Leimert Gets Mid-Size Equity Venue

Tonight will usher in yet another new mid-size professional theater space--and this one is south of the Santa Monica Freeway, in a region that has been relatively untouched by the recent expansion of the mid-size scene elsewhere in Los Angeles County.

The venue for the new enterprise is an existing club, Regency West in Leimert Park. The 161 seats are arranged nightclub-style, with tables at hand for eating and drinking. Producer Adleane Hunter is determined to turn the club into a home for “Louie and Ophelia,” a two-actor romantic comedy that she envisions as an African American version of “Love Letters,” with rotating casts of well-known black actors.

Ted Lange and Vanessa Bell-Calloway kick off the production. At first, it will play only on Sundays--adding matinees to the Sunday evening performances starting next week. But Hunter hopes to expand to Saturdays and maybe Fridays. Because of the relatively few performances per week, the production is on an Actors’ Equity periodic performance contract.

That it’s on any Equity contract at all is noteworthy. Many of the African American productions above the 99-seat level--most of the touring musicals that make up what is called the “urban circuit,” for example--don’t bother with Equity contracts.

“I want to provide more than gas money for the actors,” Hunter said. “There’s a sense of legitimacy when the standards are professional, and the idea is to raise those standards. People with that level of commitment usually have a union connection.”

Hunter and her Black Artists Network Development produced “Blues for an Alabama Sky” in 1998 at Los Angeles Theatre Center--the first L.A.-bred African American production in years to use an Equity contract. With a larger cast and more seats than “Louie and Ophelia,” that venture lost a lot of money.

The show is going on in part because of family connections. Bell-Calloway’s father-in-law, Fred Calloway, co-owns the Regency West. Although Hunter wouldn’t talk about the terms of the deal, she said that the space costs less than most 99-seat venues would. The production had to build its own stage--the existing stage that comics use was too small.

Hunter first produced “Louie and Ophelia,” by Gus Edwards, in 1998 in the 99-seat Theatre 4 at LATC, but the brief run was cut short when the show’s actress left to take a more lucrative job--a problem that often upsets 99-seat productions. Hunter then took a version of the play with Bell-Calloway and Lange to last year’s National Black Theatre Festival in North Carolina.

It was a hit at the festival, and Hunter sought a long-term home for the play in L.A., with the notion of turning it into a “Love Letters”-like phenomenon. She considered the Hudson complex in Hollywood, where she had presented a few concert-style fund-raising readings of the play, but she preferred “something closer to the [African American] community.” She was looking at a smaller space in the back of the Regency West building when she learned of the Bell-Calloway connection. While she hopes to take a production of the play to New York in June, she also wants the production here to continue, with a new set--or sets--of actors playing the parts.

WEDNESDAY MATINEES: The Mark Taper Forum will present one Wednesday matinee of each production in the 2000-2001 season--the first regularly subscribed weekday matinees in the theater’s history.

“Our weekend matinees are our most popular performances,” said Jim Royce, the theater’s marketing and communications director. “We price them as high as Saturday night, and they’re still popular. But a number of seniors do things with their families on weekends. So now we can offer them a weekday matinee at a lower price.”

The new matinees will occur in the last week of each run. As a result, the final Sunday evening performance (but not the final Sunday matinee) is being dropped, to keep the workweek at only eight performances.

GROVE NORTH: Garden Grove’s Grove Theater Center is expanding to the northwest. The Burbank City Council voted last week to grant Grove a five-year lease on the 99-seat Burbank Little Theater in the city’s George Izay Park.

Grove executive director Charles Johanson said the company has agreed to make sure that the theater is used for at least nine productions each year, including three children’s shows. Grove itself plans to produce two of the children’s shows and two of the others, which will leave room for other groups to use the facility as well.

Grove will pay $500 a month in rent. The Burbank venue’s last tenant, the children’s theater company Serendipity Theatre, left in 1998 after a rent dispute, but it was being charged $1,500 a month.

In addition to the Festival Amphitheatre and Gem Theater in Garden Grove, the company operates a summer series at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center Amphitheatre in Fullerton. Burbank officials cited the company’s experience with civic theaters.