A Theater’s Revival : Arts: City Council approves $250,000 package for Actors Alley to renovate the historic El Portal theater in North Hollywood. The first live production is planned for July.

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 dark, 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 will 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 to be announced to close the company’s current subscription season.

The smaller theater will be used to debut new plays, Morris said.

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

But City 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.

Actors Alley already has negotiated a long-term lease with the building’s owner. The troupe hopes to begin raising the money needed to 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 theater since 1966, when the Valley Music Theater in Woodland Hills closed. Numerous theatrical impresarios and groups have promised since then to bring a union-sized theater to the Valley, but the high costs always did them in long before opening night.

Robert Caine, managing director of Actors Alley, said that the troupe has several advantages over the failed ventures.

“We have been in the Valley for 21 years and we already have an established subscriber base,” said Caine, who owns a collection agency in Van Nuys. “And we have a business plan ready to go.”

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 for only one production, with the rest remaining 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.

The Community Redevelopment Agency, which is providing the money in the form of a $200,000 loan and $50,000 matching grant, did not get rave reviews for its previous involvement in live theater. The agency sank 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 so 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 when the agency gave its approval to the funding.

The El Portal opened as a vaudeville and silent movie theater in 1926. During the sound era, it became a prominent second-run house. It eventually became a Spanish-language movie theater.