THE ARTS : When Disney’s Done, What Then? : Some observers fear that the coming $200-million Disney Concert Hall will become ruler of the Music Center; others believe that the addition ofthe venue will allow for new and different programming throughout

In 1997, the Music Center’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion will get a flashy new neighbor: the $200-million Frank O. Gehry-designed Disney Concert Hall. Disney Hall will become the new home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic--as well as the spectacular new showpiece of Bunker Hill’s Los Angeles Music Center.

And suddenly, the stately Chandler, current home of the Philharmonic and the annual Academy Awards, will become the symphony orchestra’s old house.

“Disney Hall, I predict, is going to become not just a symbol for Los Angeles, but a point of entry to the Pacific Rim of the United States,” said Music Center President Shelton g. Stanfill during a recent conversation.

According to Stanfill, the bright white limestone-and-stainless-steel structure--which has been compared to everything from a flower to furled sheets of paper to the Sydney (Australia) Opera House--will energize and humanize the Music Center. He said that Disney Hall--along with a new, improved Ahmanson Theatre, which is undergoing a massive “reconfiguring” and is to reopen in 1995--will change the elitist aura of the Music Center to something more user-friendly.

But what about the Pavilion?

The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion was named after Music Center founder Dorothy Buffum Chandler, now 93, wife of former Los Angeles Times Publisher Norman Chandler. The building--a chandeliered structure ringed by columns--was the first Music Center theater to open, in 1964. In 1967, it was joined by the Mark Taper Forum and the Ahmanson Theatre (where “Phantom of the Opera” ran for four years before closing last August).

There are those who hail Disney Hall--initiated by a $50-million gift from Walt Disney’s widow, Lillian, in 1987--as the savior of the Music Center. They see a bright future with new, expanded programming moving into the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, including increased opportunities for dance. But there are others, including skeptical members of the Music Center board of governors, who have worried in recent years that Disney Hall will become the Music Center, draining life from the existing theaters.

Not only does the L.A. Philharmonic’s move to Disney Hall create a vacuum at the Dorothy Chandler, but the Music Center’s operating company must be responsible for making use of Disney Hall during the 12 to 14 weeks a year the Philharmonic will not perform there because of its touring commitments and the Hollywood Bowl season.

The immediate destiny of the Ahmanson--after its $17-million face lift is complete--has already been determined: The Broadway hit “Miss Saigon” will open there in January for a nine-month run. The Mark Taper Forum will maintain its theater season of four or five plays a year. But the future of the Chandler Pavilion remains a more open question.

Gordon Davidson, Center Theatre Group artistic director/producer, joked that when Disney Hall was first proposed, resident company directors’ primary worry wasn’t that Disney Hall would drain artistic resources, “just all the money--that’s all.” Indeed, some board members have protested that building a $200-million concert hall in the midst of a recession--for a symphony that already has a place to perform--represents a waste of funds.

Further, because the Disney gift will cover only part of the cost of building Disney Hall, board members worried that fund-raising for Disney Hall will exacerbate the already difficult task of raising funds to support the Music Center’s four resident performing companies: the Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Music Center Opera, Center Theatre Group/Mark Taper Forum and the Master Chorale. (Since 1987, accrued interest and additional gifts from the Disney family have raised the Disney contribution to $92 million.)

Music Center officials acknowledge that initial plans for Disney Hall raised fears as well as hopes, but they say that most concerns have been resolved.

“You are not going to see dark houses here because of Disney Hall,” said Sandra Kimberling, president of the Music Center Operating Co., which is responsible for scheduling the various resident company performances and other attractions into Music Center theaters. “With the growth of Disney Hall is going to come growth in all the buildings. It is going to encourage growth. We aren’t going to hear people saying, ‘But how are you going to fill it?’ ”

Kimberling cited three main proposals that could keep the lights on at the Dorothy Chandler: an expanded opera season, more dance programs and more musicals. She added that there is no danger of the Academy Awards’ moving to Disney Hall because that hall will not have a proscenium stage.

During the initial stages of Disney Hall planning, Kimberling said, the Music Center’s four resident companies each sat down and drew up projections for its 1997-98 season. Early projections were needed, she said, to persuade both Los Angeles County (which is financing the $81.5-million Disney Hall garage) and skeptical board members that the center needed a new hall. For the opera company and the symphony, perpetually in pursuit of the best guest stars and conductors, such early planning is standard: “The sort of people we need to be involved--Placido Domingo, David Hockney--they do plan four or five years in advance,” said Peter Hemmings, executive director of the Los Angeles Music Center Opera.

