Who’s Paying for Ahmanson Remodel?

Workers started removing seats from the Ahmanson Theatre Monday, the first step in the long-awaited reconfiguration of the Music Center’s northernmost hall.

The project, which was postponed for years in order to accommodate the lucrative run of “The Phantom of the Opera,” is primarily designed to turn the 2,071-seat auditorium into a hall with a flexible seating capacity. The idea is to do spoken drama in a more intimate house, while retaining the larger capacity for mega-musicals--such as “Miss Saigon,” which producer Cameron Mackintosh hopes to bring to the Ahmanson.

According to earlier announcements, the balcony will be moved forward, partitions installed, and a layer of seats will be added to the sides. Other elements of the hall also will be refurbished or updated.

The cost of the reconfiguration and accompanying renovations has been estimated at around $14 million. But Center Theatre Group officials have not yet announced details of who will finance how much. Final negotiations may still be going on. However, at least five institutions are chipping in or making plans to do so:

* Los Angeles County set aside $5 million for the project as part of a $12-million Music Center bond issue approved by county supervisors last November. The entire package was presented at the time as a money-saving measure--by retiring old Music Center bonds and issuing new ones, the county postponed paying $845,000 in debt service by a year. Besides the Ahmanson reconfiguration, the package also will pay for repairs or retrofitting of the Ahmanson and Taper air conditioning systems, the decking on the Music Center plaza, and pipes and elevators in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

* The Music Center itself hopes to raise an unspecified amount of money, likely to be part of a more extensive Music Center capital campaign. While the main beneficiary of that campaign will be the new Disney Hall, money is also expected to go to the Ahmanson, Music Center chairman Robert B. Egelston told a Times reporter. Other sources, who declined to be identified, speculated that the Music Center will set a goal of $3 million to $4 million for its share of the Ahmanson funds.

* Center Theatre Group, which runs the programming at the Ahmanson and the Mark Taper Forum, has pledged $2 million, most of it from “Phantom” proceeds, said CTG managing director Charles Dillingham in a Times interview last year.

* The Theatre and Forum Lease Co., the nonprofit group that issued the bonds that built the Ahmanson and the Taper 30 years ago, plans to provide $2 million, according to its president, Thom Grose.

* The Ahmanson Foundation plans to contribute $2 million as the final component of the funds, “provided all the other moneys are forthcoming,” said the foundation’s managing director Lee Walcott.

Construction will take at least a year. Signs at the Ahmanson box office say the grand reopening is scheduled for the spring of 1995. In the meantime, Ahmanson programming continues at the Doolittle Theatre in Hollywood, its temporary home since “The Phantom” arrived in 1989.