Cerritos Center’s First Season: A Fine Performance

Every pachyderm’s trunk in “Elephant Chain,” the symmetrical wall sculpture above Victor Gotesman’s desk, curves upward. That, Gotesman says, means good luck, something he no doubt needed when he took command of the new Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts as its general manager 21 months ago.

With the venerable Music Center of Los Angeles County close by to the north, and the younger yet well-endowed Orange County Performing Arts Center a few miles south, did the region need another culture palace?

Cerritos, a former cattle ranch once called Dairy Valley, eventually claimed fame as the home of a giant car sales complex. Would its citizens plunk down dollars for ballet, Beethoven and Brecht?

And what’s with this fancy-shmancy auditorium, which can be transformed via hydraulic, electrical and manpower into five configurations, from an intimate, 900-seat recital hall into a 2,000-seat setting for grand opera?

Who’s this Easterner Gotesman, anyway?

Gotesman recalls that the naysayers bellowed as the $60-million, city-owned and operated center prepared for its christening in January.

“The (arts and entertainment) industry and maybe the market and maybe the media to a certain extent had a lot of doubts,” he said recently. “There’s no question about it.”

The center--which ended its first season in late May and launched its second two weeks ago--is still in its infancy and still may be experiencing the sort of encouraging-though-ephemeral honeymoon that typically greets such new ventures.

But several early signs seem to indicate that the heavenly direction of the sculpted elephants’ trunks in Gotesman’s tidy office may have done some good.

The center, with a first-year budget of $5.2 million (for the abbreviated five-month season), finished in the black. Paid attendance to all 35 inaugural-season programs--ranging from classical music to jazz, modern dance to a magic show--averaged 86% of capacity, center officials report.

(A spokesman for the Orange County Performing Arts Center says its average paid attendance last year of 89% was “a record,” roughly five points higher than during its previous five years.)

Advance sales figures for this season of $2.3 million--nearly half the available tickets--are “very, very good,” according to Douglas M. Lauchlan, general manager of the Calgary Centre for Performing Arts and chairman of the Assn. of Performing Arts Centers (APAC), which represents about 25 major arts centers in the United States and Canada.

As for the center’s flexible auditorium, each of five layouts has worked “exceedingly well,” Gotesman said.

All this has pleased Cerritos city officials, who paid for the center’s construction--the costliest public project in the city’s history--with redevelopment funds. Like it did last year, the City Council has voted to give the center $2 million to make up the anticipated annual shortfall between expenses and revenues that is common to any similar arts facility.

The city has approved a total budget of $7.8 million for fiscal 1993-1994, when the center will stage its first full season of eight months.

Mayor John F. Crawley says that a few patrons have groused about their failure to snag prime seats but that otherwise the new center--with its sprightly geometric tiles adorning its pyramidal roof peaks--has received the community’s kudos.

“Most people I talk to are very happy with the theater,” Crawley said. “They like the programming, certainly they like the facility,” designed by Barton Myers Associates of Los Angeles.

“People,” the mayor added, “are very positive about the fact that they don’t have to pay to park their cars there.”

City Councilwoman Ann B. Joynt cast the only “no” vote in 1986 when the council opted for an arts complex instead of a community center. But, she says, she doesn’t hear anyone complaining that the municipal funds going to the center should instead be going to feed the hungry or to meet other social needs.

“We are an upscale community,” Joynt said, “and we don’t have a lot of the serious financial problems (of) many surrounding cities.”

Indeed, the center--focal point of Towne Center, a $35-million retail and business complex still under construction--has brought a hoped-for increase in area commerce and apparently has helped to establish a shiny new image for Cerritos.

A restaurant at the Sheraton Cerritos Hotel at Towne Center, within walking distance of the arts center, has extended its hours, and hotel occupancy has increased in the past year, according to Sheraton general manager Kathy Ray.

The center “is assisting in marketing the city and Towne Center,” says city manager Art Gallucci. “I can’t quantify that. I can just say that when I negotiate with (prospective businesses) to come into the city, they all know about the theater.”

As expected, most center-goers live in Cerritos or close by in such cities as Downey and Long Beach, officials report, though according to Walter Morlock, the center’s marketing director, it also has drawn many patrons from north and central Orange County and West Los Angeles, whose residents are avid culture fans.

Orange County arts center officials say they haven’t scientifically measured whether they have lost audience to Cerritos, but they cite last year’s record average paid attendance as indication that they have not.

