Report Card on State of the Stages

Here’s a glance at the 1997 news from some of the area’s major theater players, organized alphabetically:

1. Ahmanson Theatre. L.A.’s largest subscription audience grew larger in 1997, reversing a decline that began when the series returned to the Ahmanson in 1995, after six years at the Doolittle Theatre. The figures rose from around 34,000 for the 1996-1997 season to 48,425 (and still selling) for the current season, thanks to a chain of hot, imported musicals starting with the current “Rent.” But perhaps a bit of the credit goes to the success of the theater’s least predictable import--Matthew Bourne’s radically different “Swan Lake” last spring. Although Ahmanson subscribers didn’t sign up for a ballet, most of them took to it.

2. East West Players. This 32-year-old group is, finally, poised to make the leap to mid-sized status, but the opening of the first show (“Pacific Overtures”) in its new home at Union Center for the Arts has now been postponed until late February. With so much contributed money going into the building fund, the company went through a financial crunch last year that involved layoffs of the entire staff except for artistic director Tim Dang. It was exacerbated when a promised pledge of $1 million from Malaysian entrepreneur Vinod Sekhar never came through.

3. International City Theatre. This Long Beach troupe became the area’s second extant company--following A Noise Within--to move from sub-100-seat status to the mid-sized level for at least two shows in one season. Shashin Desai’s company presented a season of three shows at the Center Theater of the Long Beach Convention & Entertainment Center, in addition to the ongoing plays at its original 99-seat home at Long Beach City College. During the coming season, the two series will be united into one package.

4. Lobero Stage Company in Santa Barbara. It began the year as the Southland’s newest major company. But only two productions hit the boards before the Lobero Theatre Foundation pulled the plug, citing the possibility of financial disaster. The company’s much-anticipated star vehicles attracted few stars.

5. The Mark Taper Forum. L.A.’s flagship theater continued its search for a Westside outpost that would house two smaller spaces, this year focusing on the Culver Theater in Culver City, under the terms of an exclusive negotiating agreement with the city’s redevelopment agency. Meanwhile, back at headquarters in downtown Los Angeles, the new season is heavily influenced by developmental work done at various Seattle theaters. And the Latino Theatre Initiative has been integrated into the Taper structure, following its period as a grant-supported phenomenon of its own.

6. The Nederlander Organization. Its Broadway/LA series brought back L.A.’s favorite show, “The Phantom of the Opera,” making it the Pantages Theatre’s biggest hit ever. Next year: a new nonmusical series from Broadway/LA.

7. The Pasadena Playhouse. Finally, after five years without an artistic director, this venerable institution hired Sheldon Epps, fresh from an associate artistic director job at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre. Epps is the first nonwhite artistic director at any major Southland theater.

This is especially pertinent in the wake of a flap from earlier in the year when a Pasadena Playhouse spokesman declared that a never-clearly-established number of subscribers refused to renew because they felt the programming was excessively African American. Whatever the attitude of those departed subscribers, the fact remains that Epps may well lead the sometimes-staid playhouse into an era of more adventurous programming.

8. “Ragtime” at the Shubert Theatre. The U.S. premiere of this musical epic won more Ovation nominations and Ovation Awards than any show in the four-year history of competitive Ovations, but its grosses received only a very mild “bump” in the week after the awards were announced. Yet despite declining box office, producer Garth Drabinsky has extended the show into March, which (next month) will make it the first production to be playing in another U.S. city on the same day that it opens on Broadway. Depending on what happens next, this could be a milestone in the decentralization of the commercial theater.

9. South Coast Repertory. Traditionally the least ambitious of the Southland’s major theaters in terms of imports, exports and co-productions, Orange County’s flagship theater became just a bit more ambitious, participating for the first time in the potential profits (if any) from four of its commissioned plays that went on to New York productions, and co-producing the Broadway-bound “Golden Child” with the New York Shakespeare Festival.

10. Theatre LA. Besides handing out Ovation Awards, this support organization began selling half-price same-day tickets at the Beverly Center, and it sponsored the publication of an upbeat report from ARTS Action Research--two consultants who wrote that the quantity and diversity of L.A.’s pro-fessional theater is sufficient to justify the moniker “Theatre City, U.S.A.”