Troupes Fight to Be Players in Downtown Arts District

The performing arts are on wobbly footing in downtown Santa Ana, creating a challenge for city officials who dream of revitalizing the neighborhood as Orange County’s urban bohemian hub, with arts, entertainment and dining as the main attractions.

The city has spent millions to create a solid foundation for the visual arts as the key to bringing new life to a neighborhood where many buildings had been boarded up and abandoned. But little has been done to foster theaters and concert venues that might complement the galleries and studios. Each of the four small, nonprofit theaters in the neighborhood has been too consumed with its own struggles to establish a unified front to promote downtown as a theater district. One theater has failed and two others are talking about leaving.

“You’ve got a lot of passionate, committed performing arts organizations in Santa Ana. If they had the venue it would explode here,” said Ralph Opacic, executive director of the Orange County High School of the Arts, which is nine blocks northeast of the Artists Village.

Since the mid-1990s, Santa Ana has invested more than $11 million in several cornerstone projects:

* $6.5 million to renovate the 1924-vintage Grand Central Art Center, a complex of galleries and studios that also houses a small theater.

* $350,000 to renovate a former auto repair shop as the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art.

* $1.7 million in seed money to help the acclaimed High School of the Arts establish itself in a downtown high-rise after years as a suburban school in Los Alamitos.

* $450,000 in remodeling costs for a restaurant in the Santora Arts Building, a private restoration project that houses more than 20 galleries and studios.

Santa Ana also has absorbed $3 million in land costs to make possible a new, recently approved private housing development of 86 residence-and-studio lofts. The project, yet to be built, aims to bring arts-oriented, middle-class residents downtown; the city expects eventually to recoup the investment through property taxes on the homes.

Officials say that open houses on the first Saturday evening of each month typically attract 1,000 or more gallery-hoppers to the Artists Village centered at Broadway and Second Street, the nucleus of the downtown arts effort.

But when it comes to the downtown performing arts, there have been no large government investments and none are contemplated.

Don Cribb, the Santa Ana planning commissioner who was the driving conceptualist and cheerleader for the arts-driven renewal, concedes that “everything is in a state of flux” for the performing arts, and that some small companies may not be able to survive downtown.

“When an area is changing and property values are increasing and the dynamics are improving, there’s always a sifting,” he said. “Some things will [take] root better than others. I think everything will be fine.”

Cribb and Jim Gilliam, the city’s arts administrator, say Santa Ana’s strategy all along called for anchoring the downtown arts district with studios, galleries, residences, educational institutions and restaurants.

“Visual arts are front and center; the performing arts are an augmentation, a perfect complement, but they are never going to be the driving force for this community,” Cribb said. “Costa Mesa has already spoken for that” as home to the county’s most prominent stages for classical music and theater, the Orange County Performing Arts Center and South Coast Repertory.

Still, Gilliam said, he is concerned about the prospect of losing one or more of the small theaters in Santa Ana. “To find a new venue downtown is just tough,” he concedes. Meanwhile, he tries to help by scouting suitable spaces for relocating theaters. Gilliam recently got city funding to hire a consultant for 10 hours a month, helping small arts organizations such as the storefront theaters to find grant sources that will “strengthen them in the long run.”

Theater Spaces: To Be or Not to Be

For now, a map of the performing arts landscape in downtown Santa Ana would be dotted with more uncertainties than solid, secure assets.

The Celebrity Dinner Theater, the first professional theater in the area, drew well on its opening weekend in mid-November, but its future is cloudy. It is housed in one of the three theaters in the Santa Ana Performing Arts and Event Center, an attractive, carefully restored, 1930s-vintage Masonic temple. But, contrary to the privately owned center’s name, its managers say they are more interested in hosting lucrative business conferences and social functions than in taking on the box office risks inherent in show business, says general manager Jason Kordas. Nonperformance events are being booked as far ahead as 2003, Kordas said. He has yet to hire an employee to book and promote shows and concerts. “On a regular basis, I’m not sure when that will come through,” Kordas said.

Ray Limon and Joshua Carr, veteran musical theater specialists who produce shows at several Southern California venues, have been hired to mount a two-production trial run at the Celebrity. After that, building owner Michael Harrah, a leading downtown developer, will decide with Kordas whether the 165-seat dinner theater has enough profit potential to keep it going.

Troupes Benefited from a Revitalized Downtown

Musical theater does have an ongoing presence downtown with the Main Street Players, a nonprofit community theater group. Performing in the hall of the First Presbyterian Church, the amateur group offers three shows each season. Carr, its artistic director, says improvements in downtown Santa Ana, long considered a seedy, crime-plagued district before the municipal redevelopment drive kicked in, have helped average attendance grow to more than 100 for each performance.

