Sun’s Director Hopes Theater Attracts Stars

The Beatles sang about fixing a hole where the rain gets in. The Sun Theatre, Orange County’s newest, glitziest pop concert club, aims to fix a perennial, gaping hole in the county’s network of music venues and lure big-name touring acts that often have skipped Orange County because there was no suitably sized place to play.

The Sun, scheduled to open Sept. 2, is a hangar-like, yellow and tan concrete box in a corner of the parking lot at Edison International Field of Anaheim. Having cost its owner, Ogden Entertainment, $15 million to build and equip, the facility previously was Tinseltown Studios, an entertainment novelty that flopped when the public shrugged at a fantasy format in which patrons got to pretend they were stars at an Oscar-like awards ceremony.

Now the stars will be real.

Styx, the 1970s-vintage rock band, will open the Sun, followed by Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd on Sept. 3 and country music star Dwight Yoakam on Sept. 9. The three acts typically play much larger venues than the Sun, which holds 1,200 people for most shows. The capacity is 1,600 if all tables and seats are removed, said Ron Drake, the Sun’s general manager, and 1,014 if there is table seating only, with no standing room.

That’s enough to give the Sun, which offers meals along with music and drinking, a free, virtually unrivaled rein in Orange County to book any acts that figure to draw more than 650 fans and fewer than 10,000.

Sun’s other bookings so far are Ten Years After on Sept. 16, Young Dubliners on Oct. 1 and Robert Palmer on Oct. 3.

“It’s the mid-[sized] venue Orange County has been screaming for,” said Ken Phebus, the Sun’s concert director.

Until last week, Phebus, 52, was concert director for the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano, a position he’d held for 14 years, and its sister club, the Galaxy Concert Theatre in Santa Ana.

With no significant competition in Orange County, the 492-capacity Coach House and the 650-capacity Galaxy, both owned by Gary Folgner, became known as small clubs that occasionally could land big-venue acts such as Miles Davis, Carly Simon, Tom Jones, Little Richard, Beck, Jethro Tull, Willie Nelson and the B-52’s.

Now, Folgner acknowledges, he will be the underdog in bidding for many of those acts, which can sell more tickets at the Sun, or play a single show there rather than two shows at the Coach House or Galaxy.

“The Coach House has enjoyed being the only game in town, and as a result, has gotten acts that maybe should have played larger venues, but there wasn’t another option for that market,” said Chris Goldsmith, an agent for artists including John Lee Hooker and Robert Cray. “There will be more of an opportunity [in Orange County] for artists who couldn’t find a niche in between Los Angeles and San Diego.”

“I see this as a positive for Orange County, from the fans’ standpoint and the artists’,” concurred Jonathan Levine, another agent.

Avoiding Pregame

Traffic Crunches

Phebus was seated Wednesday in the Sun’s show room, which smells of newness and feels like a spacious theater rather than a club.

The ceiling is about 45 feet high; the blue-carpeted floor rises in five tiers along a gentle slope, with no sight-line obstructions between the stage and seats at the club’s long, rectangular, white-clothed tables. The lighting rig seems more suitable to a small arena than a concert club; on the stage, which is four feet high, the Art Deco-ish set for the Tinseltown show had not yet been struck.

Phebus said he will try to fill that room regularly with acts that until now have skipped Orange County because they were too big for the smaller clubs, but not hot enough to play the Arrowhead Pond of Anaheim (average capacity for concerts about 16,000) or 15,400-seat Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre.

In Styx and Skynyrd, the Sun begins with bands whose 1990s tours in Southern California have taken them to the Greek Theatre and the Universal Amphitheatre, both of which seat 6,200, and to two bigger sheds, the Glen Helen Blockbuster Pavilion and Irvine Meadows. Yoakam played four sold-out nights at the Coach House in 1992 but has since skipped Orange County entirely, headlining instead at Universal and Blockbuster.

Phebus said he also will aim for acts of the caliber of Tom Waits, P.J. Harvey and a solo-acoustic Neil Young, who have played at the 2,200-seat Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles.

“An artist like Tom Waits is more likely to play a performing arts center [than a club],” Phebus said. “This is a hip performing arts center.”

For fans, close proximity with big names will not come cheaply: tickets cost $65 for Lynyrd Skynyrd, $52.50 for Yoakam and $50 for Styx--comparable to what the Coach House, the Galaxy, and the county’s leading country-music venue, the Crazy Horse Steak House in Santa Ana, have charged for their biggest-name attractions. Those three established clubs have free parking; Sun Theatre parking costs $5, which rises to $7 on nights when Edison Field has an event.

Drake, the Sun’s general manager, plans to schedule show times to avoid pregame traffic crunches at Edison Field and the nearby Arrowhead Pond of Anaheim. The Sun Theatre, at 2200 E. Katella Ave., has its own entrance apart from entrances for stadium events.

The Sun’s initial bookings figure to draw fans mostly in their 30s and older, but Phebus said he is free to book the full range of shows that went into the Galaxy and Coach House, which included some punk and alternative acts. Phebus is less certain about rap music, saying he has little experience booking it.

He will avoid booking bands that figure to draw a hard-to-control crowd.

“I’ve always been careful about protecting a building,” Phebus said. “This is a super place. I’m not about to damage it for the sake of being cool. I’m too old to be cool, anyway.”

The Sun Theatre figures to get some help on the youth-concert end from an informal alliance with Goldenvoice, the ambitious, Hollywood-based promotion company that has long been identified with Southern California’s alternative rock movement.

Phebus said Goldenvoice will sometimes channel acts to the Sun and share the risk as co-promoter. No other outside bookers will be used, Phebus said--including Nederlander Concerts, which books the nearby Arrowhead Pond of Anaheim for Ogden.

“It seems like a great place to do the stuff we do,” said Moss Jacobs, a Goldenvoice partner whose wife, Angie Diehl-Jacobs, is a concert marketing expert who is helping to launch the Sun Theatre (she even came up with the new venue’s name).

Jacobs cited Ziggy Marley, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and “some of the KROQ-type bands” as examples of the sorts of acts Goldenvoice would try to co-promote at the Sun.

The new venue, however, will not rely exclusively on concerts. Catering large private parties and corporate events is a significant part of its plan.

Expect Eight to 10

Shows in September

Drake said the theater has three full-time employees whose job is to drum up catering business. Currently the venue is hosting one party a week on average, Drake said, but “our potential is a lot more.”

That will create scheduling limitations on the concert end, although Drake said things were flexible enough to reschedule a corporate event to make room for the Yoakam show. Most of December already is booked for parties. Phebus says he doesn’t mind, because he aims to be very selective in booking.

“We don’t want to just put bands in for the cash flow. Scaling this thing down [for bands likely to draw substantially fewer than 1,000 fans] doesn’t make sense for us.”

Phebus said he expects to book eight to 10 shows for September, then step up the concert action to full scale in October and November. But Sun Theatre officials won’t pin themselves down to specific projections or goals.

“I don’t want to put a number on it,” said Tim Ryan, who runs the Pond and oversees the Sun Theatre as executive director of West Coast operations for Ogden Entertainment; among his goals is to work joint-sponsorship deals and marketing and advertising efforts that would benefit the Pond and the Sun Theatre.

“Given this venue’s location and the amenities associated with it, I expect the momentum to build,” Ryan added. “I expect the word of mouth to be extremely strong. I don’t think fans can walk away from a show at the Sun Theatre and not tell somebody it wasn’t the best club they’ve been in in an awful long time.”