In Praise of the Peanut Gallery

In L.A., big theaters and entertainment mega-venues are microcosms of our metropolis. They have their Beverly Hills sections, conspicuously high-priced real estate for those who can afford “the best” and don’t mind others knowing it. They have their Silver Lakes and Echo Parks, bohemian enclaves popular with people who fancy themselves true connoisseurs--the balletomanes and opera queens who’ll bend your ear for hours about “sweet spots” in the mezzanine at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

And they have their Tarzanas, block after block of sensible, unpretentious seats that offer pretty good contact with the performers at prices that won’t land you in Bankruptcy Court. Of course, having an obscenely large disposable income never hurts if you’re trying to score a pair of courtside tickets to the Lakers playoff game or a sixth-row, center-aisle pass to “The Lion King” at the Pantages.

But for some discriminating Angelenos, picking the right seat for a hot Broadway show or a must-see dance troupe isn’t only a question of cost. It’s also a matter of taste, habit, snob appeal, reverse-snob appeal, gut instinct and dozens of other subjective factors you won’t find listed on any ticket stub. While every culture hound has his or her price and aesthetic preferences, some people of means would simply rather hang out with the bleacher bums in the upper balcony, while others will settle for nothing less than a box seat fit for the Queen Mum.

“It’s all personal,” says David Barber, chief publicist for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “There are people who love [sitting near] the wall; there are people who love the ceiling....These things are so mysterious. Part of it is anthropology and archeology.”

I decided to play Margaret Mead and explore the seating options at some of the city’s larger theater and concert venues. What interested me, specifically, was how to get the best value for money, the biggest bang for the buck, at a venue large enough to offer a variety of seating prices and locations.

This sounds simpler than it is. Shopping for a cost-effective, prime spot in a 3,000-seat theater or 20,000-seat basketball arena is like shopping for a house: You have to do your homework, and you’ve got to know the neighborhood. Here, then, is one man’s highly selective account of trying to maximize his cultural horizons while minimizing his frustration level and credit card balance.

My quest began on a chilly December night at the new Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, for the American Ballet Theatre’s production of “The Nutcracker.” The 3,300-seat theater, which anchors the west end of the elephantine TrizecHahn retail complex at Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue, had its coming-out party Sunday as the long-term home of the Oscar telecast. The rest of the year it will host events ranging from Barry Manilow concerts to Broadway shows.

My seat, G-47, in the upper balcony, was practically as far as you can get from the stage and still be in Los Angeles County. The familiar strains of Tchaikovsky’s ballet, rising from the orchestra pit, sounded slightly muffled, as if they were coming through a layer of gauze. But the sight lines were clear, there was enough legroom for anyone short of Shaquille O’Neal, and the stage, though steeply inclined, was close enough that I could make out the Sugar Plum Fairies’ expressions as they twirled across the floor. Not bad for a $30 ticket in a venue of such epic proportions.

Since the Kodak opened in the fall, several critics have lamented its deliberately muted acoustics, a concession to Oscar night’s need for pure, modulated sound. Others have issued warnings about the seats in the raised loge area, to the rear of the orchestra and under the first mezzanine--a sonic dead zone in many live theaters. In his review of “The Nutcracker,” Times dance critic Lewis Segal wrote that the “rake,” or incline, of the Kodak’s floor in those sections “from row to row isn’t always generous enough to keep the head in front of you from blocking your view,” unless that head belongs to, say, a kindergartner.

Plunking myself down in various seating sections after the show, I saw Segal’s point: From the rear orchestra and loge areas, the Kodak’s wide, deep proscenium stage--a boon for flying in scenery or spreading out actors and dancers--could pose a neck-craning challenge to spectators.

Later, I met with Ed Murphy, the Kodak’s managing director and previously director of event services at Staples Center. “I’m an arena guy, so I’m very partial to the ‘nosebleeds,’” he said, invoking the vernacular term for upper-tier seating. The design of modern arenas and performance venues tends to be very “cost-driven,” Murphy said. That’s why so many new sports arenas attach so much importance to building skyboxes and luxury suites. It’s also why otherwise state-of-the-art theaters like the Kodak include old-fashioned opera boxes that can be sold off for thousands of dollars.

This new corporate imperative in entertainment venue design can be a mixed blessing, as I’ve discovered during numerous Staples Center outings for concerts and Clippers games. Like the Kodak, Staples is stacked high and tight, affording good views even to upper-tier spectators. Its acoustics are no worse--and, alas, no better--than at other new sports arenas. But with today’s sophisticated sound systems, Imax-size video screens and in-your-face scoreboard pyrotechnics, you don’t have to be sitting in the front row to get a sense of what’s happening on stage or on court. Like it or not, you’re paying for flash and spectacle, not intimacy.

My problem with Staples Center is more a philosophical one: the venue’s obsessive concern with keeping the hoi polloi quarantined from the limousine crowd by means of separate entrances, concessions areas, even bathrooms. This hierarchy is enforced by humorless security personnel constantly on the lookout for scofflaws trying to switch to better seats, even if the home team is losing by 20 points and the arena is barely half full. Unless you’re in one of the corporate suites or your name is Jack Nicholson, Staples can make you feel like a steerage passenger on the Titanic who’s accidentally strayed into first class.

The atmosphere seemed funkier and less Big Brother-ish at the Forum, where my wife and I took in the Aerosmith concert in early January. Though our $40 seats were up in “the gods,” as the British call them, and only half the overhead lights appeared to be working, we didn’t miss a moment of Joe Perry’s ear-splitting blues licks or Steve Tyler’s runway preening. All we avoided by not sitting further down was being crushed by the heavy-metal mob. For head-banging entertainment, give me the Forum’s blue-collar, industrial-strength aura over Staples’ sanitized fussiness any day.

