Is the Tried-and-True Played Out?

South Coast Repertory had one of the hottest-selling runs in its history last year with Noel Coward’s “Blithe Spirit,” one of theater’s most familiar plays.

Pacific Symphony scored a doubleheader, easily selling every seat for performances by baby boomer folk-rocker James Taylor and superstar cellist Yo-Yo Ma--again, two enormously well-known musicians.

And what accessible subject was the focus of one of Fullerton Museum Center’s best-attended shows? Coffee.

Is there a pattern here? Yes, say Orange County arts leaders. And as the new year--and new millennium-- approaches, they are pondering troubling questions:

Is there a hard-core arts audience out there eager to pay for lesser-known, non-mainstream art and artists over the long haul--the classical concert without a celebrated soloist, the new play or musical that can’t promise a sure-fire “Phantom” experience, the arcane but intellectually challenging exhibit?

Or, now that the Orange County Performing Arts Center is 10 and its patrons have seen some of the world’s most famous troupes, are those patrons interested in nothing but the biggest and the most famous?

Of late, the answer has leaned toward the latter. Many officials agree that the phenomenon is only a temporary sign of the times, although some aren’t so sure.

“I think the arts still have a long way to go in Orange County to really build a real secure base,” said Louis G. Spisto, executive director of the Pacific Symphony. “We have more work to do in terms of [soliciting] annual giving and in securing a stable base of subscribers who are going to be with [us] regardless of whether [we] are producing the blockbuster event.

“We can sell James Taylor and Yo-Yo Ma, and Opera Pacific can sell ‘Carmen.’ The trick is going to be: Can we sell the ongoing Beethoven and Schubert concerts with the fine artists who may not be the household names?” Spisto said. “I see more and more a trend toward the super-performance. To me, that’s the issue for 1996 and beyond.”

Martin Benson, SCR’s artistic director, attributes the current appeal of the tried and true to a pervasive feeling of “uncertainty out there at the moment.”

Benson said that people are wondering, “Will we have Medicare, or not? How much will it be reduced, where is the nation going politically, where is the economy going? There are just too many variables.”

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This state of flux, abetted by the county bankruptcy, has led audiences to buy tickets to “things they can anchor to” psychically, Benson said, noting that SCR’s production of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchid” didn’t sell out the way “Blithe Spirit” did.

“People are not looking for ambiguity, mystery, confusion, things that are trying to deal with the complexities of the human condition. . . . I think people . . . will spend money to see ‘Phantom’ because they almost certainly know what the experience is going to be. But a new play, a bit of modern music, they’ll say, ‘No, no, we want a sure thing.’ ”

Joe Felz, director of Fullerton Museum Center, adds that offerings such as the museum center’s “From Dancing Goats to Voltaire’s Notes,” an exhibition about coffee, may draw bigger crowds because recognizable themes are easier to market.

Still, Felz agreed with Benson. “People are looking for things that are safer, just more accessible,” he said.

Said center president Tom Tomlinson: “With feel-good, get-happy performances, we are seeing no change in ticket-buying patterns. But with the more thoughtful performances, people are buying tickets much later, waiting for reviews or word-of-mouth from their friends.”

Lots of people, however, never bought tickets to San Francisco Ballet’s mixed-bill programs last month. The crowd--39% of capacity--set a new low for paid attendance for a center dance engagement. But, Tomlinson says, that is a sign of success, in a way.

In the center’s early years, attendance of dance events was consistently high because audiences had never seen many of the big-name touring troupes, such as the Kirov Ballet, Tomlinson said. Now, having seen many of those troupes, some more than once, they are more discriminating.

Audiences, he said, “have begun to be sophisticated enough to care about what they see.”

But more education must be done to build interest in less familiar programming, such as work by living choreographers, Tomlinson acknowledged.

The center wants to undertake this kind of education and agrees with his colleagues who say that the current feel-good phenomenon isn’t permanent, but part of a cyclical pattern.

“It’s going to take a while for people to feel on a more stable ground and take financial as well as intellectual or emotional risks when they walk into a theater,” he said. “But while we have had some questionable attendance numbers, we are not pulling back from doing [less-traditional] work.”

For April, the center has scheduled the Feld Ballet/NY, a small, idiosyncratic troupe without a single story ballet in its repertory, and hopes to book the Nederlans Dans Theatre again, Tomlinson said, this year or next.

Similarly, Opera Pacific in March will stage the West Coast premiere of “Regina,” Marc Blitzstein’s adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s play “The Little Foxes.”

It’s nontraditional if only because it’s an American opera sung in English and certainly comes without the built-in popularity of such bankable favorites as “The Magic Flute” and “Madama Butterfly,” which Opera Pacific sold out last year.

Opera Pacific Executive Director David DiChiera said he hasn’t noticed a recent return to the familiar, because opera buffs have always liked seeing the warhorses.

“They fall in love with the music,” he said, “so it’s something they constantly want to reinvest themselves with.”

Still, DiChiera doesn’t want to deliver only operatic Top 40, even if he stops short of presenting a Philip Glass concoction.

“I’m going into a cycle where one year I’ll always do something which is very unknown or lesser-known,” DiChiera said, “then in the following year do something that’s far better-known.”

SCR’s Benson likewise doesn’t believe that the county can’t support the sort of arts audience that hungers for something more than bonbons. Besides, he says the current mind-set isn’t exclusive to the county.

“I’ve talked to other [theater producers], in Louisville,” who are experiencing the same thing, he said. “And in New York, on Broadway, they are all big, epic, splash shows. The show taking the town by storm now is [director] David Warren’s production of ‘Holiday,’ ” a revival of the 70-year-old Philip Barry comedy about the small problems of the very rich.