Monday evenings and is limited to 25 attendees and restricted to people nominated by theater professionals. The other seminar is a three-day weekend, April 23-25, open to anyone with $265 and the untamed lust to invest or produce.

“Investing in the commercial theater has always been risky,” says Vogel, who is currently putting together his own group for a $550,000 Off-Broadway show involving three producers as general partners. “Right now there may be somewhat less risk in the theater than in the past because there are fewer projects around. It’s harder to raise money and people are more careful and do a more thorough examination of what they are getting into.”

Timothy Childs can agree to that.

“When I decided to leave real estate and become a theatrical producer and moved to New York I asked to meet with people in the theater. I started to network, saw some people I knew, talked about investments for about a year. Then I started getting involved,” he says.

His was a long-delayed decision with a deadline: that when he turned 50 he would be a full-time New York producer. He thinks the idea may have started in Cub Scout plays, possibly ripened as a drama undergrad at the Claremont colleges and kept developing as he entered his family’s investment and banking business and went on the Center Theatre Group board, where he became vice president and chair of finance and long-range planning. At one time he tried unsuccessfully to buy the Westwood Playhouse and become a stage producer without leaving Los Angeles.

“Earlier, I didn’t have the guts to make the move,” he says. “At my 50th birthday, I decided to do it.”

He found a New York apartment, opened an office, hired an assistant, lined up two desks and held costs to a minimum, all with the thought that his investments and real estate holdings in California were enough so that he could go gently into his New York adventure. Then the California real estate market went into deep shock.

“It was then I knew I had to do well in the theater,” he says.

He invested early in the Los Angeles and Chicago touring companies of “Phantom of the Opera” and the London company of “Burn This.” He also became an investor in the successful musical “Beau Jest,” which opens at the Westwood Playhouse March 6.

His only two losses: “Annie 2” and “Song of Singapore.”

All the time he kept looking for a show he could produce alone. Through his L.A. contacts he heard about the one-man show “A Christmas Carol” that Patrick Stewart, “Star Trek’s” Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, had developed doing all 39 roles of the Dickens classic. Moving cautiously, he tried to find an equal investment New York partner for the show that Stewart had been doing on the Southern California college circuit. No takers were found but one offered a piece of advice: Try brain surgery.

Rather than that, Childs took on the project himself, sole investor, sole New York producer.

If he could make it in New York he could . . . well . . . make it in New York, and then maybe anywhere.

The first Broadway presentation of “A Christmas Carol” was in 1991. Business was strong. Last year’s ran for a scheduled 24 shows, with what Childs, the numbers expert, claims drew 101.84% attendance.

With his first two hands-on productions and with four successful investments behind him, Childs is now co-producer for the revival of “Pal Joey,” a $4-million project. He’s also negotiating rights for two Hollywood movies to turn into stage musicals. And he has two L.A. actors lined up for one-person shows in Los Angeles.

He sees the most promising areas for theater investors falling in two different arenas. One, large musicals. The other, small, one-star shows. “The musical is the most expensive but has the biggest payoff,” he says. “A play could require $1 million and if it’s successful you might get the million back and something else. A $6-million musical if successful might return $20 (million) to $30 million.”

His one-actor shows would be limited runs, worked into a star’s movie or TV schedule, such as Stewart’s Christmas break. “These shows, star-driven, are also simple and inexpensive to mount,” he says.

He let some folks back home in Los Angeles know what he has been up to with a couple of recent full-page advertisements in the Hollywood trade papers. That’s one way producers learn to shout.

His message, in brief:

“TIMOTHY CHILDS THEATRICAL . . . congratulations and appreciation to PATRICK STEWART . . . whose solo performance . . . was Broadway’s smash hit for a second straight year . . . Timothy Childs, P.P.*”.

P.P.*?

*Proud Producer.

Or maybe providential producer too.