Delivering a children’s theater

Beverly Hills would be home to California’s first venue devoted solely to professional children’s theater under a proposal to transform the city’s defunct post office into a cultural center for young people. The project, organized by a group of the community’s business leaders, would place the Los Angeles area in the fold of cities with a new generation of professional children’s theaters.

Organizers are a third of the way toward a $30-million goal to transform the 70-year-old Italianate landmark at 470 N. Canon Drive into a 500-seat theater and conservatory. And, sourc- es say, the biggest multimillion-dollar chunk has been pledged by Jane and Michael Eisner, Disney chairman and chief executive, who instigated the plan to dedicate the facility entirely to children.

Organizers have been tight-lipped about the identity of the lead donors, after whom the theater will be named. Asked to confirm the Eisners’ contribution, executive director Lou Moore said, “That would be sensational,” but he declined further comment.

The move comes at a critical time for arts education as budgets shrink for public-school programs and computers and television claim a substantial share of kids’ leisure time. At the same time, children’s theater, traditionally the stepchild of the professional stage, is maturing to new levels of excellence as evidenced by last month’s Tony nod to the wunderkind of the genre, the Minneapolis-based Children’s Theatre Company, the first such troupe to win the award.

But Beverly Hills fund-raisers are still trying to overcome the genre’s outdated image as the not-ready-for-prime-time understudy to adult productions. “These children’s theaters are not children performing for children,” Moore says. “They are professional theater operations comparable to the Geffen and the Taper, where there are professional directors, actors, designers and playwrights performing shows for young people and their families. So it’s a very high-caliber theater.” The cultural center board, which includes such heavy hitters as philanthropists Caroline Ahmanson and Wallis Annenberg, Playboy Enterprises executive Richard Rosenzweig, City National Bank Chairman Bram Goldsmith and former Beverly Hills Mayor Vicki Reynolds, has brought in top theater architects Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, which renovated Radio City Musical Hall and the New Victory Theater, New York’s first major theater for children. The L.A.- and New York-based firm was hired in March 2002, when the cultural center was being conceived as a venue for both adults and children.

The board switched its focus to kids in May. And although the shift will require only minimal changes to the architectural plans for the theater, such as the addition of a glassed-in “quiet room” with piped-in sound for rambunctious kids, it has breathed new life into fund-raising for the cultural center. The capital campaign has been hobbled by a flagging economy and a merchants’ lawsuit that held up a nearby retail development that would include parking for the cultural center for more than two years.

“We realized there was a real vacuum, not only in Beverly Hills but, frankly, on the west end of the country” south of Seattle, home to the second-oldest children’s theater, Goldsmith says. “As we talked to donors and potential donors, everyone said, ‘Kids, kids, kids.’ That’s all you hear about. There was a major directional change, with our executive committee and board going back to a number of our donors, and everyone was very enthused about it.”

The California Community Foundation, which had already pledged $1 million and plans to give an additional $2 million, heartily approved the new focus, says foundation president Jack Shakely. “It brought it out of a Beverly Hills theater and made it into a regional theater for children that, oh by the way, happens to be located at the Beverly Hills post office,” he says. “It took the geographic specificity and turned it on its head.”

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Children’s fare grows up

Children’s theater has outgrown the pablum of fairy tales and actors in animal suits that was common 40 years ago, when the field was dominated by teachers and social workers. In recent years, offerings by the Minneapolis troupe and Seattle Children’s Theatre have included Jeffrey Hatcher’s “Korczak’s Children,” about Jewish orphans in the Warsaw ghetto; a new play based on a Gabriel Garcia Marquez story; Aristophanes’ “The Birds”; as well as the fanciful “A Year With Frog and Toad,” which went on to Broadway. Such quality fare has enticed top theater professionals. Even David Mamet has written children’s plays, which have been performed by New York’s Atlantic Theater Company.

“You want to enchant, but at the same time you want to challenge, you want to expose, you want them to learn about the uglier side of life -- divorce, death, AIDS, racial issues, peer pressure, things they can talk about with their family and teachers in a safe environment,” says Moore, who was the Geffen Playhouse’s founding managing director and studied children’s theater as an undergraduate at Florida State University.

While quality productions for young Southern Californians are already being mounted at such theaters as South Coast Repertory and the Falcon and through the Mark Taper Forum’s youth program PLAY, center organizers say such programming often takes a back seat to main-stage adult productions.

“It’s usually, ‘We can squeeze in a children’s show at this hour on this stage,’ or ‘We’ll do something on Saturday mornings’ or ‘We’ll take them to the schools,’ all of which is great, but it’s a secondary focus,” Moore says. “This is totally children and their families. This is a legitimate physical theater. We want the children to have the experience of going to a real, professional theater -- it’s not kiddie time -- so that they have the cultural experience of attending theater like adults, so it becomes a part of their lives and they’ll get to experience and learn from professional theater the same way we do.”

The cultural center plans to produce six shows a year that will be mounted for the paying public as well as for students, many of whom have never been exposed to theater, who would be bused in for subsidized performances. The conservatory would offer classes in acting, movement, musical theater, and set and lighting design; it would also offer apprenticeships with professionals. A for-profit summer theater camp would help subsidize discounted tickets and scholarships. The proposal also calls for working with public institutions such as zoos and museums and with an advisory board of educators to plan programming and produce study guides for teachers.

The conservatory would be housed in a two-story, 10,000-square-foot stucco annex that would contain classrooms, rehearsal space and offices. Next door is the 35,000-square-foot main building, an elegant, low-slung rectangle covered with brick veneers and terra cotta carvings designed by Ralph Flewelling.

The 1932 building’s jewel is its arched, whitewashed lobby, which is decorated with Depression-themed murals by Charles Kassler Jr. The artist intended the murals to be inspirational examples of the government helping people in need, and the words “communication, cooperation, enlightenment” are carved into the wall below them.

The cultural center has adopted that motto as its mission, and it’s planning to preserve the murals as part of a conservative renovation that would maintain the integrity of the historical landmark.

“We are taking our inspiration from the original architecture,” says architect Norman Pfeiffer. “The outside of this building is going to give people an expectation of what they might see on the inside. This building should be respected for what it was and why it originated here in the first place.”

The post office, which is one of Beverly Hills’ first civic buildings and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, became available in 1991 when the federal government decided to close underutilized facilities. Reynolds, who was then mayor, proposed to the City Council that Beverly Hills take it over so that it could be used as a cultural center. After grappling with years of federal and local bureaucracy, Beverly Hills bought the facility for $2.25 million in 1997.

“We knew this was a treasure,” Reynolds says, “and we were determined to have these programs as a legacy to the community.” Years of public hearings and feasibility studies ensued, and in 2001, Beverly Hills gave the cultural center’s nonprofit foundation a two-year lease on the building. The city required only $1 a year but stipulated that all the construction money had to be raised before ground was broken so Beverly Hills wouldn’t be stuck with the tab.

When the lease expired in December, the center asked for a two-year extension. The city gave it three. “We gave them an extra year, recognizing that this is a very difficult economic environment to raise money,” says Mayor Thomas Levyn. “And we wanted to encourage this group of volunteers to continue so we could have a first-class product.”