Kimberling also said she does not foresee any problems booking the empty weeks at Disney Hall, pointing out that the operating company has agreed with the Philharmonic that the orchestra will make arrangements to book other orchestras, classical music performers or possibly jazz musicians into the hall. And, she said, the Philharmonic will need to have more concerts in its regular series to accommodate subscription ticket-holders because Disney Hall will be smaller than the Chandler--2,380 seats versus 3,300.

Kimberling added that more time available at the Pavilion will allow for more maintenance and set-up time for special events such as the Academy Awards, as well as offer more space for other special events and short-term bookings: “We can’t really compete with the summer fare at the Greek and all that--people want to be outside and see their pop artists--but getting something like the Bette Midler run that went to Universal . . . it might be an interesting thing to get some kind of a pop series on our list.”

One special event Kimberling mentioned is the annual television Emmy Awards, currently held in September at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. James L. Loper, executive director of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, confirmed that the organization is perpetually looking for a site with more seats than the Pasadena Civic but not as many as, say, the ShrineAuditorium, and that it has several times opened discussions with the Music Center about using the Chandler. So far, he said, such talks have broken down because the Emmys need a full 10 days of set-up time and must be held in September because that’s when the TV season begins. The opera season, Loper said, has always gotten in the way.

Without the need to schedule around the Philharmonic, Kimberling said, the Chandler could better accommodate its many December holiday programs. Among these are the obligatory annual “Nutcracker,” usually performed by a visiting ballet company such as the Joffrey, the Kirov or American Ballet Theatre. With the new hall, there will be time available for an early “Nutcracker,” which has not always been the case in recent years. “ ‘Nutcracker’ notoriously doesn’t sell well after the first of the year,” Kimberling said.

The center also has its eye on a jazz series patterned after Lincoln Center’s.

“They have Wynton Marsalis; they have a program every month, or every other month,” Kimberling said. “We’d really like to do an East Coast-West Coast, ‘Lincoln Center Meets the Music Center’ tie-in. We’ve got the other Marsalis (Branford, of “The Tonight Show” band) here, and we’re going to work on that too. We did a jazz attempt a few years ago, but we just couldn’t get the dates with any consistency.”

Kimberling said that the Music Center Opera will not necessarily produce more operas in a given season but that it would be able to present more performances of each opera--more cost-effective than setting up elaborate sets for productions that may play for only a few days. She added that the opera company would gain the ability to present opera throughout the year rather than during one crowded September-October season, and that it would also get a chance to produce musicals.

“Thinking philosophically, a huge city like this must have a concert hall, separate from the opera house,” offered the opera’s Hemmings. “I think everybody agreed that the Chandler is a much better opera house than it is a concert hall. A concert hall needs to be a house without a proscenium--a proscenium is anathema to orchestra sound. Concert halls should be completely open.

“Only in relatively small cities is the one building shared on a multipurpose basis. And so, at least, the building of Disney Hall indicates a distinct maturity. All great cities have an opera house and a concert hall. We are one of the last ones to be sharing--and our time has come.”

He added: “I am very pleased to know we will be the main tenants in the future . . . and I am therefore interested and concerned to know what it is going to be used for during the rest of the year. Because the less the theater is used, the more the onus is on us to cover (maintenance) costs.”

Hemmings said the opera company currently presents eight or nine operas a year and that in 1997 it may be able to offer nine or 10.

“But with standard operas, we’ll be able to do 10 performances instead of seven,” he said. “We also think it is essential to spread our performances throughout the year, rather than doing them all in the same period; we think our subscribers prefer it. We aim toward doing an opera a month during the season, September through June, so the subscribers don’t have to go too often.”

Hemmings said extra performances for paying audiences could help offsets costs for more community outreach performances for students, senior citizens and others.

Like Kimberling, Hemmings expressed some enthusiasm for musicals but noted that they would most likely be co-productions or the work of touring companies that would be presented by, rather than performed by, the opera.

“It depends on what you mean by a ‘musical,’ ” Hemmings said. “Pieces like ‘Phantom of the Opera,’ ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ ‘Evita,’ ‘Cats’--they all use microphones, which means the casting can be very different” from opera. “I don’t think those pieces will ever be the meat of opera companies.

