COVER STORY : The Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts has been both the object of criticism and the center of attention. But to some officials and residents, the city’s ‘crown jewel’ deserves . . . : Curtain Calls

A crew of 10 black-shirted stagehands, moving with military precision, is literally taking apart the interior of the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, chunk by chunk.

We are not talking about just moving some seats around. A 134-foot-long wall, with balconies and exits, slides back 20 feet and locks into place--kerplunk. Two other walls, each weighing about 250,000 pounds, pivot like a pair of garage doors.

Columns crumple and the entire orchestra section sinks four feet. A huge curtain floats down.

As it has dozens of times in its three years of existence, the place is undergoing a radical personality transformation. This time it’s changing from a theater-in-the-round--with a revolving stage on which Little Richard and the Temptations recently flounced--to a formal concert hall with a more conventional proscenium stage.

In other theaters, stagehands move things around on the stage to accommodate different performers. “In ours, we have to set up the building,” says marketing director Walter Morlock.

*

In just three seasons, the unique shape-shifting theater--which has five or six distinct configurations, administrators say--has become an integral part of the way Cerritos views itself. City officials have taken to calling it the city’s “crown jewel”--though a costly one that sops up about $3 million a year in city money.

“We’re no longer known as the city with the big auto mall,” says City Councilman Sherman R. Kappe, referring to the huge Cerritos Auto Square.

By most standards, the theater has been a phenomenal success.

It has been packing in audiences, with almost two-thirds of its performances sold out this season. For the second year in a row, the theater, which has sold almost $5 million in tickets this year, achieved ranking as the highest-grossing theater of its size--under 3,000 seats--in California. It ranked seventh highest in the nation.

The building’s design, from its tiled roof with pennants flying to its lobby balustrade of frosted glass to its adaptable performance space, draws kudos from visiting dignitaries and theater people.

A little glamour has even rubbed off on Cerritos, which 35 years ago was hardly more than nine square miles of dairy farms and country roads. The modest city of 53,000 is now renowned far beyond the city limits as a place where Frank Sinatra, Mstislav Rostropovich, Whitney Houston and a host of others have performed.

When the Royal Shakespeare Company took over the stage last November for five performances of “Henry VI: The Battle for the Throne,” the Prince of Wales and a phalanx of Hollywood luminaries showed up to tread the center’s carpeted floors.

“It was one of the highlights of my career,” says Executive Director Victor Gotesman, 46. “To have the prestige of a company like the Royal Shakespeare and a royal visit--it gave us a lot of exposure.”

But the center, which cost $60 million to build, is not just for the swanky crowd, city officials insist. It has become a valuable community resource, bringing culture and the arts to a broad segment of the city’s population, they say.

This year, for example, students from Cerritos and neighboring cities attended special performances by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and workshops conducted by members of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Other schoolchildren received instruction in the art of puppetry from members of the puppet company Theatre Sans Fil.

“The theater has given the whole city a sense of identity and culture,” City Manager Art Gallucci says. “This has become the focal point of the city.”

But one of the dilemmas facing publicly run theaters is that even the highest-grossing ones lose money. “There’s not a publicly owned theater in the country that makes a profit,” contends Gallucci.

So it’s unprofitable, most city officials say. So what?

“Libraries don’t make profits,” Gallucci says. “Police departments don’t make profits. But they’re functions of city government. So is the Performing Arts Center.”

Still, there are a few skeptics.

Some entertainment industry observers say the center’s budgetary demands have tended to make its programming safe and bland, with few opportunities for “cutting-edge” performers that might appeal to younger audiences. “It’s for the mink stole and blue-hair crowd,” says Ken Phebus, booking agent for the Coach House, the rock and pop club in San Juan Capistrano.

Among this season’s hot tickets were Tony Bennett and Bill Cosby, as well as the Temptations and Little Richard--all long-established performers who tend to attract middle-aged and older audiences. Others included Shari Lewis & Lamb Chop, the Oak Ridge Boys, the Vienna Symphony and a Christmas show featuring Roberta Flack and Peabo Bryson.

The only jazz acts were the Count Basie Orchestra with singer Diane Schuur, and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, both dedicated to preserving music from other eras.

“We don’t take a lot of risks here,” acknowledges Gotesman. “We try to offer a broad spectrum of artists with high name recognition.”

That does not include youth-oriented shows--”only because the venue doesn’t lend itself to the harder shows, hard rock or rap,” Gotesman says.

Successful youth acts demand larger audiences than the Cerritos space can accommodate, Gotesman explains. “They don’t want to play a performing arts center, they want a Pond, a Forum or a Universal,” he says, referring to the Pond of Anaheim, the Great Western Forum and the Universal Amphitheatre.

Nevertheless, Gotesman promises a more adventurous season for 1995-96, with more contemporary jazz and classical-type music. In a coup for Gotesman, the season will include an exclusive engagement by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which opted for Cerritos over the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

*

Even knottier than programming challenges are the center’s budget problems. Some members of the City Council are restive at the amounts of subsidies the city has been required to make to the center. Before the center opened in January, 1993, administrators said the annual shortfall would amount to about $2 million a year, but this year it’s expected to exceed $3 million.

Mayor Grace Hu, for one, isn’t pleased with the prospect of multimillion-dollar subsidies in perpetuity. “I’m a businessperson,” says Hu, a real estate broker. “I don’t like a business that loses money. Right now, it looks like we have to subsidize it forever.”

