Theatre LA: Hmm, Could Be the Ticket

The last year has seen the collapse of two of the three largest companies that handle telephone reservations and credit card ticket sales for many of L.A.’s sub-100-seat theaters. The more recent and dramatic failure--that of Showtixx--has led some producers to call on Theatre LA, the theater support and advocacy organization, to start a nonprofit ticket agency for its members.

“Theatre LA has been very good about acting as a clearinghouse” for producers and theaters that suffered losses in the Showtixx debacle, said Bill Reilly, co-president of Studio City’s Excalibur Theatre, which is owed about $2,000 by Showtixx, according to Reilly’s calculations. “I don’t know why Theatre LA doesn’t offer ticket services for its members.” Companies like his, Reilly said, “are too small potatoes to do credit card sales ourselves.”

Theatre LA executive director Alisa Fishbach said the organization has heard similar requests and is “gathering information, trying to see if we can include that among our services.” However, she cautioned, “it would be a huge undertaking. It’s not something we’re going to leap into. We’d have to establish a telephone room, hire people and find the money. Could we make it work without corporate or government subsidy? There is much information we still need.”

“They should just support us,” responded Michael Pasby, owner of the dominant company in the surviving field, Tickets L.A. (sometimes known as TKTS L.A.). Pasby’s 10-year-old firm currently manages the telephone reservations and credit card services for about 40 productions, employing five workers on the phones, plus two others who handle in-person sales from the box office of the Coast Playhouse in West Hollywood. “I’ve always been open to having more input from Theatre LA.”

Pasby said his firm always pays its clients their box-office receipts (minus the service charges) in a timely manner and that its checks don’t bounce. “There are many subtle little things we’ve learned over the years.”

“We talk to hundreds of people every day,” Pasby said. “We represent the daytime voice of the small theaters.”

Several producers, however, said they don’t use Tickets L.A. because of complaints about rudeness or mistakes on the part of its workers.

“We’ve never hung up on somebody,” Pasby replied. “But customers can be difficult too. We have to be firm--when someone asks if they can show up 10 minutes late, for example. Otherwise, it could be complete chaos.” As for mistakes, “we never overbook,” Pasby said. “Of course sometimes people show up on the wrong night--and it always becomes the ticket agency’s fault, even when it might have been the customer who misunderstood.”

CATES TO DIRECT: Next January, for the first time since the launch of Geffen Playhouse in 1995, the company’s producing director Gilbert Cates will direct a Geffen show.

He’ll stage Donald Margulies’ “Collected Stories,” opening Jan. 20. Until now, “I have not had the time,” Cates said. “When we started, I didn’t realize how much work there would be in terms of theater operating and fund-raising.” At the end of this month, however, Cates is stepping down from one of his other jobs as a UCLA dean.

Which isn’t to say that he’ll quit his other career as a Hollywood director. He’s currently directing a miniseries. And if the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences asks him to again do his usual stint as producer of the Oscars, he’ll segue immediately from “Collected Stories” over to the Oscars.

Before “Collected Stories,” the season will open with Irish writer Martin McDonagh’s “The Cripple of Inishmaan.” The play’s New York premiere, staged earlier this year by American director Jerry Zaks, wasn’t received nearly as well as the concurrent New York staging of McDonagh’s “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” which used the original Dublin cast and director. The Geffen production of “Cripple” won’t use the same personnel as the original, but it will be directed by Irish-born Joe Dowling, a former artistic director of Dublin’s famed Abbey Theatre and now the head of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.

THE LAST SECRETARY: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last secretary is scheduled to see “The Last Tycoon” at the Fountain Theatre on Friday and answer questions from the audience following the performance. Frances Kroll Ring, now 78 and a resident of Beverly Hills, worked for Fitzgerald during the last 20 months of his life, in 1939-40, as he was trying to complete “The Last Tycoon.” She wrote “Against the Currents: As I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald,” a memoir of those 20 months.