by Rob Kendt
Call it the Disney Hall of L.A. 99-Seaters: The Boston Court
Theatre, now under construction on the site of a former parking lot on Mentor
Avenue in Pasadena, isÑaccording to architect John Sergio FisherÑthe first
99-Seat theatre in the region to be built from scratch as a state-of-the-art
performing arts venue. Fisher should know: He was architect on the only
comparable local spaces, the Falcon Theatre (which would have qualified, except
that it was built with 120 seats), and the Tiffany Theaters, which went up
inside an old movie theatre. He's also responsible for such efforts as the
newish Madrid Theatre in Canoga Park, the renovation of Downtown movie palace
the Orpheum, and the four-theatre complex at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.
He's obviously the go-to guy for L.A. theatre design, which is why Clark
Branson, an independently wealthy raconteur and folk singer formerly associated
with the Venue at the Brewery Arts Complex, picked him to helm the design for
the $5 million project.
On a recent tour of the nearly half-built facility, Fisher showed
off not only the intimate mainstageÑcomplete with trap room, tension grid, and
catwalksÑbut also a recital hall that will use a new German system for raking
the seating at various angles. Shepherding the project and likely to produce
with Branson once the venue is up and running next spring is veteran L.A.
producer/actor Eileen T'Kaye, whom I reached in New York (she was a producer on
the just-closed Elephant Man, and she's setting up Tony
Abatemarco's one-man show Cologne at an Off-Broadway venue). T'Kaye
called Branson a "real patron of arts, especially intimate theatre,"
and noted the scarcity of smaller spaces in the Pasadena area, where Branson
was born and raised. "There are a lot of groups that want to be in
Pasadena, but there aren't the spaces," said T'Kaye. Boston Court isn't
conceived as a rental house, but it will "host" and co-produce as
well as produce.
It's an impressive structure of reddish brick, with
"corballed" walls (good for acoustics) arching up imposingly. Of
course, our impolite question is: With all the money going to outfit the
theatre, couldn't Branson afford to build something outside the 99-seat
rangeÑand thus outside of L.A.'s so-called Equity Waiver plan, which currently
offers actors a whopping $7 minimum per performance? "Knowing Clark, he
will go beyond that," said T'Kaye. "But to build a mid-sized space
and go to [Equity] contractÑthat would multiply the cost of doing this three
times." The tradeoff, she said, is that actors will be able to work in a
space with clean new dressing rooms, state-of-the-art equipment, and an
"environment that will be nurturing." A "soft opening" is
planned for late this year.
¥ The first graduating class of UCLA's Ray Bolger Music Theater
Program is currently knocking Sondheim's Company out of the
park, in a fabulous, all-stops-out production directed by alumni John
Rubinstein. In the years since Bolger's family endowed this conservatory-style
program within UCLA's ecumenical School of Theater, Film, and Television, the
program has attracted such talents as Nancy Dussault, Nick Gunn, and Karen
Morrow, as well as Gary Gardner, who teaches the history of musical theatre.
"We are training students in the showmanship of singing, the acting of the
lyric," said Gardner. "Bolger believed that the actor comes first.
This is not a song-and-dance program; we want to send out a working actor who
is able to do anything." On the evidence of Company, they're
doing the job: The lead, Grant Tyler, is among the most convincingly uncertain
Bobbys I've seen, and the show's JoanneÑthe wizened boozehound who belts out
"The Ladies Who Lunch"Ñis played and sung to a fare-thee-well by Leah
Sprecher, a real find. At last week's opening, which offered a short tribute to
Bolger and speeches from acting program head Mel Shapiro and UCLA Chancellor
Albert Carnesale, it was disconcerting at first to see barely-twentysomethings
performing Sondheim's songs of urbane, jaded marital regret, and enacting
George Furth's witty but very 1970s take on relationships; ultimately I found
the young performers' imaginative leap into material beyond their years quite
moving. Company runs through June 8 at UCLA's MacGowan Hall Little Theater.
¥ The Classical Theatre Lab goes to LondonÑJack London, that is,
in a workshop production of Theft, a little-known political play from
1910 by that old lupine lefty, for eight performances starting next Thursday,
June 13, at Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute. It promises "an ample airing
of London's political sympathies." You've been warned.