Los Angeles Theatre Center Staging a Comeback

Is there life on Spring Street?

Los Angeles Theatre Center, the city-owned downtown theater complex, has seldom lived up to its name since its resident company collapsed in 1991. But last week came word that the L.A. premiere of a Stephen Sondheim musical, “Assassins,” will be presented at LATC beginning Nov. 22. It will be just one of four shows the Los Angeles Repertory Co. plans to stage at LATC over the coming season. Also on tap are Brendan Behan’s “The Hostage” and “Hamlet” in repertory, plus the West Coast premiere of Martin Sherman’s “Messiah.”

The series will be the first subscription season to be staged in the building since the old company fell apart. True, it will take place in the 90-seat Theatre 4 instead of the building’s three larger halls. However, one of the bigger theaters--the downstairs Theatre 3--has been busy lately, with the Bilingual Foundation’s “Pancho Villa and the Naked Lady” and a double bill of the Andy Garcia-directed “Race2Love” and Rick Simone’s “These People.”

Also, the San Francisco Mime Troupe will return to the largest theater, the Tom Bradley, for four performances of its latest show, “Escape From Cyberia”, which deals with California issues, Aug. 11-14.

Beginning Friday, the larger halls may attract even more producers, for the rental rates are going down. Nonprofit groups will be able to rent the 498-seat Bradley for $500 a performance (down from $650). Rates for Theatres 2 and 3 are dropping by $100 to $350 for Theatre 2 and $400 for Theatre 3. The higher commercial rates will not change.

Only in the small Theatre 4 and the even smaller Studio 5C will the rates go up Friday, from $100 to $175 in 4, from $40 to $60 in 5C. Because producers can use Actors’ Equity’s 99-Seat Theatre Plan (requiring only token payments to actors) in Theatre 4, it has been the busiest of the halls.

Officials of the city’s Cultural Affairs Department, which runs the building, sound bullish on LATC’s prospects.

LATC “has happily become a non-issue on the political level,” said Cultural Affairs General Manager Adolfo V. Nodal. The old LATC ignited bitter debates in the City Council and elsewhere over the public money spent on it. But now “it’s no longer the lightning rod of our budget, and that’s a great step forward.”

The city is financing the building’s overhead and utilities with $400,000 in the past fiscal year and with the same amount in the coming one. Rod Punt, the Cultural Affairs assistant manager who manages LATC, said that this “stable budget” has banished the former image of the place as “an unpredictable black hole of public funds.”

Cultural Affairs is moving its performing arts staff into offices within LATC, which should bring additional attention and possibly extra expenditures from the performing arts budget into the building. LATC also received its first outside grant since 1991 when the Norris Foundation gave $10,000 to help improve the computer system in the box office.

When the city took over the management of the building, a co-op of groups that would get first call on the facility--and lower rental rates--was announced. That co-op is now dead, for all practical purposes. While two members of the co-op, the Bilingual Foundation and Will & Co., have used LATC regularly, most of the other members have not. Most of them “have their own home facilities or communities,” Punt said, and “LATC represented another dimension or an outreach for them”--one they couldn’t afford during recessionary times. The co-op’s special rates are no longer in effect; all nonprofits share the same rates.

It’s no secret that many theatergoers still perceive the LATC area as dangerous. But Nodal and Punt want that image dispelled. The street is better lit, security guards are in place, and the alley behind the building is blocked off so that people may now park in the rear and enter through the back of the building without venturing onto Spring Street. That alley is “is so clean you could eat an egg off it,” claimed Punt.

“The city is bending over backwards to make it easy” to produce at LATC, said Peter Ellenstein, L.A. Rep’s managing director. And he believes Sondheim fans will go see “Assassins” wherever it’s produced, even if they’re leery of the area around LATC.

THE SUN SETS: Glenn Close and Alan Campbell leave “Sunset Boulevard” after tonight’s performance. But before leaving, they got an opportunity to hear themselves on the new cast album. Producer/composer Andrew Lloyd Webber hosted a “listening party” party for the cast at the Record Plant in Hollywood Tuesday. A fall release is planned for the album.

Meanwhile, the “Sunset” cast’s question-and-answer session that was to have been held Wednesday afternoon at the Shubert Theatre was canceled in order to accommodate a New York Times photo session on the set, said a spokesman. People who had reserved tickets through Telecharge were called about the cancellation, but some 35 were turned away at the door. The event, which would have benefited several AIDS-relief projects, will probably be rescheduled “with another Norma,’ presumably Faye Dunaway, the spokesman said. The cast had already raised $100,000 in fund-raising efforts for various charities in earlier benefits, he added.

SCHENNKAN EXITS L.A.: Robert Schenkkan, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of “The Kentucky Cycle,” is no longer Los Angeles-based. Formerly a denizen of Van Nuys, Schenkkan and his family have moved to Seattle, primarily because they believe it’s a better place to raise their two children, said the playwright.

“L.A. was very good to my career,” Schenkkan noted. But Seattle has been no slouch in that department. The city’s Intiman Theatre presented the world premiere of “The Kentucky Cycle” and is now headed by “Cycle” director Warner Shook, who has commissioned Schenkkan’s next play, “Handler.” About the new play, Schenkkan would say only that it’s less than two hours long, all in one part, and requires a cast of seven--in contrast to the massive, two-part “Cycle.” He said there’s a chance that it may pass through a future Mark Taper Forum New Work Festival--as did the “Cycle” before it went to the Intiman and then to the Taper mainstage.*