SAN GABRIEL VALLEY / COVER STORY : ARTISTIC DIFFERENCES : Pasadena’s drama, music and dance groups are struggling to survive in the face of high rents, funding cuts, city zoning regulations and the failed vision of an arts-friendly ‘hometown downtown.’

Gregory Gliedman knew that starting his theater company, the Dramatic New Arts Theatre, wasn’t going to be easy. He didn’t know, though, how hard things would be in Old Pasadena, where the company opened its doors a year ago this month.

Gliedman’s group, depending partly on flyers to publicize its shows, was discouraged from passing them out on the busy streets by police who interpreted city laws as forbidding such distribution. Then, neighboring store owners refused to place flyers in their windows. Gliedman says that city officials planned and then canceled meetings intended to iron out the group’s problems in its new neighborhood. Meanwhile, Dramatic New Arts was trying--with little success--to lure crowds with a season that included plays by Eugene Ionesco and Maria Irene Fornes.

Gliedman wrestled with a solution to his problems. Finally, in November, he arrived at one: The company left Pasadena.

In Gliedman’s view: “Theater is met with gross indifference in Pasadena, both by the public and the city because theater isn’t what people come to Pasadena for. If you’re a performing arts company in Pasadena, you’re gonna spend a lot of money and time trying to develop an audience.”

Gliedman and company are shopping for a new home in Hollywood. “We really feel wanted there,” he said.

He isn’t alone in his feelings about Pasadena. Although the city is home to many successful arts groups, including the Norton Simon Museum and the Pasadena Symphony, several factors have caused the performing arts scene to fall on hard times. Consider the following:

* Pasadena’s central nighttime entertainment zone, Old Pasadena, boasts only one theater: the Knightsbridge.

* The Ambassador Auditorium closed May 17 after an internal shake-up and a resulting revenue loss sustained by the Worldwide Church of God, which owned and subsidized the highly respected concert hall.

* The Pasadena Dance Theatre and Pasadena Pops Orchestra have signed pacts with the San Gabriel Civic Auditorium, in the city of San Gabriel, to give most of their performances in that theater.

* The Basement Theatre, named for its 10-year basement home in Pasadena’s First Congregational Church, has decided to move because of rising rents, although it is trying to stay in the city.

* The operating company for the Pasadena Playhouse declared bankruptcy in March, sparking questions about the long-range effect on perhaps the city’s most venerable performing arts venue.

* Pasadena’s proposed 1995-96 budget would cut funding for the city’s arts division by 75%, including an elimination of the division’s grant monies (which totaled $130,000 in the past year, directed at several local organizations).

“A lot of bad things are happening at once,” said Rick Cole, former mayor and City Council member, who recently left office.

Cole and other observers cite many reasons for the problems faced by Pasadena arts groups:lack of planning, high rents, limited venues and, perhaps most critically, audience indifference.

“Old Pasadena,” said one observer, “is drawing young people east of the San Gabriel Valley looking for a good time but not willing to go all the way to Hollywood. They want movies, nightclubs, eateries, watering holes--and nothing else.”

But because of its reputation as a busy nightspot, Old Pasadena is naturally attractive to performing arts organizations trying to lure audiences.

Gliedman noted: “We wanted to be where the action was.”

But to perennially cash-strapped arts groups, Old Pasadena has proved too expensive. Landlords, charging rents the market will bear, lease to cash-rich tenants. Thus, the proliferation of clubs and restaurants, and the notable lack of alternative arts venues.

Cole noted that Old Pasadena didn’t just happen. It was willed into existence over several years of careful planning and consideration of what the city needed.

“It went through its Bohemian phase, and then it changed,” said Cole. City officials, members of the Old Pasadena Business Improvement Assn. and Old Pasadena supporters got together two years ago and talked about the area’s future.

The group’s resulting vision, said Cole, was of “a hometown downtown,” in which Old Pasadena would have a better balance of people working, eating and shopping in the area, as well as a greater mix of arts venues.

Cole added: “Everybody said they believed in it, but in the meantime, many have behaved with a different agenda. There are those--businesses mostly--who have consciously or unconsciously pushed Old Pasadena into an urban theme park and party place like Melrose Avenue, not into a hometown downtown.”

As for Old Pasadena’s only operating theater, the Knightsbridge Theatre in the Braley Building on Raymond Avenue, “We are doing quite well--artistically,” says managing artistic director Joseph Stachura.

It appears to be surviving financially, though when pressed for details, Stachura repeats the phrase most favored by theater operators: “With largely classical programming that includes Shakespeare, the theater manages to exist without grants or public or private donations.”

While the Knightsbridge gamely continues, though, it may be an exception in what Cole calls “a place that’s becoming a party ghetto. Landlords with mortgages to pay look for tenants who can pay the highest rent and help the bottom line. You end up with bars, nightclubs and T-shirt shops.”

At the same time, says Cole, “Pasadena’s theaters and the city’s art-support system have not cultivated a theater audience here.”

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Cole still laments the city’s failure to help relocate the respected acting training center, the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, to Old Pasadena from the other side of town. The plan fell through partly because a landlord could not be found. The academy remains in an elementary school on Paloma Street in east Pasadena--far from most arts activity.

