New O.C. Arts Center Head Opened New Era in Alaska

When Tom Tomlinson arrived here five years ago to run the just-built Alaska Center for the Performing Arts, he found himself in one of America’s last frontier boom towns. With its oil-based economy and thin history that put shiny glass office towers amid log cabins, Anchorage was a city on the edge of the wilderness struggling to decide, culturally and in other ways, what it wanted to be when it grew up.

Tomlinson, who will leave here later this year to direct the Orange County Center for the Performing Arts in Costa Mesa, helped bring a new era of the arts to Alaska. Before the center was opened, the local symphony and most touring performers played in a high school auditorium. Today the center, with its three halls, books about 300 performances a year, attracting a regular diet of national touring performers to Alaska’s largest city.

But along the way, the center--a $70-million, glass-and-brick downtown fortress that is loved by some locals and reviled by others--produced a string of controversies that placed Tomlinson repeatedly in the public eye. He has endured annual battles over public funding of the arts, access for disabled patrons and the need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in public money on unexpected building maintenance, particularly to fix a poorly designed roof that leaks from the city’s several-foot-thick winter blanket of snow.

Tomlinson has revealed himself as a middle-of-the-road administrator who has sparred with the city’s conservative mayor over the building’s annual $1-million operating subsidy. He has been an unabashed advocate for government arts funding, yet also has had to play tough-guy with financially pinched local performance groups that sometimes couldn’t afford to rent the center’s halls. Some of them complain that the center has made life more difficult for arts groups outside the mainstream.

Previously a manager of performing arts centers in Tacoma, Wash., and Joliet, Ill., Tomlinson has said it is too early to say what he will do when he takes over the Orange County job in October. But people looking north for a glimpse into his ideas of art and entertainment will find he charted a mainstream course, although on occasion he has gone to bat for off-center or controversial productions.

Like Anchorage itself--a combination frontier business center and yuppie outpost that plays host to healthy populations of both espresso bars and wild moose--the Alaska Center has turned out to be a mix of the highbrow and the down-to-earth. It is not uncommon to see symphony patrons in plaid wool shirts with bolo ties, and women in evening gowns arriving for winter performances often must pause in the lobby to slip out of heavy parkas and snow boots.

As a public building, the center has been leased out for everything from Amway conventions to Roman Catholic Masses on Christmas Eve to political rallies supporting abortion rights. To the horror of some patrons, plans recently were unveiled to lease space in the building for a Taco Bell to help generate more income.

In any case, most of the 300,000 ticket buyers who attend the center each year come for classical music, opera, theater and dance. Last winter, the National Symphony Orchestra played here for a week. The facility features touring Broadway shows once or twice a year and features a regular stream of mostly mainstream entertainers such as Jay Leno, Ray Charles, the South African group Ladysmith Black Mambazo and country singer Reba McEntire.

Tomlinson, 43, has a background in theater and dance, and people in the arts community here say his own tastes run toward the mainstream. “Things like ‘Cats’ and ‘Les Miserables’ are very much the sorts of shows that Tom loves,” said Gene Dugan, artistic director of Anchorage’s Out North Theater Co.

Even so, the group found support from Tomlinson several years ago when it produced the drama “Bent,” which deals with gays and the Nazi Holocaust. Tomlinson wrote letters supporting funding of the production and defended it when some conservative patrons objected to it, Dugan said.

People in arts circles here said there have been few other disputes over content at the center. But then, with a city population of only about 250,000 and a limited audience, groups that use the center have tended to be cautious in their offerings.

“I think Anchorage is pretty conservative,” said Helen Strait, president of the Anchorage Children’s Theater, a tenant of the center. “I can’t think, really, of anything that’s been done up here that you’d call outlandish or controversial. The center has generally been very safe in what you’ll see there--’Phantom of the Opera’ and like that.”

What controversy there has been involved two issues that Tomlinson probably won’t face in Orange County--cuts in public arts funding that have jeopardized the future of some local groups, and a building that, while state-of-the-art in many ways, has design flaws that took up much of his time here.

The building was built by the city government as part of a 1980s spending spree fueled by revenue from North Slope oil production. As the amount of oil produced in Alaska begins to fall, governments here are being forced to cut budgets. This has especially squeezed the arts, which have always been dependent here on public support.

The Alaska Center has gradually increased private fund raising, but Tomlinson has repeatedly had to defend it against threats by Republican Mayor Tom Fink to cut the city’s $1-million subsidy and shut the center down. To keep revenue coming in, Tomlinson has tried to book an increasing number of touring acts, and this has led at times to scheduling conflicts that some local groups believe hurt them.

“Politically, it’s been a very difficult situation,” said Ira Perman, executive director of the Anchorage Concert Assn., another building tenant. “It’s been a very difficult environment here, lately, for arts groups. . . . Tom came into a situation where he not only was bringing a new building on line, he had to integrate the performances of the various groups in town, really, for the first time. All this at a time when, financially, it’s been difficult. I think he’s done a great job.

“All the problems you’ve been reading about, they’re not his fault.”

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