Taper Using Landmark Grant for Higher Latino Profile

The Mark Taper Forum will present at least one Latino play on its mainstage during each of the next three subscription seasons, and an entire Latino Festival during the 1996-97 season. The commitment is one of the ways the Taper plans to use the biggest single grant it has ever received from a source outside the Music Center--$1.47 million from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund.

“It’s nuts” that there haven’t been more Latino plays on the mainstage since the landmark production of “Zoot Suit” in 1978, said Taper resident director Oskar Eustis, who helped write the grant application. “We’ve had far too weak a response to the amazing success of ‘Zoot Suit.’ ” Although two South American plays appeared on the mainstage in recent years, “Zoot Suit” remains the only Taper mainstage production by a U.S. Latino or about a U.S. Latino subject.

“We’re definitely interested in focusing on work that has to do with the Latino population in the United States,” including “all varieties” of that population, said Eustis. Next season’s Latino play has been announced--”Bandido!,” by “Zoot Suit” creator Luis Valdez.

The ultimate goal of the grant is to draw more Latinos into the Taper audience. So the mainstage productions will be accompanied by a variety of other activities:

* As many as five Latino plays will be commissioned during the first year of the program--including one from the Latino Theatre Lab, formerly affiliated with the late Los Angeles Theatre Center. As many as four will be commissioned during the second year.

* The Taper will host and/or co-produce other Latino Lab projects, such as the group’s annual fund-raiser, special evenings of poetry and song, and Christmas season productions of “La Virgen del Tepeyac.”

* The Lab’s director Jose Luis Valenzuela will be promoted from a part-time position at the Taper to a full-time resident artist job.

* The Taper will conduct an “extensive” Latino marketing study, culminating in new marketing ventures including bilingual advertising.

* A Latino audience development coordinator will be hired.

* A Latino Advisory Task Force will be created.

The Taper had twice applied for Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest grants that would have focused on outreach to African- and Asian-American as well as Latino audiences, only to be turned down on the grounds that the goals were too broad, said Eustis.

The Bilingual Foundation of the Arts will receive $150,000 for audience development over the next three years as part of the same round of Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest grants.

FADE TO BLUE: The Golden Theatre in Burbank, probably the most regularly acclaimed producer of musicals among the area’s smaller theaters, will close its doors today.

Producer Carl White said the theater can’t afford a looming doubling of the rent and increases in costs for insurance and other overhead expenses. Business at the theater’s “Fade to Blue” has fallen off in recent weeks, since the run was interrupted for a three-week hiatus to re-cast some of the roles. And donations have dropped by almost 90% since the recession hit, he added. “We don’t want the embarrassment of being evicted.”

The theater never operated as a nonprofit institution. If he were to do it all over again, White said, he would try to get nonprofit status. But chances are slim that he’ll do it all over again. White said he and artistic director Gregory Scott Young want to embark on their individual careers, and the third mainstay of the company, associate managing director Alison Fusco, is leaving the state.

Still, they haven’t abandoned their hope to take their “Club Indigo” revue--which has appeared in three different incarnations at the Golden, including “Fade to Blue”--to a larger theater with an Actors’ Equity contract. All that’s required are investors who can contribute nearly $500,000.