Santa Ana’s Stages Lure Two New Acts

Santa Ana’s drive to remake its downtown as a hub for arts and entertainment is getting a boost with the arrival of a playwrights’ theater to showcase little-known local writers, and a dinner theater that will offer familiar musicals.

The board of New Voices Playwrights Workshop voted this week to take up tenancy at the DePietro Performance Center, a 78-seat house on Main Street that opened in June. A kickoff event on Feb. 25 will feature a collage of scenes from the work of the playwrights circle’s 17 members.

The dinner theater would be the first attraction for the recently opened Santa Ana Performing Arts and Event Center, a restored, 70-year-old Masonic Temple at 5th and Sycamore streets owned by downtown developer Michael F. Harrah. Limon/Carr Productions expects to sign an agreement soon to put on shows, while Harrah’s operation, which includes a catering business and restaurant, would handle meals.

Partner Joshua Carr said Thursday the joint venture is in “the final phase of negotiating. . . . We’re going to make it work.” He expects to open in mid-May with the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, “The Pirates of Penzance.”

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New Voices, previously headquartered at the Costa Mesa Civic Playhouse, had been looking for a downtown location for the past year before settling on the DePietro Center’s Don Cribb Theater. The small auditorium is named for the arts activist who first pushed the idea of revitalizing downtown Santa Ana by way of the arts.

The DePietro, opened last June by Cherie Kerr, leader of the Orange County Crazies comedy troupe, to date has offered sketch comedy nights by the Crazies and occasional jazz concerts and performances by guest comedy acts. It will continue to program its own attractions around a New Voices schedule, which will include monthly readings of new scripts, two of the short-play festivals for which the 4-year-old group has become known, and New Voices’ first two stagings of members’ full-length plays.

The playwrights’ group had considered opening its own downtown storefront theater or refurbishing the basement of the Pacific Symphony, but its board vetoed those options as too expensive. New Voices’ plan now is to use the DePietro Center for at least a year while continuing to raise money for a place of its own.

“It’s a great solution for now,” said Christopher Trela, New Voices’ founder. “I’ve been telling the group that the Artists Village is the place to be.”

Carr said he knows firsthand that the village concept is working. For 12 years he has produced theater downtown as artistic director of the Main Street Players, based in a hall at the First Presbyterian Church at 600 Main St.

“Our audiences at the church have probably increased 50 to 75% the last three years, and a lot of it is because the new Artists Village is down there,” Carr said. “They’ve cleaned up the streets and gotten rid of a lot of tired, distressed buildings. It’s like a little mecca up and coming in Orange County, and I think in a few years, it’s going to be a center for art and entertainment.”