Is the Curtain Going Up on North Hollywood’s Renaissance?

The hopes of North Hollywood boosters to see the dilapidated Lankershim Boulevard business district reborn as the NoHo arts district will get a big lift next month, when the Actors Alley Repertory Theatre stages its inaugural performance at El Portal, a onetime vaudeville house that most recently showed Spanish-language films before going dark.

Actors Alley, which has been putting on live theater in the San Fernando Valley for 21 years, is staking its future on NoHo. So are eight smaller theaters that coexist with abandoned, deteriorating buildings and vacant lots amid a predominantly Spanish-speaking population.

To spark the area’s revival, they are counting on a future Metro Rail station just across from El Portal, a revitalization program planned by the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency and a soon-to-be-adopted city ordinance that would allow artists to live in the buildings in which they work.

The managing director of Actors Alley for the last nine years, Robert Caine, is president of Caine & Weiner Co. Inc., a nationwide commercial collection agency with $55 million in annual sales.

Caine negotiated the troupe’s 29 1/2-year lease on El Portal and made the proposal to the CRA that won $250,000 in loans and grants for renovation.

An Encino resident, Caine moved with his family to Studio City in 1945. He recalls watching movies at El Portal when he was a student at North Hollywood High School.

He discussed the North Hollywood renaissance with staff writer Doug Smith.

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Question: Lankershim Boulevard is devastated right now. All the buildings east of the theater are vacant. What’s going on there?

Answer: I don’t think this area can get any lower. It’s impossible. You think in terms of the commercial part of it, North Hollywood is at the bottom. Economic times today haven’t helped it a hell of a lot. I’m not sure who else can go out of business. The car guy up the street, he’s gone. The redevelopment people and the chamber, everybody is really working together. I think there is a lot more conversation on how we as a community work together to upgrade. The potential is really good.

Q: Do you believe the NoHo district can become a distinct theater district, or is that a gimmick?

A: It’s not a gimmick. It certainly is a PR tool. It is something to use to try to bring others in so they would be encouraged to establish residency. I think the potential is there. I’m not going to sit here and say there are going to be 20 theaters in two years. But I think the potential is there to attract better people.

Q: Is a face - lift coming soon, or will the street be a series of empty lots for the next 10 or 15 years?

A: No, I don’t think it will be a series of empty lots for the next 10 or 15 years. As far as an overall face-lift, I don’t know. A lot of stories are floating around. But, in reality, until something happens--specifically somebody says, “Yes, I’m doing this, and here is the money that we’re going to do it with,”--I don’t know that we can count on it.

The fact that (Metro Rail) is coming in with their station, I mean we could throw a rock and hit it, is going to help tremendously. That’s six or seven years, by their projection, so give a little, eight years. It’s certainly something that’s going to improve the area as far as making it accessible so that people don’t have to have cars. You can get from Hollywood in 10 minutes.

There’s been conversation of changing the way that you park on Lankershim, angled parking instead of parallel parking, and maybe nicen it up a bit with a few trees. That doesn’t have to be a high-cost project. But it certainly would improve it if we did that for five or six blocks.

I have a lot of faith in this movement of the Planning Commission changing over the zoning restrictions so that the artists’ movement can develop.

Q: Were you drawn to Lankershim Boulevard by the NoHo district concept?

A: As far as Actors Alley is concerned, we have been looking for a place the past four years or so that would enable us to fulfill the mission of our organization, which is in the broad sense to create a regional theater for the San Fernando Valley and in the narrower sense to create an Equity performance venue.

Somebody saw it driving down the street and said, “You ever look at the El Portal? I don’t think it’s being used very much.” As we started talking to those people, it became pretty evident that kind of a facility would have some real value, a fairly old theater actually built as a vaudeville house. There’s a little romance.

Q: Do you see risk in this venture?

A: There’s a risk in everything. Some people have some reticence about going there. I don’t think there’s any question about it. But I think what we put together was based upon logical business decisions. There’s a parking lot that is relatively close, half a block. There is decent lighting. I don’t think the area is any worse than anything else. People get mugged anywhere. In our case, it isn’t that dangerous. I mean, I don’t feel that uncomfortable.

Q: In terms of personal safety, you mean? Won’t the lowbrow environment discourage patrons?

A: I think the issue is personal safety. I don’t think it has anything to do with lowbrow or highbrow. I don’t think that most of the people who are theater-goers are big snobs. People who go to the theater, they go.

Q: Do you see a part of your role as stimulating the area?

A: Oh, yes, absolutely. Not only economically, because we’ll be employing people to work there and creating some kind of ongoing business with positive energy, but also with what we do in the community, non-performance programs in the schools and the community around us. And we have several of those on board. We have done them before at different times, and once we’re open we’re going to go ahead and reinstate them.

Q: If you succeed at what you’re doing, Lankershim Boulevard would be a gentrified district in the middle of a huge population of Spanish-speaking people. Do you have any plans to reach that community?

A: Our Latino playwrights program is a new thing to us that we feel is very important to establish and get going in that area. We feel that, not just North Hollywood but in the San Fernando Valley, the Latino population, the Spanish-speaking population, has to be somewhere around 45%. We feel that there should be an outlet for development of what comes from them, plays written about their own experience.

There needs to be an opportunity to have that form of expression. Hopefully, it can be translated into other kinds of programming, not only putting on plays but dealing with the community in general so that you sensitize people to theater arts and you get them to start coming to a theater, whether you take it to a school and get the kids interested, and then maybe the kids bring their parents to the theater.

There’s an audience to develop there, not just selfishly nor necessarily altruistically. There is an audience to develop. I’m not sure that we necessarily have to cater to the Latino community, but they are a population that is underserved.

Q: Does that mean you’ll perform plays by Latino playwrights?

A: You’re darn right.

Q: Will that be in English or Spanish?

A: Hopefully it can be done in both. The process will probably take a year or so to get it into the workings of everything else that is going on as far as the plays being done and getting it into the reading process. But it is on our agenda. It would be done in English and it would be done in Spanish.

Q: Then you could promise that in the next couple of years there will be Spanish words up on that marquee again?

A: Well, “El Portal” is always going to be up there, unless we get some guy named Smith who wants to give us $1 million to name the theater after him. Then it will be named “Smith” real fast.