Gotesman said that among the pleasant surprises of the first season was the popularity of the Peking Acrobats, whose performance March 12 was the center’s first sellout. He has attributed the troupe’s popularity to its previous appearances in Southern California and to Cerritos’ large number of Asian-Americans, who in 1990 made up 45% of the city’s population of 53,240. (The center has booked two performances in February by the Chinese Golden Dragon Acrobats from Taiwan).

Other first season sellouts included appearances by Frank Sinatra, Twyla Tharp and Mikhail Baryshnikov’s touring modern dance group, folk singer Judy Collins and Indian sitar master Ravi Shankar.

First-season disappointments? Lackluster ticket sales for Lynn Redgrave’s one-woman show “Shakespeare for My Father” and for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Gotesman said, recalling that to fill seats for that concert, discounted tickets were offered at the last minute to students from local schools. He noted, however, that later in the season, audiences flocked to hear the Pittsburgh Symphony.

In any case, he said, neither sellouts nor tepid ticket sales have profoundly affected any of his programming strategies.

“We’re too new to say there’s any historical reason for not doing something yet,” said the 44-year-old native of Rochester, N.Y., who began developing his programming philosophies in college.

While earning a music degree from the University of Rochester’s prestigious Eastman School of Music (he once aspired to sing professionally), Gotesman’s interests shifted to “the complexities” of arts administration, in which he went on to earn a master’s degree from the University of Iowa.

There, he held the first of three jobs at universities around the country, helping to run the schools’ performing arts activities. Before Cerritos, where he’ll earn $73,680 this year, he was director for seven years of the University of Massachusetts Fine Arts Center, where he managed programs and operations of its 2,000- and 700-seat theaters. The Massachusetts facility presented “a smaller version of what we’re doing here,” he said.

He thinks the Cerritos center’s mandate is to provide a diversity of offerings (he has offered a far wider variety than his Orange County counterpart, the soon-to-retire Thomas R. Kendrick) and to lead rather than follow the community’s tastes.

“We have to educate, we have to lead, we have to enlighten, and that’s the approach we’re taking.”

So far, there has been a predominance at the center of popular, lightweight entertainment. Gotesman defends this as part of the education process.

“Most people coming here” have never been to any theater, he said. “You can’t start out with purely experimental or avant-garde programming. You have to bring people into the building, make sure they’re having a good time, then somewhere down the road” you can present more sophisticated work.

That road may lead this fall to “Einstein on the Beach,” composer Philip Glass’ 4 1/2-hour minimalist production that Gotesman predicted would be “a significant stretch for our audience” (indeed, it is far more challenging than anything the Orange County center has offered during its six years of operation).

Gotesman said negotiations are underway for the production, the same one staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1984. Its producer, Jedediah Wheeler, said from New York last week that a deal involves complex arrangements to tour the work to several other U.S. cities but that a resolution should come within six weeks.

Gotesman further said he doesn’t “close (the) door on any programming option” including such potentially controversial presentations as plays about AIDS or homosexuality (other areas where Orange County’s center officials have not ventured).

Dealing with municipal red tape hasn’t been hassle-free, he said, but so far the five-person city committee--which includes two City Council members--that must approve all Gotesman’s programming choices hasn’t closed its door on anything.

One formidable roadblock Gotesman has hit is the difficulty of booking new or relatively new musicals. This season’s lineup includes “Cats,” which has sold out all eight shows (in October) but which has played Los Angeles and Orange counties over and again.

“Any of the major Broadway musicals are virtually impossible” to lasso, Gotesman said, usually because of longstanding relationships between other performing arts centers and organizations that produce and tour the shows, such as Pace Theatrical Group in New York.

“That doesn’t mean we are giving up,” added Gotesman, who plans to try to book musicals produced by such regional theaters as the La Jolla Playhouse, “to get the product before it hits Broadway or before it goes on the road.”

“Casual” discussions with the Pacific Symphony and other groups that regularly perform at Orange County’s arts center haven’t developed into anything substantial, he said.

Meanwhile, the center is forming a board to focus on funding educational programs, now in their infancy.

Other than “Cats,” second-season sellouts so far have included all three of pop queen Whitney Houston’s performances last month and include upcoming shows by George Benson and Natalie Cole, the Vienna Choir Boys, and Peter, Paul & Mary.

But rather than pushing tickets and introducing the new center with a sis boom bah!, Gotesman thinks his primary focus now should be on internal organizational development--his full-time staff jumps from 14 to 19 this year--and on sustaining what’s been achieved.

“I think we’re developing into maturity as a premiere presenting organization, and I’m very pleased with that,” he said. “Personally, I feel like I’ve succeeded where people thought I couldn’t.”

Still, he added, “you’re only as successful as your next performance. That’s my rule.”