Vanguard’s Search for New Home Puts 2002 Season on Hold

“I’m gonna walk before they make me run,” Keith Richards once sang in a Rolling Stones song. Now the Vanguard Theatre Ensemble knows what he was talking about.

After tonight’s closing performance of Anton Chekhov’s “The Three Sisters,” Orange County’s longest-running storefront theater company is going to walk away from its home in a Fullerton warehouse complex before city officials make it run to the bank.

It could cost $50,000 in production-related electrical repairs and remodeling costs to bring the theater into line with fire and building codes, said Wade Williamson, the Vanguard’s artistic director. Rather than pour that kind of money--which the company doesn’t have--into staying put, the ensemble and its board of directors recently voted to shut down until they can find a new home.

It makes more sense to spend a big sum refurbishing a better-situated space, they decided, than to fix a 78-capacity room whose drawbacks--especially its lack of visibility from the street--had made moving a goal even before pressure came from city inspectors. But the decision means Vanguard’s 2002 season is on hold until the company can find appropriate digs and raise the money to outfit the place.

Williamson said location scouting and a $50,000 fund-raising campaign are underway; Vanguard has not set a timetable, but Williamson said he hopes the theater can transplant itself within six months. The plan is then to pick up where it left off, presenting the five shows already announced for the rest of this year. The goal is to find a new spot within a five-mile radius of the current theater, Williamson said, so Vanguard can maintain its base in north Orange County. Another requirement is proximity to restaurants--an amenity lacking at the current site.

Brian Page, president of Vanguard’s board of directors, said the company has already gotten one donor’s promise of a matching grant of $10,000. He said the shutdown has not jeopardized $20,000 already committed this year by BMC Software, Vanguard’s corporate sponsor. The theater has also been promised 100 seats from the Shubert Theatre in Los Angeles, which is due to be demolished in the fall for redevelopment.

The Vanguard ensemble formed in 1992 and has occupied its current site almost from the beginning. The theater is tucked away in a business park on State College Boulevard.

It can’t be seen from the street, and there is no prominent, well-lighted signage. Even those who have been to the theater repeatedly may have to feel their way to find it, Williamson acknowledged.

An extended hiatus is a drastic measure that poses obvious problems. Regular patrons could get out of the Vanguard habit while the theater hibernates. Williamson said the worst-case scenario would be what befell the now-defunct Alternative Repertory Theater in Santa Ana, which had 18 months of down-time in 1997-98 because of delays in the remodeling of its new home, the downtown Grand Central Art Center. The delay and the change of location contributed to lower attendance and, ultimately, to ART’s disbanding in 2000 after 13 years. Williamson pointed more hopefully to the example of Stages, a storefront theater that successfully relocated in 1999 from Anaheim to Fullerton.

Vanguard’s staple has been the intimate staging of classics by writers such as Shaw, Chekhov and Arthur Miller as well as and works by established contemporary playwrights. This season began with Sam Shepard’s “Fool For Love” and “The Three Sisters.” The decision to move puts a hold on upcoming works by James Elward, Edward Albee, Nicky Silver and Romulus Linney--as well as Vanguard’s first premiere of a new play, “In the Absence of Angels,” by Orange County writer Johnna Adams.

Williamson promises they all will be done once a new home is found. The move may be disruptive, he said, but “it’s what’s needed to help this company be bigger and better and stronger than it is.”

Groves Seem to Be Sprouting All Over

The Grove of Anaheim, by any other name, would smell a lot sweeter to the management of the Grove Theater Center in Garden Grove.

The erstwhile Sun Theater, a 1,200-seat venue for rock concerts, changed its name last December to the Grove of Anaheim after a change of ownership. Now the Garden Grove Grove, which puts on plays in a 172-seat indoor theater and an adjoining 350-capacity outdoor amphitheater, is crying foul.

Phones at the Grove Theater Center are being tied up by callers who want to reach the rock venue, said Charles L. Johanson, the theater’s executive director. What’s more, Johanson fears that, now that tickets for GTC’s spring and summer season are on sale, folks who call 411 for the number will be sent on a wild goose chase to the rock venue’s box office, possibly costing the Grove Theater Center some sales.

The Grove Theater Center has been around since 1994 under Johanson and artistic director Kevin Cochran; a precursor company, Grove Shakespeare, operated the theater before that. When it comes to entertainment venues in Orange County, Johanson says, seniority gives the Garden Grove Grove dibs on “Grove” and the Grove of Anaheim needs a new moniker to remove confusion.

Johanson recently sent a letter to that effect to Stephen Lazar, general manager of the Grove of Anaheim, and to Lazar’s corporate bosses at SMG in Philadelphia. Lazar did not return calls seeking comment.

“We put a lot of time and energy into the name selection,” Johanson said. “We took Grove Theater Center because of Garden Grove and the connotation of a grove as a nice place. There are trees here, and we’re on a nice little Main Street. There’s certainly nothing grove-ish about being across the street from Disneyland.”

Johanson said he found out about the name conflict in January when friends in New York City sent him congratulatory e-mails on having booked comedian Paula Poundstone. Oops, wrong Grove.

He knows the folksy, decidedly non-corporate Garden Grove Grove will be the underdog if this turns into a legal fight. Johanson said his theaters drew no more than 4,000 playgoers last year in Garden Grove and in Fullerton, where the Grove Theater Center operates an outdoor summer series. The Grove of Anaheim can surpass that in a good week.

Its parent corporation, SMG, manages a national network of sports and entertainment facilities, and according to SMG’s Web site, attendance topped 25 million at its venues in 2000.

The Grove Theater Center is appealing to SMG’s sense of fairness, Johanson said. “They’re a huge company. If they decided to lawyer us to death, we don’t have the money [to prevail].”