O.C. Venue Open Again for Concerts

The concert theater that went out with a whimper two years ago returned Saturday night--not exactly with a bang, but with new managers who are confident the venue will have its share of bang-up evenings at the box office while attracting a steady stream of high-profile pop and rock talent.

The Freedman Forum Concert Theatre is the new incarnation of the Celebrity Theatre, which expired early in 1994 when its former operators fell into bankruptcy and lost their lease. The revived theater in Anaheim’s downtown district opened with a concert by the young pop-R & B divas Faith and Monica, who played to 810 fans. That was less than a third of the 2,500 capacity, but the in-the-round theater had been scaled down to a half-house configuration, a set-up that its operators say they intend to use frequently.

“I’m very pleased,” Bruce A. Kahn, the former Dallas concert club owner who is the Freedman Forum’s president and operating partner, said toward the end of a mellow evening that appeared to present no problems more difficult than a temporarily jammed cash register at the bar in the lobby. “All the systems work; we’ve got it pretty well together. I think everybody enjoyed the show.”

Kahn and his financial backer, lawyer Blaine Greenberg of Los Angeles, aim to stage 100 or more concerts annually; Greenberg said the Freedman Forum will pay more than $300,000 a year in rent to its landlord, the Leo Freedman Foundation, a charity that is a major supporter of arts organizations in Orange County.

Greenberg said the Freedman Forum now controls parking revenue at the theater ($5 per vehicle, $10 for preferred spaces), an advantage he said former operator Edward J. Haddad lacked. Kahn said two other cash generators--the theater’s snack concessions and bar operations--will be run far more efficiently than under the old regime.

But the key to the Freedman Forum’s success will be its ability to book acts that lots of people want to see. To that end, the new operators--who style themselves as experts on venue management but not on concert promotion--have formed an alliance with the House of Blues, the hot concert club in West Hollywood.

Kevin Morrow, talent buyer for the House of Blues, is overseeing bookings and promotion at the Freedman Forum. As he sat in the theater’s cocktail lounge before the show, Morrow set a somewhat more modest goal than the Freedman’s new operators:

“It will be at least 70 [shows] a year in here. That’s what I’m shooting at. If this place gets hot, I don’t think [100] is so unrealistic.”

The theater’s opening round of bookings covers a wide gamut of pop styles: youth-oriented pop-R & B (Faith and Monica), R & B aimed at an older crowd (Regina Belle and the Whispers, who play Thursday), heavy metal (Motorhead), reggae (Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers), Salsa (Celia Cruz), Latino (Jose Jose), rap (LL Cool J) and country (Johnny Cash). Kenny Rogers, originally booked to open the venue, has had his three-night stand pushed back to July.

Kahn said comedy and alternative rock also will figure in the mix. Stage-side seating will be removed to provide the “pit” that alternative rockers and their fans prefer.

The Freedman Forum is operating with the same sound and lighting system the Celebrity had, and the concert hall remains unchanged, with aisles of orange-colored, well-padded seats rising in a steep slope from a circular stage, allowing for unobstructed sight-lines and an intimate feel.

A major change, however, is being studied: whether to build a permanent stage at one end of the theater, doing away with the in-the-round configuration.

Morrow said that would be a boon to his promotional efforts, even though it would mean reducing the theater’s capacity by 100 to 200 seats.

“I’ve [already] run across seven or eight acts that would have liked to have played [here] but didn’t want to do it in the round. They felt weird about it,” Morrow said. “I would love to see [a fixed, proscenium stage]. It would enable us to get a lot of extra bookings.”

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In whatever configuration, the Freedman Forum fills a gap in the county’s pop infrastructure, which for the past two years has had concert clubs (the Galaxy in Santa Ana and the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano) and gigantic venues (the Pond of Anaheim and Irvine Meadows) but nothing in-between. (The 3,000-seat Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa offers popular music very, very rarely, considering the form somehow less than fully legitimate).

The Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, which opened just as the Celebrity went out of business, sits a few miles over the county line and has partly filled the void. Now well-established, it figures to bid for some country acts and middle-of-the-road pop shows that would also interest the Freedman Forum.

“I don’t know yet” whether the two venues will be hotly competitive, Morrow said. “So far, [Cerritos has posed] no problems.”

“They’re so much different than we are,” Greenberg said, noting that classical music, dance and theater take up much of the Cerritos schedule, while the Freedman Forum is geared strictly toward pop and rock. “There is plenty of room for both of us.”

The Freedman Forum’s arrival poses a definite problem for Orange County’s two established concert nightclubs, the Coach House and the Galaxy, both owned by Gary Folgner.

“They’re going to be going after shows that have been home runs for us for a long time,” said Ken Phebus, concert director for the two clubs. He said acts big enough to play two-night stands or two shows a night at the 480-seat Coach House or the 550-seat Galaxy will consider doing just one show at the Freedman Forum in its scaled-down, 1,250-seat configuration.

“There isn’t much I can do” to stop acts from going to the Freedman to make nearly as much money for half the work, Phebus said, other than to hope long-standing relationships with performers keep them loyal to the Coach House and the Galaxy. “It’s going to be difficult to beat.”

Phebus predicted that the Freedman and Folgner camps will be bidding against each other on two or three acts per month. Morrow thinks the competition will be less intense than that: “I bet you we bump heads on maybe 10 shows a year.”

But Phebus said the Freedman Forum has already drawn away two acts, LL Cool J and Johnny Cash, that he otherwise would have expected to land for the Galaxy or the Coach House.

Faced with new competition, the Coach House and the Galaxy may be able to benefit from a fresh alliance with Goldenvoice, a leading Los Angeles-based promoter of alternative rock shows.

While continuing to book Folgner’s venues, Phebus has also been hired by Goldenvoice to augment bookings at its two club-level venues, the Hollywood Palace, a 1,200-capacity competitor of the 1,000-capacity House of Blues, and the Glass House, a newly opened 800-capacity club in Pomona. The alliance will allow Phebus to match the House of Blues’ ability to offer touring acts dates in both Los Angeles County and Orange County.

“We’re in a war mode,” Phebus said. “We do our best to protect ourselves, and this is one way of doing it. It gives me a chance to flex [competitive muscles] and have some fun.”

Phebus and Morrow both said it is unlikely that the competition will flare into a bidding war for performers’ services, a development that inevitably would drive up ticket prices. Both said they are determined to make economically sensible offers based on an act’s drawing power and a fair ticket price, and to pass if an artist’s financial demands became extravagant.