A CLOSER LOOK -- The high price of culture

Alex Coolman

The architect’s model of the Balboa Theater is so clean and white it

looks like a wedding cake.

Stare at it for a moment and it begins to look like good things are bound

to happen. A dreamy vision of the theater as a vibrant, living venue

comes to mind, and all that seems necessary to make it happen is a few

committed players and a little community support.

But beyond the good vibes, the theater needs something else before it can

be molded to the shape of an architect’s fantasies.

It needs about $2 million.

Renovations to the space, which looked like they would cost $3.5 million

last October, are now predicted to cost more than $4 million. Behind the

plywood-sheathed facade of the building are a host of design challenges

-- from elevator installation to creating a waterproof foundation -- that

have conspired to swell the project’s bottom line.

If the Balboa Theater’s financial demands are formidable, though, they

are by no means unusual.

Talk to people who work for local performing arts organizations and one

theme recurs in their comments like the groan of a low E on a double

bass.

Money.

They can’t live without it.

And though savvy arts organizations can usually figure out how to

generate funding from one source or another, doing so draws them into a

ticklish problem.

They need to come up with programming decisions that will be palatable to

the donors who bankroll them. But they also need to put together a season

of shows that will be exciting and challenging for their audiences.

Fail to take care of the donors, and they’ll go broke. Fail to excite the

crowds, and they’ll face an even worse fate.

They’ll become irrelevant.

So they try to strike a balance between commerce and art. And that, no

matter how thick the frosting, is rarely a piece of cake.

It might not have been obvious to college students plunking down $12 for

cheap seats to the Stuttgart Ballet at the Orange County Performing Art

Center, but they were costing The Center money.

The ballet is an enormous financial loser, said Jerry Mandel, Center

president. The $68 seats don’t pay for themselves when you weigh them

against the high cost of hiring the company to dance.

“It’s very difficult,” Mandel said. “Except for our Broadway shows,

everything we do here is going to ‘lose money.”’

The Center spends about $30 million annually to put on its productions,

and it expects to fall about $7 million short of that level in ticket

sales.

The balance of the funding has to come from somewhere else.

“Nobody makes it at the ticket booth. That’s only at the movie houses,”

Mandel said. “We have to go out and raise that money through private

donations.”

For Mario Lescot, who recently was forced to give up running The Theatre

District in Costa Mesa because of financial constraints, the fiscal

challenge proved daunting.

Lescot knew how to make an audience happy, but he said taking care of the

dollars and cents was always a struggle.

The theater generated almost all of its income with box office sales, and

that often made it tough to pay the bills.

“Every month it was a pilgrimage to pay the rent,” he said. “If you’re

scared to death about that, it robs you of some of that creativity. So

its tough.

“I guess that’s why I’m an artist,” Lescot said. “I can do a good show,

but I don’t know how to make a buck.”

The Theatre District put on some fairly challenging material. The Henry

James play “The Heiress” graced its stages a few months back, and Lescot

put on Mart Crowley’s overtly gay “Boys in the Band” in 1996.

Lescot said audiences responded well to the material. But he didn’t

schedule plays because he thought he could make a lot of money from them;

he scheduled plays because he thought they were powerful works.

“You’ve got to love it,” he said. “And you can’t be doing it because

you’re saying ‘Ah, this is going to pay the rent in October.”’

At The Center, of course, this is exactly what happens: the money-making

Broadway shows like “Miss Saigon” and “Fame” create a financial cushion

for the German ballet companies and the offbeat jazz singers.

But as pragmatic as this approach sounds, it still relies on subjective

judgments about what’s worth bringing to the stage. “It’s not a science,”

Mandel said. “We’re never 100% sure.”

Moreover, say people in the arts, trying to second-guess the audience is

a good way to put them to sleep.

“An audience doesn’t really know what it wants,” said John DeMain, the

artistic director for Opera Pacific. “They just know what they think they

want.”

DeMain said audiences are reassured by familiar work. In the world of

opera, for example, there are about a dozen shows that are guaranteed to

generate big ticket sales. Put on “Madame Butterfly” or “La Traviata” and

the result is almost certain to be happy crowds and fat coffers.

But these same works, precisely because they are so frequently performed,

grow stultifying with repetition. Over the long run, DeMain thinks, they

can turn people off.

“Giving them what they want is a dangerous thing,” he said. “If we

respond only to market-driven pressure, we’re going to make going to the

opera like going to the Washingtonmonument.”

The people writing the big checks don’t want things to grow dull any more

than programmers do. Roger Kirwan, who is chairman of the board for The

Center and a donor to many arts organizations, said he realizes that

being challenged by some performances is part of the art-going

experience.

“I may not always like what they bring to stage, but I’m always going to

be glad to expand my horizons,” Kirwan said. On the other hand, he said,

his most satisfying nights at the theater or the ballet have less to do

with avant-garde aesthetic theories than with simple, satisfying

entertainment.

“I don’t go to be enraptured. I don’t go to be lifted up to the stars,”

he said. “I just look for an enjoyable evening.”

So the art has to be accessible, but not too accessible. Challenging, but

not too challenging. At the end of the night, the art has to matter to

the people who make the effort to see it, or they won’t be coming back.

For Michele Roberge, executive director of the Balboa Performing Arts

Theatre Foundation, these kinds of questions aren’t just some abstract

consideration. They’re what will determine whether the drive to restore

the theater will succeed or fail.

Roberge said she tries to sell potential donors on “the entire concept”

of the theater, emphasizing what will be different enough and new enough

about it to attract an interested audience.

The theater can offer a unique experience, she said, because at 350 seats

it provides a more intimate environment for plays and performances than

can be found elsewhere.

And hopefully that angle will be compelling to people with deep pockets,

because the theater’s small size also means that its ability to generate

revenue from the box office is limited. Like the ballet and the opera,

the theater will need to drum up money from somewhere else.

“Ticket prices will never cover the costs of doing performances,” Roberge

said. “I’m always going to have my hand out.”