Stage right?

Sunday, October 01, 2006
BOB HICKS
The Oregonian

"It's a nutty, nutty, nutty time," Chris Coleman says with a jagged little smile.

No kidding. Coleman, artistic director of Portland's biggest theater company, Portland Center Stage, is in the midst of whipping together a grand-scale "West Side Story," one of the biggest shows the company's done since it debuted in 1988.

And that's the easy part.

The tough part -- the part that dwarfs any single show, even an American masterwork like "West Side Story" -- is pulling back the curtain on the theater itself.

When "West Side Story" has its official opening night on Friday, it will also mark the opening of the $36.1 million Bob and Diana Gerding Theater at the Armory, Center Stage's new home, which has been plopped inside the gutted shell of the 1891 Armory building in the Pearl District. Hundreds of people are expected to traipse through the old-new building today for a series of getting-to-know-you events.

The unveiling of the eco-savvy Gerding is the biggest real-estate event to hit the city's performance scene since the opening in 1987 of the Portland Center for the Performing Arts' Newmark and Dolores Winningstad theaters -- the two major halls in the building that Center Stage is abandoning to move uptown. On the city's larger cultural map, the birth of the Gerding rivals the Portland Art Museum's $45 million expansion last year into its north-wing Mark Building.

It's a moment Coleman has been looking forward to since he arrived at Center Stage from Atlanta six years ago. And it's certainly one of the most significant steps a Portland theater company has ever taken.

"I tip my hat to him," Portland Opera's general director Christopher Mattaliano says of Coleman. "It's cause for celebration. There always are going to be naysayers, but this is terrific for everybody."

Still, moving from the handsome and familiar if artistically frustrating Newmark is a gamble.

Will the price tag (Center Stage is still more than $9 million short of paying the construction bill) put a crimp in the company's ambitions? Will the company's established older audience follow it from the city's traditional downtown into the go-go hustle of the Pearl? Will the move draw in the city's younger, more pop culture-attuned crowd, an audience that so far hasn't given mainstream theater much of a whirl?

The move raises several other large questions:

Why quit the Newmark, a space that was meant to transform the city's arts culture when it opened just 19 years ago?

Will Center Stage's exit leave the publicly owned Newmark in the lurch, with no one to fill all those empty dates?

Will the Gerding re-energize the company, as Coleman so fervently hopes?

What does the move mean to a fractured local theater community in an age when the art form itself is fractured, with no clear sense of common goals?

What effect will the new performance hall have on other mainline performance groups, including the city's ballet and opera companies and its symphonic orchestra, each of which has flirted with the notion of moving into its own new performance space?

In a rapidly changing urban area that expects to squeeze in another half-million people by 2025, the answers aren't easy.

"I think it's like the rest of the city," Coleman says. "So much is changing. In 20 years we might look back and know where we were going."

Center Stage's splashy new house

Walk through the Gerding and it's clear this place is meant to be a magnificent theater machine. More than that, it aims to stitch itself into its community in some very Portlandy ways.

It's a great big recycling project, maintaining a striking historic facade even though everything inside is new. It's environmentally friendly, with sophisticated operating systems that might make it the most "green" historical rehab and performing arts facility in the nation.

With features ranging from interactive touch-screens in the lobby to a "sliver park" along one side to public meeting spaces to a cafe, free Wi-Fi, lobby performances and theater classes, it's throwing its doors wide open to the community surrounding it -- which, with Powell's Books a stone's throw one way and Jimmy Mak's jazz club an underhand lob the other, is rapidly turning into a mini-cultural district. The Gerding's lobby will be open from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily, making it, the company hopes, a sort of cultural living room for the city.

The extras, Coleman anticipates, will become part of what makes Center Stage tick as it seeks to fight the graying of the theater audience and realign itself with younger generations. "My hope is not to run off all the mature audiences in Portland, but open our arms," he says. "There's already shifting happening. There's a level of curiosity about what this thing is going to be." All that lobby stuff, he adds, is meant to be "a magnet for all ages, but cooler for young people."

There are other significant advantages. At the Gerding, Center Stage has control of its own space. If a show is selling well, the company can hold it over: Don't be surprised if "West Side Story" tacks another week or more to its run.

In the end, of course, nothing much matters if the performances inside the armory aren't alive and vibrant and pertinent.

The building's twin hearts will be the theaters themselves -- a 599-seat proscenium main stage and a flexible, 200-seat second stage where all sorts of things might happen. The first shows in the two spaces are telling: the classic "West Side Story" in the bigger hall, the intimate and edgy "I Am My Own Wife" in the smaller space.

A lot of theater people expected Coleman to go with a more radical design for the armory's main theater. "I was really surprised that they designed a sort of traditional proscenium stage," says Robyn Williams, executive director of the Portland Center for the Performing Arts, which manages the Newmark.

But the Gerding's main stage appears to be an excellent performing space, big enough to play epic and small enough to play intimate. Its sight lines are good, its seats are comfortable and it has an almost luxurious amount of knee space between rows -- a not insignificant selling point.

"We've been fascinated, charmed, by what's happening in the public spaces," Coleman says. "But for me . . . it's going to be just delightful putting on a show there."

Meanwhile, back at the Newmark

When the New Theatre Building opened next door to the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in 1987, it was following the money, just as the Gerding is following the money into the high-rolling Pearl.