“But I think pieces like ‘Oklahoma!,’ ‘My Fair Lady,’ ‘South Pacific,’ ‘Carousel’ and of course the Gilbert and Sullivan pieces and pieces like ‘The Merry Widow’ and ‘Die Fledermaus’ . . . are done by opera companies. And the other way to do musicals is to buy into a circuit, as we did with ‘Porgy and Bess.’ I think an opera company is a perfectly logical organization to put on musicals, but we can’t take any risks, because an opera company’s duty is to put on an operatic repertoire each year. What I am hoping is that some sort of fund can be created to take the potential sting out of presenting musicals.”

Whereas plans for the opera are largely in place, the prognosis for dance at the Music Center is less certain. The Joffrey Ballet, the center’s former resident company, lost its residency because of financial difficulties in 1991 and has not been replaced with another company. Dance presentations since then have been sporadic, and plans to establish an active Music Center dance planning committee have been stalled time and again because of the economy.

Kimberling is enthusiastic about dance possibilities at both the Chandler Pavilion and the reconfigured Ahmanson. At the Ahmanson, she said, “we are removing the left stage wall. Right now, there are some dance companies that would showcase very nicely at the Ahmanson, but they can’t leap offstage without smashing into a wall.”

Kimberling and Disney Hall officials note that Disney Hall offers some opportunities for dance too. The concert stage could be used for modern dance companies that do not require fly space or suspended scenery, and Disney Hall will contain a small chamber concert space seating 600 that might be used for small-scale dance concerts.

Other officials, Hemmings among them, are less optimistic about dance at the Music Center--particularly at the Ahmanson, which has already booked “Miss Saigon” for Jan. 25-Oct. 15, 1995, and will likely continue to play host to long-running shows in the future, leaving virtually no time available for dance.

The Dorothy Chandler presents a problem for dance because it’s big . Its cavernous stage is suited only to big ballet companies--and even they could only put on large-scale, showy story ballets such as “Swan Lake” or “Romeo and Juliet,” not repertory programs. And “where are they going to come from?” Hemmings asked. “The problem is that all the American national dance companies are in great financial trouble and touring has become so expensive. The only thing on which they can make ends meet appears to be ‘Nutcracker.’ ”

Kimberling said most of the responsibility for selecting and scheduling performers for Disney Hall will fall to the Philharmonic.

Disney Hall “is not the kind of place where you are going to book trade shows; it’s designed for a real specialized audience,” she said. “It’s a concert hall. . . . They (the Philharmonic) have more expertise in that--it’s something they know more about, the classical artists and everything. We’ll pick up the slack time, but the majority of (engagements) will come through the Philharmonic.”

The Philharmonic’s executive vice president and managing director, Ernest Fleischmann, declines to speculate on what those offerings might be.

“We are obviously concerned with what goes on in Disney Hall, but I am not in any position to tell anyone what it is going to be,” he said. “Mr. Salonen (Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen) and (artistic consultant) Peter Sellars and I are working on it. It is a . . . profound matter which I would say will have impact on the cultural life of this city; we take it extremely seriously.

Fleischmann stressed that each of the Music Center’s resident companies has its own board of directors separate from the Music Center and that the Music Center, which is the center’s fund-raising arm, provides less than 7% of the Philharmonic’s operating costs. Therefore, he said, he is not concerned about any fears Music Center board members may have had about Disney Hall.

“I’m glad they are worrying on our behalf, but we are the ones carrying the ball,” he said. “I wasn’t afraid, nor was anyone connected with the Philharmonic. If they did not have confidence in us, it (Disney Hall) should never have been offered to us in the first place.”

Fleischmann called Disney Hall “complementary to, not competitive with, the Music Center.” And he sees the separate facility as a way to cut, not increase, costs for the Philharmonic and the opera. “There is a tremendous reduction in stage costs” to be realized, he said. “At the moment . . . an opera set has to be taken down, and the orchestra has to be put up, all in a few hours, requiring legions of stage hands.”

Center President Stanfill--who took over in January after six years as president and chief executive officer of Virginia’s Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts--also sees more Chandler Pavilion open time as a boon.

“So many major things that have ended up at the Orange County Performing Arts Center would have been naturals here had there been time available,” he said. “It is quite possible for something like the Bolshoi Ballet, or the Kirov, to be in both places, without feeding off each other’s audience. Those things didn’t come here before, because there was no space, no time. It will be complex in terms of time and schedule, but at least it will be possible.

“When I was at Wolf Trap, we were dealing with people like the Metropolitan Opera and the Spoleto Festival, and we were able to do it because they had the available talent and we had the right kind of space. The Music Center did not.”