THEATER NOTES : Odyssey to City--Hold the Hot Wax

The Odyssey Theatre Ensemble wants to expand its operations into a larger theater at its site on Sepulveda Boulevard. But can that plan coexist with the carwash next door?

When the Odyssey moved to the site in 1989, creating three new 99-seat venues in the process, it was clearly labeled an interim move, necessitated by the end of the lease at the theater’s former site a few miles west. The city of Los Angeles arranged for the Odyssey to remain in West L.A.--as opposed to moving to Santa Monica or another Westside spot--by temporarily renting the city-owned site on Sepulveda to the theater company for $1 a year.

Since then, however, the Odyssey board and artistic director Ron Sossi have decided that they want to stay on Sepulveda--and use the site to build a new facility that would include one 500-seat theater as well as two 99-seaters.

Sossi said his team has informally developed two different plans for the site. But he fears that a proposal by a neighboring carwash to lease part of the Odyssey’s rear parking lot for its detailing facility would stymie any such plan. The transaction would eliminate 48 parking spaces from the lot, which would reduce the theater’s total parking capacity from 109 to 61--just above the amount Sossi says is required by city codes before any expansion.

The carwash would lease the area for $4,500 a month--which would bring considerably more money into the city coffers than the $1 a year that the Odyssey pays for its entire site.

But Sossi has enlisted his subscribers and other theatergoers in a petition campaign to try to stop the lease of the parcel to the carwash.

No decision has been made; the city has issued a request for proposals to see if there are any other parties interested in the site.

City Councilwoman Ruth Galanter, who represents the area, has not taken a position on the lease proposal. “I love the Odyssey,” said Galanter, “but if we’re going to give them money, we need to give it upfront, with numbers on it, so people know about it. This is a terrible dilemma we face all the time, where we have wonderful organizations whom we are able to give things to in times of prosperity and frequently with a time limit on it. Then the prosperity disappears, and we have an enormous number of competing demands for the same money.”

Galanter spokesman Jeff Prang said that “ample street parking is available” in the largely industrial area during the evening hours when the theater is in operation. If the theater were to expand, he said, the Odyssey probably could obtain a variance that would enable it to make an exception to city codes for on-site parking. Furthermore, Prang noted, the Odyssey formerly rented part of the controversial parcel to another business for storage, not for parking.

“Baloney,” Sossi responded to Prang’s claim that ample street parking exists. “We have people all the time who are irate because they have to walk too far.” They’ll have to walk farther if the parking in back is reduced, he said. He added that the one part of the back lot that had been rented to another company was “a concrete lump” that was unsuitable for parking.

This isn’t the first time that parking has been the focus of attention at this site. Before the Odyssey moved in, the city used the site as a garage for those little vehicles that are used by the people who issue parking tickets.

HERMAN/MERMAN SONG: When Civic Light Opera of South Bay Cities opens “Hello, Dolly!” Friday, it will include a song that hasn’t been heard in the score since Ethel Merman sang the role on Broadway in 1970.

When composer Jerry Herman heard that his friend Karen Morrow would play the title role in Redondo Beach, he fished the ballad “Love Look in My Window” out of his trunk and offered it to her.

Though Herman originally wrote the song--and show--with Merman in mind, she initially turned down the role. Carol Channing got the job instead, and her “larger-than-life, unreal quality” was well suited to the show, Herman said (in fact, Channing’s still touring with it). However, she lacked Merman’s pipes, and “Love Look in My Window” was a casualty of her casting.

“If it had been cast first with a real singer, it would have stayed in,” Herman said. When Merman finally took the role six years later, Herman restored the song for her. But she was the last Dolly of the original production, and subsequent productions followed the Channing model.

Morrow is in the Merman tradition more than the Channing tradition, and “she’ll sing the hell out of it,” Herman predicted. However, she won’t be doing a second song that was restored for Merman’s benefit, because Herman thinks it’s too similar to the existing “Before the Parade Passes By.”

REP REBOUND: When the Los Angeles Theatre Center company folded in 1991, some feared that San Diego Repertory Theatre might be next on the list of city-center theaters to bite the dust. But San Diego Rep has rebounded. The last two seasons have resulted in operating surpluses, and subscriptions were up 34% last season--the first increase since the theater moved to the Lyceum in Horton Plaza in 1986.

Now the company has announced an ambitious 1994-95 season. First up will be Pearl Cleage’s “Flyin’ West,” about four black women who claim their own land in Kansas in 1898, Sept. 21-Oct. 8. It will be followed by a revival of Claire Luckham’s “Trafford Tanzi” (Oct. 21-Nov. 19), the annual “A Christmas Carol” (Nov. 26-Dec. 24, actually set in Victorian England, for the first time in six years--what a concept), “Hamlet” (Jan. 28-Feb. 18), the Southern California premiere of Octavio Solis’ “El Paso Blue” (Feb. 24-March 25) and a final to-be-announced show (Jane Martin’s controversial “Keely and Du” is a possibility).*