The city had hoped to bring the academy into the area as “an attraction for other groups to relocate” to Old Pasadena, Cole said.

“We were close to a deal a few times,” he recalled, “but it always fell through.”

Efforts by the city arts division, said Denise Nelson Nash, the agency’s chief, to encourage an arts influx into Pasadena “are limited by our budget. Last year, we had $130,000 to offer in grants, but the requests we received were over $600,000. There are programs we would like to fund, but funding runs out.”

Now, all of the grant money is set to be eliminated under the city’s proposed 1995-96 budget. A variety of groups that regularly perform in local schools would be affected by the funding cut, including the Ruckus Performance Ensemble (which also performs on Pasadena streets).

The division’s efforts to market Pasadena arts include a periodic arts calendar insert in Pasadena-based newspapers. The city is considering a new division-sponsored zoning initiative, targeting east Pasadena, that would allow artists to live in their work studios.

“We’ve acknowledged,” said Nash, “that we have to do better marketing strategies. Undoubtedly, we lack a choice of affordable venues inside the city.”

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The city’s influence on venues is limited, Nash added, since “the division doesn’t run any facilities.”

Others, though, complain that various city regulations and procedures, including the process of rezoning areas from residential to commercial use to accommodate a theater business, is less streamlined than those of some neighboring cities.

Said one source who had been active in the local arts scene:”The city of Pasadena does not make it easy at all to start up a performing arts company, and makes it very difficult to get zoning approvals, unlike a helpful city like Glendale.”

Among Pasadena’s existing venues, the latest bad news is the closing of the Ambassador Auditorium, owned by the Pasadena-based Worldwide Church of God. The church, which had subsidized as much as 45% of the hall’s operations, sustained a severe financial blow when reforms adopted in 1994 caused it both to lose some members and gave those who stayed more leeway in how much they contributed. Donations dropped by about 30%.

This spelled disaster for the auditorium as a world-class concert hall.

The church plans to use the auditorium for its own religious activities.

“The one thing we were fortunate about is that we were able to alert our subscribers . . . in advance that there would be no season” for 1995-96,” says Doug Russell, Ambassador marketing director.

Nash says that the “[arts]division is looking for a way to save the Ambassador.” But Russell counters that he “knows of no city help, and we haven’t been approached by the city.”

Russell added, “We applied for city grants for the past five years, and we were always rejected. They said we didn’t include enough local talent. . . . All that we could come up with, I guess, was world-class talent,” such as jazz greats Dizzy Gillespie and Ella Fitzgerald and pianist Vladimir Horowitz.

Some local talent, meanwhile, continues to look outside of Pasadena for venues. The Pasadena Dance Theatre and Pasadena Pops Orchestra both maintain offices and--in the case of the dance company--a studio in the city. After years of performing in Pasadena, each has recently signed pacts with the San Gabriel Civic Auditorium for subscription-based performing seasons.

So, why is Pasadena’s loss San Gabriel’s gain?

“We just became a professional company,” said Pasadena Dance Theatre artistic director Charles Maple, “and it so happened that the city of San Gabriel was interested in developing [its] Civic Auditorium as a performing arts center. . . . We’re a Pasadena-based organization, but you go where you can afford to go, and we couldn’t afford the Pasadena Civic Auditorium.”

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Pasadena Pops Orchestra executive director Toni Spagnola tells a similar story. Unlike the outdoor Pasadena venues where the orchestra has performed, the San Gabriel Civic Auditorium “is an official concert hall with good acoustics and a lot of prestige. We want to establish partnerships with other venues, and the San Gabriel Civic has a good following and audience base.”

Additionally, the orchestra has left its longtime summer spot outside the Rose Bowl. Its new summer home is Descanso Gardens in La Canada Flintridge, where it will perform the first Saturday of every month from June through September. The group’s only remaining Pasadena-based venue is on a converted concert stage in a ballroom at the Ritz-Carlton, Huntington Hotel, where a few of its fall and winter concerts will take place. The remainder of the season will be in San Gabriel.

Some Pasadena-based arts institutions are carrying on in their home base, despite their own share of problems.

The Pasadena Playhouse has just announced its 1995-96 season, even though Theatre Corp. of America, the playhouse’s operating company since 1981, filed for bankruptcy protection in March. The theater is being managed by the board of Pasadena Playhouse State Theatre of California Inc.

Whether the playhouse can establish a stable management team for the future remains a question. At the same time, the theater has enjoyed recent box-office hits, such as “Radio Gals,” and fund-raising efforts in 1994 reaped about $800,000--nearly double the fund-raising target.

The tiny Basement Theatre, meanwhile, continues its efforts to remain in Pasadena despite the rent hike that is driving it from its longtime home in the First Congregational Church. City officials are working with the theater to secure zoning permits to enable it to operate at the Pasadena Presbyterian Church on Oakland Avenue.

Alvin Jones, city director of planning and permitting, said his staff is trying to find the best rezoning format for the theatre. “We don’t have a solution yet, but we’ll try to see what we can do for them.”

Said Jim Nasella, a spokesman for the theater group, “We’re crossing our fingers, and hoping.”