El Portal Ironing Out the Kinks

El Portal Center for the Arts is still “a work in progress,” the building’s architect, Richard McCann, said last week in the wake of the Jan. 14 opening of the main stage at L.A.’s biggest new professional playhouse in 15 years.

In other words, the North Hollywood venue, formerly a movie theater, will probably look and sound better during subsequent shows than it does during its debut show, “Over the River and Through the Woods.”

The sound quality was the biggest complaint heard from audience members so far. In fact, McCann advised that for now, theatergoers might want seats that are ostensibly in the worst location--the back of the side galleries--because the show sounds better there than elsewhere.

This will change, he added, after the installation of “ceiling clouds,” acoustical reflectors that will hang from the side walls adjacent to the stage. “They’re very important to bouncing the sound energy back into the center of the main floor,” he said. A cluster of central speakers for the sound system--supplementing the stage speakers currently in use--should also help, and an infrared system for those who rely on headphones should be ready when the second show, “Rollin’ on the T.O.B.A.,” rolls around in March.

The painting and decoration inside the theater are still only about one-third complete, McCann said. For example, those prominent stage-adjacent walls, which, McCann said, “look rather harsh, like a cartoon,” will take on a more subtle appearance after several glazes are added. Though made of concrete, those walls were designed to look like travertine in the 1926 original, and that look is being restored.

The overall lighting level in the seating area and lobby “is just not there yet,” McCann said. “I sat in the upper part of the left-hand gallery, and I could hardly see the steps,” so theatergoers may want to reconsider his earlier advice about where to sit. Floor-mounted fixtures will brighten the lobby. “In two or three weeks, the look will be much warmer.”

The main-stage auditorium seats about 390 (though wheelchairs, which take extra space, can reduce total capacity to 376), but there is room to add a few seats that could take the capacity up to 399, McCann said. By the standards of mid-size theaters in L.A., 399 is big.

The initial plan for the renovation of El Portal would have included only 199 seats in the largest space. At first, only 99 of those 199 seats would have been used in most of the productions, allowing the theater to keep costs down by paying the token fees of Actors’ Equity’s 99-Seat Theater Plan instead of the weekly wages of an Equity contract. The company would have grown gradually to full use of the 199 seats over the course of five years, according to the original plan.

That plan was abandoned after the 1994 Northridge earthquake. El Portal’s leaders say they realized that the costs for doing a show for 199 would be almost as great as the costs for doing a show for 399, but potential revenues would be only half as much.

Still, by El Portal’s own previous standards (1,400 seats in 1926, later reduced to just under 1,000), 399 is small. Opening weekend produced a few comments about the contrast between the huge stage and the high ceilings--and the capacity of not even 400.

Bear in mind, however, that half of the previous movie palace is taken up by a separate 99-seat black box, slated to open next month and intended to be acoustically sealed off, as well as a spacious lobby that’s also being used as a gallery. And inside the main auditorium, a large control booth takes up space.

Many of these details and the eventual, ambitious level of technical facilities are intended to help bring in extra money by renting out the main stage to movie and TV productions, and possibly renting the black box for use as a recording studio or sound stage, said McCann and El Portal President Robert Caine.

“The plays take top priority,” Caine emphasized. But if a production company rents the building for one week in between shows, “we could get some nice income.”

Meanwhile, the theater attracted a few nonpaying party crashers Sunday--pigeons that flew down from those high ceilings and cooed from the New Jersey rooftops depicted in the play. No, they weren’t imported for atmosphere, said a theater spokeswoman, but they fit right in.