Hoping the Show Will Go On

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 a handful of cornerstone projects, including $6.5 million to renovate a 1924 historic building and $1.7 million to help the acclaimed Orange County High School of the Arts move into a downtown high-rise.

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 in 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 conceded.

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 find grant sources that will “strengthen them in the long run.”

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, general manager Jason Kordas said.

Ray Limon and Joshua Carr, veteran musical theater specialists who produce shows at several Southern California venues, have been paid 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.

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, said 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 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,” Opacic said. 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. 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, said Andrea Harris, site 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 aims to step up nontheatrical offerings. A monthly jazz series is running and a monthly film series is expected to begin in January.

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.

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 Empire Theater out of the neighborhood.