December Reopening of Celebrity Theatre Expected : Music: A 10-year lease is signed for the Anaheim venue, which will have a new name.

ANAHEIM —  Dormant for nearly two years, the former Celebrity Theatre is expected to reopen in December with a new name and new management.

According to Ellis Stern, an official of the charitable foundation that owns the 2,800-capacity theater-in-the-round, a 10-year lease has been signed with new operators.

“It’s my understanding they will open the theater with some shows early in December,” Stern said. “It will probably be the same fare that was there before, the same types of shows”: pop, rock, jazz and country acts. Stern said “a couple of small contingencies have to be worked out” before the deal is final, but “I don’t believe it’ll be an impediment” to a December reopening.

The theater’s previous operator, Edward J. Haddad, ran it from June, 1987, until his company’s eviction in April, 1994, for failure to keep up with the rent. Before Haddad’s California Celebrity Theatre Inc. fell into bankruptcy and lost its lease, the acts appearing on the theater’s rotating stage included Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire, MC Hammer, L.L. Cool J, B.B. King, Luther Vandross, Dionne Warwick, Guns N’ Roses, Ted Nugent, Gordon Lightfoot, Bruce Cockburn and Todd Rundgren.

The Celebrity’s closing left a void in the Orange County pop concert market, which has had no mid-size venue willing to accommodate acts too big for the nightclubs (the Coach House, the Galaxy Concert Theatre and the Crazy Horse Steak House) but not big enough to play the massive venues, Irvine Meadows and The Pond of Anaheim. (The 3,000-seat Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa continues largely to treat pop music as an illegitimate art form.)

Stern, a attorney in Los Angeles who is co-trustee of the Leo Freedman Foundation, said he could not name the new tenants because the foundation has agreed to leave it to them to identify themselves and to make their plans for the venue known. The new operators have “significant experience in this type of business,” including past operations in Texas, Stern said.

Calls to the theater over the weekend went unanswered. A message on its answering machine reveals that the venue’s new name is the Freedman Forum Concert Theater. Freedman Forum was the venue’s original name when its founder, the late Leo Freedman, opened it in 1987 with a brief, abortive run of Broadway-style musical theater productions.

Freedman soon leased it to Haddad’s California Celebrity Theatre Inc. for use as an all-purpose pop concert facility. The theater is at 201 E. Broadway, near City Hall.

Richard Bruckner, redevelopment manager for the city of Anaheim, said he has been in contact with Bruce Kahn, a principal in the corporation that has taken over the theater.

“We very much want to see it open and operating. It’s a great boost to the downtown and brings a lot of people in,” Bruckner said. “When it was open in the past, the restaurants and other businesses downtown saw a marked [improvement] in their business. We hope it is reopened and Bruce is successful.”

The theater’s reopening also figures to be a boon to the arts community in Orange County. Since 1991, the Freedman Foundation has made millions of dollars in grants to local museums and musical, dance, theatrical and arts education groups. Rental income from the Celebrity Theatre reached about $350,000 in peak years, Stern said. With the theater dormant for nearly two years, he said, the foundation has relied on income from its endowment investments--and the use of some principal--to make its grants, which he said have totaled about $600,000 to $700,000 for 1994 and 1995.

“Now that we will have a monthly income from the theater, we hope to continue that and perhaps do better,” Stern said.

According to documents in the California Celebrity bankruptcy file, Haddad’s company paid at least $240,000 a year in rent to the Freedman Foundation, plus a share of the theater’s income.

Stern would not disclose monetary terms of the Foundation’s lease with the new tenants but said it calls for a flat rent, with no landlord share in the theater’s income. The old income-sharing lease resulted in legal disputes between the Freedman Foundation and California Celebrity Theatre Inc. over whether revenue from ticket sales and operation of the theater’s restaurant and bar were being properly accounted for and passed along to the landlord.

Stern said the rent will rise over the course of the new lease and that eventually the Freedman Foundation will be able to match what it earned in peak years from the Celebrity Theatre. According to court documents, the Celebrity’s business fell from 87 concerts and $3.7 million in ticket revenue in 1991 to 71 shows and $3 million in 1992 and 29 shows and $1 million in 1993.