Santa Ana Gives Kids a Hand

Santa Ana, trying to cultivate its downtown as the grass-roots theater and arts hub of Orange County, has begun to nurture two recently transplanted children’s theaters previously based in Orange and Anaheim.

Broadway on Tour and Front Row Center put on shows in which kids dominate on both sides of the footlights: The actors range from elementary school to age 20, and the productions are children’s favorites and family-oriented Broadway musicals.

The two companies are separate but interrelated; Daniel Halkyard founded Broadway on Tour in 1989 and now is artistic director of the year-old Front Row Center troupe. He remains on friendly terms with his original company, occasionally serving as a guest director for Broadway on Tour.

The two theaters recently had a common problem: Their leases were running out--Broadway on Tour is in a former junior high school cafeteria in Orange, and Front Row Center is in a small building in Anaheim.

Santa Ana officials learned of their problem, checked out their shows, and extended an invitation and a welcome.

Now Broadway on Tour is rehearsing for its second production in a 500-seat theater inside the 1924-vintage Ebell Society of Santa Ana Valley building; Front Row Center is gearing up for its first production in the acoustically excellent, 1,575-seat Santa Ana High School Auditorium. Halkyard also is scouting a more intimate venue in the city to accommodate the company’s series of smaller shows for very young children.

The transplantation of the two children’s theaters is a smaller-scale replay of what appears now to be the critical coup in Santa Ana’s arts movement: the luring of the Orange County High School of the Arts to a downtown campus after officials in Los Alamitos failed to embrace the school’s expansion plans.

Halkyard and Laurie Holden, president of Broadway on Tour, say the arts high school’s recent move helped pave their way into Santa Ana.

“If someone wanted me to move there five years ago, I wouldn’t have done it,” Holden said. “This year, with OCHSA moving in, that was it for me. I started driving through town and I realized, ‘This looks a lot different than it did five years ago.’ They have come so far and it’s getting better and better.”

Halkyard said he didn’t even realize an arts-centered attempt to revitalize downtown Santa Ana was going on until the announcement early this year that the arts high school--which enrolls some students who perform with his group and Broadway on Tour--was moving in.

Anaheim officials couldn’t offer any help when Front Row Center’s lease on a 106-seat theater on Anaheim Boulevard ran out, Halkyard said. Santa Ana officials provided the troupe with options for stages, rehearsals, office and storage spaces.

“It’s night and day between the two cities,” he said. “Santa Ana is hungry. Not one negative, not one ‘I don’t think we can do this.’ It’s ‘How can we help you?’ ”

Front Row Center will enjoy rent-free use of the Santa Ana High auditorium for its big shows, starting with the Oct. 27 opening of “Annie Warbucks,” a sequel to “Annie.” “Cheaper By the Dozen” and “Into the Woods” are scheduled to open in December and January, respectively. In exchange for the rent break, Halkyard said, 6,000 Santa Ana public school students will get to see each show for free.

Holden said she picked the well-appointed Ebell theater from among several options city officials showed her. She said she worked out favorable terms with the service club that owns and operates the building; there will be some schedule-juggling involved, because the Ebell hosts other events such as square dances, its own club meetings and wedding receptions.

A nine-show run of “Jack and the Beanstalk” last month was encouraging, Holden said. Average attendance had been 90 to 100 per show at the Orange venue; she expected that to fall substantially because of the move. But by the last two performances at the Ebell building, she said, attendance had hit the 100 mark and the Ebell, a big step up from the theater’s spartan former digs, where audiences sat on plastic folding chairs, was getting raves.

“Our patrons were just delightfully surprised at how beautiful it was inside.”

What’s more, she said, the hall’s “amazing acoustics” enabled the young actors to perform without relying on microphones--an ideal setup, Holden said, for teaching them to project their voices.

Broadway on Tour’s tenancy is on a trial run through the end of the year, said Frances Laster, past president of the Ebell Club, a service organization of 200 members. The next production, running Nov. 11 through Dec. 17, is “Goldilocks and the Christmas Bears.” Holden hopes her company will become the Ebell’s resident theater group for the four shows planned in 2001.

Until now, Santa Ana had lacked children’s theater companies, said Jim Gilliam, the city’s arts coordinator. To help the ventures gain a firm foothold, he is helping both companies target fliers and leaflets to prospective audiences within the city. School officials are putting out the word to arts and music teachers to alert talented kids about opportunities to audition for the two troupes. Halkyard said two of the lead actors in “Annie Warbucks,” a 16-year-old boy and a 10-year-old girl, are Santa Ana students who came to him via the school grapevine.

While targeting a countywide audience, Broadway on Tour and Front Row Center both hope to become ports of entry into the theater for Santa Ana’s large population of immigrant families. Together, the two groups are planning theater workshops and free dress-rehearsal productions for residents who live in the neighborhood near the El Salvador Community Center on Center Street. The two children’s theaters are using the city-run center for their rehearsals, free of charge.

“We realize it’s going to be a process before [the audience] is ethnically balanced, but that’s what theater is about, taking time, getting them involved,” Halkyard said. “I want to make inroads with fairy tales and folklore”--subjects that translate across cultures. “Once the child walks through the threshold, the adult will follow.”