Directing the Dream : As the Civic Arts Plaza season opens with ‘Man of La Mancha’ on Friday, the quest becomes how to balance creativity with profitability.

For nearly all of the 30 years Thousand Oaks has existed, there has been talk of a major performing arts center--a dream of a place where the world’s great entertainers might share the same stage with home-grown, home-based, home-proud performers.

It’s done. Almost.

The Civic Arts Plaza in Thousand Oaks lifts the first of its two stage curtains for the first time Friday night. Fittingly, “Man of La Mancha,” drama’s durable quest for the impossible dream, will be mounted by the Santa Susana Repertory Company on the Arts Plaza’s handsome but smaller Forum Theatre stage.

That’s the half of it. Almost.

Friday’s opening presages by nearly a month the grand opening of the Arts Plaza’s main auditorium, center of big-ticket action and, plainly, the venue that got the place built. That show will feature Bernadette Peters and the Conejo Valley Symphony. In subsequent months, be ready for Ray Charles and Willie Nelson and Tony Bennett and Anne Murray and Liza Minnelli.

Pulling it together has been epic--an effort that reaches far beyond completing construction on the sculptural, $65-million facility designed by famed architect Antoine Predock. Selecting the programs to mount--bold or timid, provocative or safe--in a scant few months has been the largest of recent challenges. Programming, after all, is the heart of a performing arts center.

“Everyone has been in a dead gallop,” says Larry Janss, a force not only in getting the center built but in defining the broad class of shows that will initially dominate both the main and small stages. “None of us has opened a regional performing arts center before. We’re making it up as we go. We don’t want to arrive a day late and a dollar short.”

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A day late and a dollar short.

The axiom--or the fear that it might prove true--has fueled program choices in recent months and serves as a guide to understanding not only the selection of this weekend’s opener but the entire season’s lineup.

Unlike numerous performing arts centers that receive subsidies from the cities that built them, the Civic Arts Plaza must generate enough revenue to pay for itself. The Thousand Oaks City Council voted such a decree.

That means mainstream, popular programming will dominate in the moneymaking 1,800-seat main auditorium--with local, less commercial, less-at-stake ventures in the Forum Theatre, which seats as few as 278 and as many as 398. The result is a cultural bifurcation of sorts.

The main auditorium will be the venue for which the Arts Plaza might become a well-known regional facility, drawing patrons from the San Fernando Valley and Santa Barbara. The Forum will be the prime outlet for Ventura County’s artistic expression.

On Nov. 19, for example, when Vegas showroom veteran Paul Anka croons on the main stage at tickets ranging from $30 to $50, the Westlake Cultural Foundation will be launching a “Salute to Youth” concert in the Forum with tickets at $20. On March 24, 1995, when superstar Liza Minnelli packs the main house on tickets starting at $60 and topping out at $90, the country-singing twins Janet & Judy will be featured in the Forum in the Conejo Valley Children’s Concert Series sponsored by Conejo Valley Adult School, AM-850 radio and The Oaks mall.

The notable exception to this in-house culture divide, of course, involves the resident Conejo Symphony Orchestra. This local symphony, featuring many first-class professionals, goes from years of being marooned in a gymnasium at Cal Lutheran University to performing on the main stage with such big-ticket artists as Pinchas Zuckerman and Glenn Dicterow. It will be a new day for this orchestra, not to mention its avid local following.

If anything marks the tone and style of the inaugural season’s program, it is that the entertainment is uniformly middle-of-the-road and crowd-pleasing. Instead of Andrew Dice Clay, there’s Howie Mandell and Bill Cosby; instead of a production of “The Piano Lesson,” there’s “42nd Street” and “A Chorus Line”; instead of Metallica there’s Kenny Loggins; instead of the Toshiko Akiyoshi Jazz Orchestra, there’s museum jazz in the form of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band.

Only, perhaps, the Santa Susana’s Forum production in February of Bernard Sabath’s “The Boys in Autumn,” to some a disturbing portrayal of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in their final years, could be considered provocative.

“Well it is very safe, very commercial,” says the city’s theaters director, Tom Mitze, of the first-season lineup. “This is a family-oriented community, and what you see represents family-oriented programming. I don’t expect problems in the concerts or letters of complaint about language in the theater shows or comedy performances.”

Janss, who once booked Ray Charles in his nightclub Shades, is even more pragmatic: “We need to balance community representation and star-driven entertainment. It’s daunting to fill the big auditorium, and we’ve got bills to pay. We’re not starting off looking for controversy.”

He pauses a moment, adding: “We need to crawl before we walk, to get it right. . . . We’re just not going to put 2 Live Crew in there calling for rape and murder.”

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Choices for the major musical concerts, however, are not made by anyone in Thousand Oaks. Those have been farmed out to Avalon Attractions, an Encino-based promotion company that successfully bid to rent the main stage for roughly 40 weekends of the year and take responsibility for mounting profitable concerts.

As long as Avalon hews to the Thousand Oaks middle-of-the-road sensibility and to packing the house with crowd-pleasers, the major concert choices are exclusively Avalon’s. Asked whether Avalon, in effect, thus becomes this region’s arbiter of major concert opportunities, Janss smiles and says: “Well, yes, that’s true. It is really up to Avalon. They’re the experts at this level of booking. And they are driven first by keeping their company profitable.”

Nick Masters is Avalon’s talent executive and no newcomer to the business, having once run the black music (now urban music) department of the William Morris Agency in Los Angeles. He also is deeply involved with Avalon’s contract to program shows at Irvine Meadows Amphitheater.

As the man whose choices set the tone projected by the new Civic Arts Plaza, Masters is surprisingly casual about his methods.