Few venue operators have given more thought to creating an environment for customers of all aesthetic tastes and income levels than Claire Rothman. A former president and general manager of the Forum for 21 years, Rothman also has worked at the Spectrum in Philadelphia. She was chair of the Music Center Operating Company in Los Angeles and is now vice chair of the Music Center. She spent several more years as a Ticketmaster executive.

Sure, Rothman says, just like 747s, big performance venues have different seats to accommodate different budgets. But what do most tourists remember about their trip to Paris--the Eiffel Tower or the airline in-flight meal?

“If you give the person a good-quality piece of entertainment and they can see and they can hear, even if they’re far away, they get caught up in it,” Rothman says. “It’s the act they come to see, not the venue. Nobody comes to an empty house to say, ‘What beautiful covering on these seats!’”

Maybe, I thought, there are no truly bad seats, only bad shows. Both were available at a holiday matinee of the Disney musical “Aida” at the Ahmanson Theatre. “Did you bring any extra oxygen?” a woman behind me asked her male companion as she took her seat in the upper balcony. Nearby, a father jokingly warned his young son not to jump.

Though the Ahmanson’s balcony appears more compact than the Kodak’s, its perspective seems more pinched, its sound quality erratic. Directly in front of me, Marla Gam-Hudson was voicing displeasure with her $20 seats several rows from the front of the balcony, where she said a salesperson told her the seats would be. Gam-Hudson, who teaches theater at Cal State Northridge and also directs plays at theaters around town, had organized a group of about 40 friends and students to see “Aida” that afternoon. “It’s definitely not as clear up here. I’d rather be down there,” she said, indicating the orchestra level.

I had no such problems watching “Fiddler on the Roof” from an equally high altitude at the Wilshire Theatre, the faded but elegant Art Deco monument on the border of Beverly Hills. Seated in the front row of the “back,” or upper, balcony, I had a fine view of Anatevka and could catch Theodore Bikel’s droll inflections on “If I Were a Rich Man.”

The Wilshire is in some ways a strange space, and its rear orchestra seats are to be avoided. The sight lines are OK, but voices there sometimes get flattened into a distant drone, as happened during last fall’s production of “Copenhagen.” But the theater does fine by an old warhorse like “Fiddler,” where half the audience probably walks in knowing the score.

Another of L.A.’s vintage venues, the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood looks and sounds better than ever. After an extensive buffing-up, the Pantages has been packing in the masses for Disney’s blockbuster musical “The Lion King” since September 2000, and the show is booked through the year. The $12 mezzanine seats for “The Lion King” are among the best large-theater bargains in town, which explains why they’re snapped up practically the moment they go on sale. Other “Lion King” ticket prices range from $32 to a whopping $127.

It’s doubtful that spending those extra bucks will get you a better panorama of this sprawling production, with its mesmerizing puppets and frenetic dance numbers. “The Lion King” offers another good value: The “horseshoe” of $32 seats at the rear of the orchestra, some of which are just a row or two behind the $47 section.

The night I attended, Aval Johnson and her daughter Alean Bridges were savoring the view from their $12 mezzanine seats. They’d economized even more by bringing their own refreshments. “[My] sister came last month, and she told us to bring some snacks,” Bridges said. “So we’ve got ginger snaps, wheat crackers and bottled water.” A longtime patron of the Ahmanson and the Shubert, Johnson, who is 4 feet 8, told me she always sits in the mezzanine, “otherwise I’m always looking at someone’s head.” Pondering her advice, I flashed back 20 years to an expensive box seat at the Shubert Theatre in New York, so far to the side that I missed half the chorus in “A Chorus Line.”

It was time to take the L.A. audiophile’s acid test: the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Yes, you can compromise on sound and visual quality when it’s only Aerosmith in a basketball arena. But what subtleties of seat selection might I learn from classical music lovers, those people with ears as finely balanced as a Stradivarius?

The L.A. Phil’s Feb. 21 program looked promisingly strenuous: Bach, Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique” and the Los Angeles premiere of “Offertorium,” a raucously defiant orchestral work by contemporary Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina. Conventional wisdom holds that the front eight or 10 rows of the balcony are the best place to hear classical music because sound rises. Other connoisseurs swear by the first few rows behind the conductor or opposite a favorite section, such as the brass.

Ed Edelist, a 72-year-old Encino resident raised in Cologne, Germany, is among the higher-is-better believers. A piano player, he favors the balcony not only for its superior sound, he says, but also so that he can watch the pianist’s hands at work. “The auditory aspect is important,” he says, “but the visual aspect is very important too.”

Another longtime L.A. Phil subscriber, Richard Engdahl, is a habitue of the first eight rows of the balcony, center section. “And I’d say the least cost-effective would be the orchestra ring, the back of the orchestra, because I think you’re paying more for those seats than many other places in the hall, and the sound is not that good.”

Of course, many of the Chandler’s symphonic pluses and minuses may be passe by the fall of 2003, when the L.A. Phil moves across the street to the new 2,273-seat Walt Disney Concert Hall, leaving Los Angeles Opera as the Chandler’s principal tenant. In the new Frank Gehry-designed hall, patrons will surround the orchestra on all sides, doing away with antiquated proscenium arches and boxes. Theoretically, there shouldn’t be a bad seat in the house.

So does that mean only millionaires and chuckleheads will be shelling out for front-row perches? Ah, so many performances, so many decisions ... so little time. Culture-saturated and beer in hand, it was time to repair to my back porch to contemplate the sublime white noise of the distant Hollywood Freeway.

Reed Johnson is a Times staff writer.