Opening-Night Jitters : Backers Hope Simi Valley Will Embrace New Cultural Arts Center

Caviar is chilling and buffed brass rails gleam inside the Simi Valley Cultural Arts Center, bustling toward its grand opening gala tonight.

As Broadway star Rita Moreno struts through rehearsals this afternoon for two nights of song and dance, and Mayor Greg Stratton rehearses his opening speech, technicians will still be twiddling dials and theater managers biting their nails over last-minute worries:

Will the stage-lighting computer in the new 287-seat theater hit all its cues? Will Moreno’s loudspeakers mesh with the house sound system?

Will glitchy air conditioners leave the lobby / art gallery a furnace and the theater an icebox like earlier in the week? Will fire alarms blare unexpectedly?

And finally, they wonder quietly, will the people of Simi Valley fully embrace this place--a once-rotten, quake-rattled old 1920s Methodist church that was gutted, strengthened, painted, padded, carpeted and polished into a Greco-Roman jewel of a community theater--as their cultural Mecca?

If any hint can be found in the huge list of folks who signed on as ushers, clerks and stagehands for the center’s shakedown season, then the answer is yes, according to David Ralphe, the center’s general manager.

“The thing that is most exciting is the response of the community to the center,” Ralphe said. “We asked who would be interested in volunteering, and we had 187 people show up. . . . We were pretty much able to schedule [volunteers for] all the shows in November.”

Fund-raising for the center’s hoped-for $2-million endowment to support ongoing operations is also moving steadily, with well over $200,000 committed, and thousands more in pledges being weighed by would-be donors, said Peggy Sadler, head of the Cultural Arts Center Foundation.

The foundation has been courting benefactors with promises to name chunks of theater after them--the staircases, the entrance, the pews, she said.

“This is the part that’s frustrating,” Sadler said. “It moves slowly, but we also have to remember it’s being worked out over a three- to five-year [fund-raising] program.”

Daily, more and more promising omens of community support appear: 250 people mobbed an opening reception last week in the art galleries, 110 art lovers strolled past paintings by members of the Simi Valley Art Assn. and Disney Studios artist Bill Perkins over the weekend.

The box office phone is a-jangle with reservations for “A Christmas Carol,” and the season schedule is already crammed with musical comedy, children’s plays, jazz, movies and visual art.

Yet plenty of $100 tickets for Saturday night’s fund-raising gala show--complete with a cheese-and-pastry reception for Moreno--remain unsold.

And local theater directors are expressing only guarded optimism that the residents of this family-conscious, suburban enclave of strip malls and three multiplex movie houses will shell out up to $17.50 a ticket for live theater often enough to keep the arts center alive.

“Tickets are quite expensive,” said Kevin Traxler, head of the Soap Box Players in Simi Valley. “I’m not convinced that the people in Simi Valley will pay that. Not that I don’t think it’s worth it, but the primary form of entertainment in this town is either bowling or video rentals.”

Past Soap Box plays cost $10 a seat at the old theater space in a revamped traffic court--which Traxler admits was much less of a real theater than the Cultural Arts Center. “And people griped at that,” he said.

But Cultural Arts Center ducats will still cost far less than the $65 or $70 charged for big musicals at Los Angeles theaters or even at the Civic Arts Plaza in nearby Thousand Oaks. And the past two Soap Box shows sold out to an encouraging half-and-half mix of San Fernando Valley residents and dedicated Simi Valley theatergoers, he said.

And despite the doubts--despite the limitations of a small stage with no overhead backdrop storage and virtually no room in the wings--Traxler said he is excited.

“It’s going to be tough being the first theatrical production going in there on a larger scale and really testing the waters on everything,” he said, referring to the Dec. 1 opening date for “A Christmas Carol.”

“But it’s great. It’s exciting. And it’s about time.”

Local artists are also jazzed about the new gallery space set aside just for them--a downstairs community room, with parquet floors and spotlights, that positively glows with brass fittings and varnished oak.

“It’s terrific,” said George Holmes, a local artist, art store owner and former member of the Simi Valley Art Assn.

“The whole thing is coming together,” he said of the center. “It’s like watching a piece of artwork develop. . . . It goes through what we call an ugly duckling stage, but it’s definitely a swan. It’s just very tastefully done, and they really didn’t cut the corners.”

The director of another new community theater sent his best wishes--and a few words of caution:

“Opening a new theater is as exhilarating as riding on a roller-coaster--it has its ups and downs,” said Tom Mitze, manager of the Civic Arts Plaza, which just celebrated its first anniversary.

“First of all, things are never completely done, but you open anyway, and there are always a lot of last-minute details, some of which you take care of in time and some you don’t. But what counts is the opening performance, and they’ve got a great opening act in Rita Moreno.”

If Thousand Oaks’ success is any indication, Simi Valley’s Cultural Arts Center should prosper, Mitze said. The Civic Arts Plaza pulled in twice as many shows as expected in its first year and garnered a $450,000 surplus.

“There’s such a hunger here” for the arts, Mitze said. “There’s a lot of people in this area who don’t want to drive to L. A.. There’s the desire for entertainment close to home. . . . If the quality is in the performances, I think the audiences will know.”

And as the curtain rises in Simi Valley, he said, “we wish them well. We look forward to welcoming them as another cultural resource in Ventura County.”