Funding OKd to Renovate El Portal for Live Theater : North Hollywood: L.A. City Council will give Actors Alley troupe $250,000 for the project. It will be the Valley’s first full Equity facility since 1966.

Funding for the first major live theater complex in the San Fernando Valley in more than 25 years was approved Wednesday by the Los Angeles City Council.

The $250,000 package will go to Actors Alley, a small troupe currently producing shows in a Valley storefront, to renovate the historic El Portal theater in North Hollywood. The troupe plans to temporarily divide the now-dark and dilapidated El Portal into 199-seat and 99-seat theaters to open in July.

Actors Alley Artistic Director Jeremiah Morris said the larger of the two theaters would open with a new play, “The Audit,” by Peter Lefcourt, that was written for the troupe. It will be followed by a revival of the comedy “The Male Animal” by James Thurber and Elliot Nugent and then a play yet to be announced to close the company’s current subscription season.

The smaller theater, to open later in the summer, will be used to debut new plays, Morris said.

The council vote was 11 to 1. Ernani Bernardi agreed with a small group of area residents who spoke against the measure, including businessman Don Eaton, who suggested the money “should be used on our schools to keep teachers from running away to other areas.”

Mayoral candidate Julian Nava was not present, but had previously opposed the proposal, saying, “This is not a time to spend money on the arts.”

But council President John Ferraro pointed out that the funding, which will come from the Community Redevelopment Agency’s cultural fund, was earmarked for the arts and cannot be used for other purposes.

Once in its new home, Actors Alley hopes to begin raising the money needed to eventually turn the El Portal into a 600-seat, state-of-the-art facility. But even its initial plan is a benchmark--theaters with more than 99 seats have full Actors Equity status and must pay performers at least union scale.

This greatly increases production costs, which is why the Valley has had no full Equity theaters since 1966 when the Valley Music Theater in Woodland Hills closed. Since then numerous theatrical impresarios and groups have promised to bring a union-sized theater to the Valley. But the high costs always did them in long before opening night.

Actors Alley Managing Director Robert Caine said the troupe has several advantages over the failed ventures.

“First of all, we are not newcomers,” said Caine, who owns a collection agency in Van Nuys. “We have been in the Valley for 21 years, and we already have an established subscriber base.

“And we have a business plan ready to go. The others weren’t run like businesses.”

Actors Alley, which is a nonprofit company, has received special dispensation from Actors Equity that will allow it to use the 199-seat space for the rest of this season at the El Portal as if it were a 99-seat house. The troupe would not, therefore, have to pay union salaries right away.

“We’ll just take out all but 99 seats in there,” Caine said.

Next season the rest of the seats will be added, but only for one production, with the rest still being at the 99-seat level. During the following season, the troupe will do two shows at the 199-seat level. After five years, all the shows in the theater will be full Equity.

“This gives us some breathing space to build the audience,” Caine said.

The Community Redevelopment Agency, which is providing the money in the form of a $200,000 loan and $50,000 matching grant, didn’t get rave reviews for its previous involvement in live theater. The agency had sunk more than $20 million into the ill-fated Los Angeles Theatre Center downtown before that project went bankrupt and closed in 1991.

Agency officials say they will never again get that involved in a theater’s operation.

“The lesson we learned with the L.A. Theatre Center is that if you support the operations side, if you support the production side, you are in the black hole of the arts,” said CRA Chairman James Wood to Actors Alley officials at the time the agency gave its approval to the funding. “If you come to us and tell us you need money to keep your doors open, you are not going to get it.”

If all goes smoothly and Actors Alley is able to revive the El Portal, it will give the building more reason to exist than just as an architectural curiosity. The theater opened as a vaudeville and silent movie theater in 1926. During the sound era, it became one of the city’s most prominent second-run houses. It eventually became an all-Spanish language movie theater.

But the El Portal had hard times in recent years. One promoter wanted to use it regularly for rock concerts, but at one of his first events a riot broke out, killing the venture. A theater impresario’s plan to use the El Portal for a series of musicals and plays ended when he was convicted for false and misleading advertising.

The building’s reputation among city historians was not sullied by these failed ventures. Last month, at the urging of the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Commission, El Portal was named an official city historic-cultural monument.