Nearly Complete, Simi Stage Is Not Meant to Upstage : The city’s new Cultural Arts Center is set to open Nov. 3. Officials say the carefully restored, neoclassical-style hall is not another Civic Arts Plaza--and that’s OK with them.

The first season for Simi Valley’s new Cultural Arts Center is almost hammered out.

The Nov. 3 black-tie opening is written on the calendar in ink now, not pencil.

And organizers are already whispering a wish list of celebrities who might help them launch the center’s 290-seat theater and art gallery.

But while they juggle ticket-pricing formulas and color schemes, while they weigh whether Rita Coolidge, Rita Moreno or Shirley Jones might sing on opening night, organizers hasten to point out that this is not the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza.

No, unlike Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley could not afford to build a big, expensive, ultramodern pile of high-tech concrete and hydraulics for its venue. Simi Valley’s leaders were not ready to pour anywhere near $81 million from closely guarded city funds into so dicey a financial venture as the arts.

Instead they agreed to part with barely $3.9 million in city redevelopment funds to buy and rehabilitate a 70-year-old church with rotten wiring, decaying plumbing and quake-cracked plaster.

And some question whether Simi Valley residents will forsake 23 local movie screens and their cable television for the costlier pleasures of live theater. Or if the new center will join white-elephant theaters that other communities have embraced, then forgot when the thrill wore off.

“It’s a philosophical question as to whether the city should be spending taxpayer money on cultural arts and theaters,” said Simi Valley Councilwoman Sandi Webb, who opposed the project, then was drafted for the center’s planning committee after council colleagues outvoted her.

“Three votes say we’re going to do it,” she sighed. “So I’m going to work on making it as cost-effective as we can.”

Fund-raisers have so far gathered $200,000 as part of a hoped-for $2-million endowment fund for theater upkeep. But some community groups are already clamoring to use the $300-a-night hall for less--or for free.

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A city consultant is working to book jazz combos, film series, children’s art shows and big-name celebrities to keep the public’s interest high.

And this is no patched-up wreck of a church hall.

Simi Valley’s return on its investment is a potent mix of gloss and gear: a carefully restored, 1924 neoclassical-style community center with computerized stage lighting, 24-channel sound and a healthy dose of stained-glass charm.

“This is more intimate” than the 1,800- and 400-seat theaters at Thousand Oaks’ Civic Arts Plaza, said Jay Bloom, chairman of the Simi Valley Cultural Arts Center Commission. “You feel closer to the performers when you look at the stage.”

Simi arts groups are thrilled to graduate from the cramped spaces they had been using.

Since earthquake damage squeezed the Simi Valley Art Assn.’s displays off the walls of an old Police Department annex, more than 120 artists have been competing for space on the walls of George Holmes’ art-supply shop.

“The artists are terribly excited about having somewhere to show,” said Holmes, referring to the new center’s spotlighted lobby walls, stairwells and vestibules. “It’s laid out very nicely.” Art association members, he said, are busy raising money for costly hardware to hang framed pieces there without damaging the walls.

Simi Valley theater producer Kevin Traxler also seems pleased.

Now, his Soap Box Players troupe can bid adieu to the small, poorly wired ex-courtroom and the costly Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza theater they once played. The new digs, he said, are “pretty cool.”

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The troupe already plans to stage three musicals at the new center: “A Christmas Carol,” “The Secret Garden” and a new work called “Once on This Island.”

“It’s going to be great,” Traxler said. “It’s very exciting.”

The high-tech, proscenium theater taking shape on Los Angeles Avenue is only the latest incarnation of a 1924 building that has led multiple past lives--as a Methodist church, a mortuary, a Jewish synagogue and a Jaycees haunted house.

Back in the early ‘20s, the city’s Methodist community gave the building its neoclassical design because they “probably were looking for something that was timeless,” said architect Jim Combs, who is working on the current project.

Combs said his firm preserved the building’s original design by carefully folding modern necessities into it.

Its 11,100 square feet were stretched to 12,615 by adding stage space behind the original altar area and duplicating the Greco-Roman decor of the facade on the building’s rear face.

Wheelchair ramps--now required by law--were slipped into trellised ramps, known as pergolas, that lead to the front door and will be covered with flowering vines, he said. Reproductions of 1920s-vintage gas lights were installed on the brick plaza out front and the 86-space parking lot at the back.

And the padded, bench-style theater seats will be capped at each end with the wooden edges of the original church pews.

Builders also contacted the Los Angeles company that cast the church’s stained-glass windows back in 1924.

Using samples of the original mottled powder-blue and creamy beige glass that were on file, the company provided exact duplicates to replace panes that vandals had smashed.

On the inside of the building, carpenters built light boxes around windows to block sunlight out of the darkened theater, while banks of lights make the windows glow from within at night.

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Contractors ripped out and replaced every wire, pipe and air duct and crammed the tiny boiler rooms in the cellar with new boilers and air conditioners.

They tore out the old plaster-and-lath ceiling and some walls--cracked by countless earthquakes--and replaced them with new drywall.

Likewise the cracked bas-relief columns that lined the theater, which have been recast in fiberglass and painted to resemble the original plaster. And the varnished-wood front of the choir loft has been completely stripped and refinished.

The church’s musty basement has been transformed into a multipurpose room that can house cabaret shows, seminars and catered meals.

Yet much work remains.

And nothing, the organizers warn, is set in stone--including opening night.

The date was pushed back twice--to October and then November--after work was stalled for two months last winter while the city replaced the first building contractor over non-performance.

Last week, carpenters, electricians and carpet layers were still buzzing away. Landscapers were laying pipe for a refurbished rose garden that the Methodist community originally planted to honor Simi Valley’s World War II veterans.

Wiring hung from the ceiling. Floors were bare. And the pew-style seating was still in storage, awaiting installation.

Some are already criticizing the planned seating design. In a letter to the commission, producer Traxler wrote: “I can’t help but laugh when I think of the Opening Night Gala, when the ‘who’s who’ of Simi Valley are rubbing butts in sequined gowns at $100 a pop and nowhere, but their laps, to put their arms. I wouldn’t call this an incentive for repeat business.”

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And that’s not to mention the uproar about the paint scheme--city officials and decorators are still haggling over it.

About two weeks ago, officials and artists got a peek at the carnivalesque pattern that decorators had brushed onto the column tops--a riot of purple, peach, brick red and hunter green--and rebelled.

An ad-hoc design committee quickly huddled and came up with a new proposal: Daub sky blue and pale yellow on outside column tops to match the stained glass, and use something like teal and golden yellow inside to contrast with the green walls.

“I think [the original scheme] made fun of the building rather than playing on its dignity,” said Pat Havens, head of the Simi Valley Historical Society and a Methodist.

“So many of us were married in that church, hundreds of couples,” she said. “The whole thing was turning it into a carousel.”

But Webb said the new paint scheme should work out better.

“We’ll have to come back and look when a few of them are painted,” she said. Once that snag is ironed out, Webb said, “the rest will just sail on past. I think it’s going to look really gorgeous.”