The Orange County High School of the Arts, an independent public school that selectively chooses students for its curriculum of visual and performing arts, has been forced to go on the road to present its biggest shows. The campus includes a 385-seat Symphony Hall and a 90-seat theater but lacks a large venue. So 20 to 25 of its 60 annual productions are being staged at various far-flung halls in Orange County and Long Beach.

“It’s difficult to build any kind of consistent audience base when you’re using venues all over the county,” said Opacic, also the school’s principal. The solution: buy and demolish a beauty supply store just south of the campus and build a 600-seat theater for plays, dance and opera. But Opacic estimates that is probably three to five years in the future and would require $10 million in private donations.

Since it was abandoned by the Alternative Repertory Theatre 18 months ago, the 73-seat space in the Grand Central Art Center has been underused. However, that should change in the coming year, says Andrea Harris, director of the Cal State Fullerton facility.

Last winter, after it was dark for nine months, the Cal State theater department reopened it for student productions; Harris says other theater groups will be able to use it only with approval from the theater department, which wants to maintain “quality control.” But Harris aims to step up nontheatrical offerings. A monthly jazz series is running and a monthly film series is expected to begin in January.

Attendance for the Cal State shows has jumped this fall, according to Holly Jeanne Sneed, who handles marketing for the student productions. “A lot of people are hesitant to come” because of the lingering image of downtown Santa Ana as a blighted, unsafe area. “We tell them they should try to rediscover it and they’ll be pleasantly surprised--and they are.” Unlike the other small downtown theater companies, whose marketing budgets are meager, Cal State funding enables Sneed to send out 10,000 flyers promoting student shows at the Grand Central theater.

The storefront theaters, lacking the funding and institutional stability of the arts high school and Cal State’s satellite theater, are on their own and feeling unappreciated.

Spike in Rent May Send Rude Guerrilla Packing

The Rude Guerrilla Theater Company has won a strong reputation among critics for artfully staging edgy plays. Artistic director Dave Barton finds it ironic that the improving climate may price Rude Guerrilla’s 50-seat Empire Theater out of the neighborhood. In three years, the monthly rent for the theater has gone from $850 to $1,750, with a further boost to $2,025 due March 1. It is more than the company can afford, Barton says, especially since its guerrilla theater ethic dictates that 10% of any profits go to charity and that ticket prices must be kept low--currently they are $12 to $15. Rude Guerrilla recently decided to tighten its belt by eliminating the $5 stipend it has paid to cast members. Barton said a bigger space is mandatory by the end of 2002.

“These [arts] villages tease you with the idea of cheap rent, you get in there and help make the neighborhood more desirable, and--bang!--the rent goes up,” Barton said. “The people who were the reason the area got cleaned up in the first place have to leave.”

Cribb, the arts district visionary, says Rude Guerrilla’s “experimental, innovative, provocative and challenging” approach is a boon to Santa Ana’s effort to create an urban bohemian alternative to Orange County’s pervasive suburban mall culture. He recently launched the Guerrilla Guild, a group of patrons who will support the theater. Rude Guerrilla also is getting some help from the city’s part-time grant consultant.

The Hunger Artists, feeling squeezed in a 45-seat upstairs theater where loading in scenery is hard labor, asked for city assistance in finding a better place but came up empty, said Mark Palkoner, co-managing director of the 5-year-old company. “They gave us two or three spaces to look at and nothing’s come from it.” The theater is committed to moving as soon as it finds a suitable home. It has bid on suburban warehouse spaces but been turned down, Palkoner said, because the prospective landlords have a bias against businesses that are open at night.

With Synergy in Short Supply, Groups Struggle

The Orange County Crazies comedy troupe also operates downtown, offering a handful of performances each month at the DePietro Performance Center, a 78-seat storefront. Cherie Kerr, the group’s founder and director, says attendance has been disappointing, but she owns the theater and is willing to keep it afloat out of her own pocket. She said time and money are in short supply in all small, volunteer theaters, which are typically run by people who have outside careers and pursue their art as an avocation.

Kerr has forged ties with her across-the-street neighbor, the Orange County High School of the Arts, where she has worked as a part-time teacher. The Celebrity Dinner Theater’s co-producer, Ray Limon, also teaches at the school. But such synergy has been in short supply among downtown Santa Ana’s performing arts groups.

Rude Guerrilla’s Barton recalls just one meeting of the area’s theater leaders in three years to discuss mutual concerns and the prospects for joint promotional efforts. “Nothing came of it. Often we’re too busy doing what we have to do to survive, so we don’t have time to mix with each other.”

Harris, the Grand Central Art Center site director, would like to see a “master schedule” of theater offerings throughout downtown Santa Ana, which could be handed out to the crowds that come to the Grand Central and other galleries during the monthly visual arts open houses. “If we all band together, of course we’ll be stronger and more people will want to come see what’s going on.”

But togetherness might not pay off soon enough for Barton.

“Unless the city can get us something better, we’re history. The company moves.”