“There is no method, I guarantee you that,” he says, laughing. “It’s many factors, really. Some of it is common sense.

“Take Michael Feinstein--not exactly a hot ticket in L.A. But he does big business in Palm Springs, and we’re talking about an upscale community around the Arts Plaza. These people know him and like his music, which is Rodgers and Hart. That’s why he’s on the bill.”

Arts Plaza director Mitze amplifies Masters’ assessment of the audience. “There is a suburban consciousness to this area,” he says. “Cutting-edge programs, like jazz, are often better in more bohemian settings. I don’t think Philip Glass’ music would work too well here. And you could never do the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s ‘Next Wave’ festival here, for example.”

Fine by Masters. His only constraint was time: He had only three months from getting the green light until August, when he needed to have program brochures printed and distributed. But he found available for hire Kenny Rogers, Shirley MacLaine, Willie Nelson, Tony Bennett, Kenny Loggins, Liza Minnelli, among others.

“This is what I do for a living,” says Masters. “I buy a whole lot of shows for a lot of places, and I have relationships. That, coupled with the excitement about that new building--I find it to be a wonderful European classical setup in a modern structure--made it happen.”

Sometimes, however, other factors make it happen.

Singer Smokey Robinson recently played golf with Thousand Oaks Mayor Alex Fiore and noted, sadly, that he wasn’t on the bill. Fiore called Mitze, who called Masters, who called Robinson’s manager, who called Robinson. Dec. 9 is now the Smokey Robinson show.

And sometimes even the experienced Masters, who once lived in West Hills and professes to “kind of know something about the area,” finds himself surprised. Willie Nelson’s show, with ticket prices from $25 to $45, sold out in a heartbeat--before anyone else--requiring an additional show.

“That did surprise me,” says Masters. “But you can bet that told me to buy more country. And I will.”

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While market demand and community values drive the Arts Plaza’s first offering of major concert and dramatic production choices, other factors thicken the stew.

Mitze says his first job is to mill about the lobbies of both theaters to “listen to what people say. Our shows must reflect and challenge the cultural appetite of the surrounding communities.”

But the line between reflecting and challenging a community can be quite thin, even blurred. Mitze, who comes to Thousand Oaks from running the La Mirada performing arts center, recalls that community’s somewhat conflicted response to the show “Follies.”

That show, a sanitized version of the casino show, nonetheless features scantily clad dancers. But the costumes offered more coverage “than you’d see at the beach,” says Mitze. Curiously, letters of protest poured in. Mitze invited the critics in for a show to help him understand what was going on. His conclusion: “Everybody does, in fact, like ‘Follies.’ But the problem was that people felt that kind of show belonged in Las Vegas--not their neighborhood.”

No sooner did Mitze decode that mystery than La Mirada launched the provocative play, “The Mind With the Dirty Man,” starring Don Knotts. In an effort to forestall criticism, Mitze offered subscribers the option of dropping one of the season’s five productions--each clearly described in the season’s brochures.

“ ‘Dirty Man’ was the one show nobody dropped,” says a laughing Mitze. “So who can really tell?”

That doesn’t mean Mitze, whose cultural tastes are wide-ranging, won’t do his darndest to find out. Because he’s first in charge to make sure the Civic Arts Plaza makes a go of it--and will save the talk about regional cultural aspiration till later.

“I make my living selling tickets,” he says. “I’m not an angel. I work too hard making money to enjoy losing it. I’m a conservative person in a risky business.”

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“This is the honeymoon year” for the Arts Plaza, says Larry Janss. “We can do no wrong. In the second year, the blush will be off. That’s where the challenge is.”

That’s also where Janss believes the real work of establishing the Arts Plaza’s cultural constellation begins. Is it forever market-driven entertainment? Or is it sometimes risky? Will it sometimes veer off-center?

As part of meeting that challenge, Janss, a prominent developer in this region, founded the Gold Coast Performing Arts Assn., which pools administrative, fund-raising and logistics costs for the Arts Plaza’s three resident companies: Santa Susana Repertory, Cabrillo Music Theatre and the Young Artists Ensemble. Gold Coast’s fund-raising will aim at providing upfront production costs for mounting original shows--a subsidy that would seed this region’s burgeoning talents in music, dance and theater, and very likely affect the nature of its programming.

On a larger scale, Janss chairs the Founders Circle, a group within the Alliance for the Arts, the Arts Plaza’s key fund-raising arm. The Founders Circle seeks to establish a $10-million endowment for the Civic Arts Plaza and it’s already well beyond the halfway mark.

The first goal of the endowment is to ensure that the arts programs remain self-supporting. To that end, the first $250,000 in annual earnings off the endowment principal will cover fixed costs at the center. But anything after that may be used to subsidize shows of particular cultural interest that may cost more than a mere 1,800 tickets can buy.

Take Luciano Pavarotti, whom Masters considers the No. 1 attraction--no matter what market he’s singing in. Pavarotti’s per-show fee starts at $250,000 to $300,000--$150 a seat might not even cover it at the Arts Plaza. But he did appear in Pasadena’s far smaller 1,200-seat Ambassador theater a few years ago.

“With the right funding, the right subsidy,” says Mitze, “you can do anything.”

The endowment efforts thus gird the Arts Plaza’s future and with it the ability to program shows beyond what the marketplace virtually guarantees as financial and popular successes.

Timing, availability, cultural appetite, community values, whim, subsidy--all figure in programming a season at the Civic Arts Plaza, which Friday, on the smaller of its two stages, does perhaps the largest job of all: takes the impossible out of the dream.