Gallucci and others argue that the Performing Arts Center, and the adjoining Cerritos Sheraton Hotel, have served as magnets to draw other businesses to the city’s Towne Center, a 125-acre business and commercial complex near the center of the city.

“We use it (the theater) as a marketing tool,” Gallucci says. “Potential tenants get tours of the theater and a copy of the program.”

*

The new tenants, some of whom openly acknowledge that they were sold on the Towne Center because of the prestige of the theater and the convenience of the hotel, have in turn generated more revenue for the city through the sales tax and hotel bed tax.

“You have to look at the Towne Center as a total package,” says Councilman Kappe.

The three-year-old complex has been an extraordinarily successful redevelopment venture for the city, officials say. With 23 retail establishments and seven restaurants already in place and more scheduled to open this year, the complex should generate $78 million in revenue for the city over the next 20 years, they say.

Business leaders sometimes talk about the “synergy” between the theater and nearby retailers and restaurants.

The theater is the spoon that often stirs commerce in Cerritos restaurants, suggests Jack Kleyh, executive director of the Cerritos Chamber of Commerce. “It’s certainly brought some traffic in,” he says. “We get a lot of calls from people who say, ‘I’m coming in for a performance. Where’s a good place to eat?’ ”

The Towne Center’s Mimi’s Cafe, a block from the theater, is the highest-grossing outlet in the 19-restaurant Southern California chain. “I’d say 50% of our customers are going to the theater,” says manager Miguel Silva. “You can tell because we get this hit around 6 o’clock, and they all seem to leave by 8, when the performance begins.”

Cerritos maintains an annual $54-million budget with no property or utility tax. The city, which the Assn. of American Geographers has ranked as the country’s most ethnically diverse, thrives largely on sales taxes from Cerritos Auto Square and Los Cerritos Mall, as well as the Towne Center.

Despite the balanced budget and $160 million in reserves, the City Council has tried to keep theater programming expenses down. “We’re working very hard to get it under control,” says Councilman Bruce W. Barrows. “A few types of shows we’ve had to subsidize heavily because the draw was very low. That’s going to be the ballet type of thing.”

Two council members, Kappe and Paul W. Bowlen, sit on the programming committee, along with Gotesman, Gallucci and other center staff. Working out a program for an entire season is a matter of fashioning nine months’ worth of commitments out of a welter of available artists using a limited budget, Kappe says.

The center’s budget this year is $8.3 million, almost half of it for programming. Its revenues are expected to be $5.3 million, about $5 million from the box office and the rest from rentals of meeting rooms and concessions.

The Orange County Performing Arts Center, which will cover a $5 million deficit this year largely with corporate donations, has a budget this season of $19 million.

The long-term answer to budget shortfalls, Gallucci says, is an interest-generating theater endowment fund. Like other public theaters, Cerritos has begun such a fund, collecting $3.5 million in donations so far.

“Every time we get a new developer, I twist his arm,” Gallucci says.

But the fund must reach at least $20 million to generate enough interest to have a significant impact, Gallucci says.

Maybe the city should have planned a bigger theater, some city officials say.

If Hu had her druthers, the center would be about 25% bigger--a 2,500-seat theater instead of one whose maximum seating is 1,963. “With 2,500 seats I think we could break even,” she says.

But it’s hard for many residents to imagine a better theater than the one they have. It sits like a colorful mirage in the midst of office buildings, an arresting vision of tile, glass and steel.

It’s hard also to imagine a more versatile theater, center officials say, because there are none as adaptable as this one.

As stagehands tinker with equipment, architect Barton Myers, who designed the theater, drifts through, leading a group of structural engineers on a tour.

Referring to the theater’s constant state of flux, from operatic space and arena to dramatic stage and cabaret, Myers says: “There’s nothing in the world that does this.” The theater was modeled roughly after the Derngate Centre, in Northampton, England, although the Cerritos building has more possible configurations.

In the schizophrenic 17,000-square-foot interior, hardly anything is nailed down. Only the rear balconies--the cheap seats--are fixed in place for all performances.

On this day, the theater’s stage crew was getting ready for performances by singer-songwriter Randy Newman and folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie.

Why not leave the theater set up for its maximum-seating configuration, a theater-in-the-round surrounded by banks of seats?

Simple, says marketing director Morlock. “Randy Newman sits at a piano when he performs,” he says. “He’d be blocked to the audience on one side of the stage.”

The big changes are made not with sheer muscle or with sophisticated electronics but with the clever use of compressed air.

Movable walls, one of them weighing 175 tons, have inflatable sacks, or “casters,” beneath them. When stagehands want to move them, they hook hoses to the casters and pump them full of air from three big compressors on the theater’s loading dock.

The crew leans into the wall, and someone turns on the compressors. About 1,300 cubic feet of air per minute shoot through the hoses, creating a sharp hissing noise, like a jet plane warming up.

The casters inflate, releasing enough air through pinholes to create a thin cushion beneath the wall. The crew heaves, and the wall moves smoothly, like a big Hovercraft, to the rear of the stage.

“All clear?” shouts master rigger Rogan Girard.

“Clear!” respond the stagehands.

The air stops, the wall sinks down and locks perfectly into place in the dark space--hooking into openings in the floor--like a piece of bridgework in a mouth.

With the theater ready for the next performance and the workers gone, Gotesman often sits in a seat there, contemplating the empty hall of illusions over which he presides, so solid yet so changeable. He thinks about performances that have taken place there and acts to come, he says.

“It’s a spiritual time, similar to some kind of meditation,” he says. “It’s my time.”