Facets of the Tiffany

It’s 7:30 on a Sunday evening. A performance of the new musical “The Last Session” is underway on the Tiffany Theaters’ 99-seat South Stage, and a revival of the rock musical “The Rocky Horror Show” is about to open its doors at the adjoining 99-seat North Stage. Ticket-holders wait in the lobby, their conversations buzzing in the air.

The theater’s operator, Paula Holt, stands to the side, watching.

“The real reward is watching audiences respond to the work you put on,” she says a few minutes later in her office at the back of the West Hollywood theaters. “The plays that I’ve really loved producing, I watched night after night. Part of me was watching the play; part of me was watching people watching the play.

“It makes up for the hours that you pore over these ridiculous budgets that never make sense and never come out straight.”

A theater neophyte when she opened the Tiffany in 1985, Holt, 56, has become known as one of Los Angeles’ savviest theater operators. With two hits currently under her roof, it’s an exciting time, but also a time of uncertainty.

The building in which Holt rents space for the Tiffany, at 8532 Sunset Blvd., just west of La Cienega, was sold recently to the developers of a massive hotel, shopping and office complex. The Tiffany building will be razed to make way for the Sunset Millennium project, which will occupy three blocks along the south side of Sunset.

Holt is negotiating with the developers in the hope of including a pair of 99-seat theaters in the complex. She’d like to end up on the ground floor of the former Petersen Publishing headquarters, a half block east at the corner of Sunset and La Cienega, which the developers have also purchased. Yet while Holt believes she has a binding agreement with the developers, Mark Siffin, president of project partner Maefield Development Corp., says nothing has been signed.

Though Siffin believes that “theater is always a valuable contribution to any community,” he cautions that his project is a work in progress and he’s taking his cues from many places.

Holt refuses to imagine a future apart from Sunset Millennium and vows to push forward. Meanwhile, she anticipates operating at her present site for two more years, though Siffin says he can’t predict the timetable.

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When Holt opened the Tiffany Theaters, she intended merely to rent them to others. Soon, however, the producing bug bit, and she began pulling together her own shows.

Among her hits have been “Laughing Wild” (1990), starring its playwright, Christopher Durang, and Jean Smart; “Woman in Mind” (1992), starring Helen Mirren; “Marvin’s Room” (1994), starring Mary Steenburgen and Smart; David Mamet’s “Oleanna” (1994), directed by William H. Macy and starring Kyra Sedgwick; and “The Bermuda Avenue Triangle” (1995), starring Bea Arthur.

Holt has produced about 20 of the more than 100 shows presented there, including “Rocky Horror,” a revival of the comic sci-fi musical about the cross-dressing Dr. Frank N. Furter and his bodybuilder of a monster. Outside producers are presenting “The Last Session,” a gospel-tinged pop musical about a singer-songwriter facing AIDS.

Other shows by outside producers include the long-running “Bouncers” and “Nite Club Confidential” (both 1986), as well as “Give ‘Em Hell, Harry” (1992), starring Jason Alexander, and “The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me” (1993), written and performed by David Drake.

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The Tiffany’s glowing marquee is a distinctive part of the Sunset Strip’s nighttime glamour. Inside, the lobby and theaters--designed by John Sergio Fisher, whose other projects include the Los Angeles Theatre Center--are a sleek nightclub-like symphony of blacks and grays. The theaters are fraternal, not identical twins. The South Stage is a traditional proscenium, while the North Stage is a modified thrust, its stage jutting slightly into the audience and its seats curving gently around.

“It’s a prestigious address,” Michael Alden, a producer of “The Last Session,” says, explaining why he and his partners rented the Tiffany. “What Paula Holt has done is allow [going to] 99-seat theater to be an event.”

That was exactly what Holt and her then-husband, Dennis Holt, set out to do when they purchased the Tiffany, a former movie house, in 1983. They reconfigured the facility for live performances and used the rest of the building to house Western International Media Corp., the media placement company that Dennis Holt founded. (The Holts divorced in 1987, but Paula Holt kept a long-term lease on the theater. When Dennis Holt sold the building, he made the introduction between his ex-wife and the developers.)

Paula Holt grew up on Los Angeles’ Westside; her father was radio and television personality Bob Purcell, her mother a homemaker. Holt studied philosophy and pre-law at Sarah Lawrence College and earned a master’s in communication at USC in radio and television production. She worked for a while as a programmer with KHJ-TV in Los Angeles and as a production coordinator at WABC-TV in New York, then, after marrying, read manuscripts for literary managers and agents, co-wrote a Mexican cookbook (“Authentic Mexican Cooking”) and served on the board of her children’s private school. The experience of reading manuscripts and serving on the school’s board turned out to be particularly beneficial, she says, when she decided to run a theater.

One of the worst storms in the Tiffany’s history hit right away. Actors’ Equity Assn., the union for professional stage actors, was then reevaluating its policy of waiving union-scale salaries at theaters with 99 seats or fewer. Feelings were running high among Equity officials, union members and small-theater producers when Holt applied for a waiver, and Equity turned her down because she was carving a larger venue into 99-seat spaces. She took the union to court, where she eventually won her waiver.

Nowadays, the dispute is nearly forgotten. “I have such a good working relationship with Equity,” says Holt. The administrator of Equity’s 99-seat plan, Michael Van Duzer, concurs, calling the union’s relationship with Holt “friendly and professional.”

After renting out the Tiffany for a while, Holt says she started to become “very jealous” of her tenants because they were more closely connected to the reasons she’d wanted to be a part of the theater community in the first place: “a love of story, a love of the art.” She produced her first show, serendipitously called “My Life in Art,” in 1987.

At $130,000, “Rocky Horror” is Holt’s most expensive production yet, with a cast of 11, a band of five, costumes by hot clothier Todd Oldham and a set that is a spaceship-cum-haunted mansion. Holt and three other investors pooled the money, and Holt admits the show will only pay back the investment if she can move into a larger space in Los Angeles or elsewhere.

With Los Angeles awash in 99-seat theaters, theater professionals are looking for ways to increase the number of mid-size houses (100 to 499 seats) in which actors might be better able to earn a living wage. Holt is sympathetic to this effort, but she says the economics are just too daunting for her to consider expanding. It costs roughly $40,000 to $75,000 to stage a show in a 99-seat house, she says, compared to “well into the middle six figures” for a show in a mid-size house.

Largely due to this jump, Holt says that expanding to mid-size isn’t part of her relocation plans. She mulled the possibility with the operators of the nearby mid-size Coronet and Canon theaters but concluded that the area couldn’t support three commercial mid-size theaters.

Holt operates the Tiffany on a yearly budget of about $250,000, which enables her to do “a little better than break even.” She ends up channeling much of the return back into her productions.

As much as Holt loves the work, she dryly observes: “You have to be a little bit nuts to want to do live theater. You find out how badly you want to do something by how many obstacles get put in your face.”

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“The Rocky Horror Show” and “The Last Session,” Tiffany Theaters, 8532 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. “Rocky Horror” plays Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, 8 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays, 8 and 11 p.m. Tickets on sale through April 25. (David Arquette’s final performance is today; Bob Simon, star of a European touring production of the show, begins Thursday.) $25-$55. “The Last Session” plays Thursdays and Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 5 and 9 p.m.; Sundays, 3 and 7 p.m. Ends May 2. $35-$37.50. For both shows, call (310) 289-2999.