Both the New Theatre, which houses the Newmark and Winningstad Theatres, and the Schnitzer were originally meant to be built near Keller Auditorium on a block donated by the old Evans Products, creating a sort of Lincoln Center complex, the Portland Center for the Performing Arts, near the riverfront.

But business and political leaders felt that downtown had a big gap on Broadway, and that creating a new cultural zone there would revitalize a key economic stretch of downtown.

Economically -- at least for the business district, if not for the underfunded arts groups that paid top dollar in the arts center because it failed to set up an adequate operating fund -- the plan was a smashing success.

Artistically, it was another story. The refurbished rock 'n' roll palace that became the Schnitz has always been an uncomfortable fit for its main tenant, the Oregon Symphony. And the two new theaters proved to be the wrong spaces in the wrong place at the wrong time.

No performance hall is perfect, of course, and many of the most revered performing groups in the country play in halls that aren't ideal for their purposes. But the Newmark and the underused Winnie, a courtyard-style space that's proved economically infeasible for most groups, are problematic in interesting ways.

With two balconies and close to 900 seats, the Newmark is a grandly old-fashioned, Edwardian-style theater, built for an age when acting styles were large and most plays were lavishly produced spectacles. And by and large, the public loves it: The theater is beautifully appointed, and it feels special.

The problem is, even as the hall was being built the American theater was deep into the process of redefining itself as a more intimate, stripped-down art form -- a combination of changing tastes and the economic realities of producing this expensive form of art: Small-cast, basically designed shows are cheaper.

For most theater, the Newmark has always played bigger than it is, and producers have been trying to deal with its challenges since the now independent Center Stage was established as a branch of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Coleman is adamant about the space's shortcomings.

"Everyone who was a finalist for my job said, 'If you want to succeed long-term, you have to find another space,' " he says.

The Newmark, he adds, is "a big space: 880 seats. If you are filling that number of seats on a regular basis, you are usually operating with a $15 million to $20 million annual budget and are in a significantly larger metro area.

"But beyond that: the relationship between actor and audience in the first half of the orchestra level is quite problematic (the stage is too high and the rake of the house too shallow). The overhang from the second balcony makes acoustics quite problematic at the back of the first balcony, and in the second balcony you are pitched so steeply that you're looking at the top of actors' heads."

Center Stage's exit leaves a huge programming gap in the Newmark. Oregon Ballet Theatre and Portland Opera, companies that might be expected to pick up the slack, could indeed end up doing that -- but only a little bit.

"Certainly our Broadway series is starting to test the waters of the Newmark," the opera's Mattaliano says.

But even for chamber operas, he adds, the Newmark probably won't work very often: "I would love nothing more than to run a Mozart opera, say, or a Rossini, in the Newmark. But logistically it's problematic, because the orchestra pit is so small there."

The ballet's artistic director, Christopher Stowell, whose company presents part of its season in the Newmark but most of it in the 3,000-seat Keller Auditorium, echoes Mattaliano. The pit is too small, he says, and the ballet's big hits, such as "Swan Lake," need the seating capacity of the Keller.

"The truth is, we can't really put more of our season there, unless we were to expand our season generally," he says. ". . . There are too few seats. It just doesn't pencil out."

Plenty of other potential users are out there, although no obvious ones that can fill large blocks of time. A lot of classical musicians believe the hall's sound is too dry, but its availability is tempting: The Portland Piano International series, for instance, is moving into the Newmark this season. The hall would work well for midsized pop concerts, and it's a good space for dance, if companies can afford to rent it.

The Newmark may be best suited for musical theater -- and Center Stage has produced a handful of musicals in it, although Coleman says the hall's uneven acoustics make mixing sound for a musical difficult -- but Portland has no musical theater company with the financial resources to move into it.

Surprisingly, Center Stage's departure from the Newmark could be a financial boon for the Portland Center for the Performing Arts, which manages the Newmark, Winningstad, Brunish, Schnitzer and Keller theaters.

"The immediate thing is, we're going to make more money," says the PCPA's Williams.

That's because, as one of the arts center's resident companies (the others are the opera, ballet, symphony, Oregon Children's Theatre and Tears of Joy Theatre), Center Stage got the cheapest rental rate available -- only about a third that charged other not-for-profit groups, and even more of a break over commercial rates.

"We've really heavily subsidized the space for Center Stage," Williams says. "So we knew we wouldn't have a huge amount to make up."

In fact, the Newmark is pulling in much more money. Last season Center Stage paid $47,070 for 188 days of use. For the same time period so far this season the center has contracted only 83 days for the space -- but with rent of $72,120.

In addition, the arts center is adding income by beginning to rent out the small Brunish Theatre, which had been used mostly as rehearsal space for Center Stage.

Williams sees the shift as a chance to throw open the Newmark's doors to a wider variety of uses.

"Just like Center Stage, we have a next chapter for ourselves," she says. "It opens up a lot of possibilities. Can we do stand-ups? Can we do small bands? I think we have an opportunity to re-create the Newmark, and I think that's a good thing." Company at a crossroads

Center Stage's brave new move into the armory comes at a time when the kind of big regional theater company it represents is undergoing an identity crisis. Beginning mostly in the 1960s, cities from Seattle to Minneapolis to Louisville to Baltimore established central professional theater companies, large groups that would uphold the classics and raise performance standards and be the suns around which smaller, thriving satellite theater companies would orbit.

Those groups still exist, and many continue to have loyal and healthy followings. But in an increasingly fractured culture, theater itself has become fractured, and the idea of a central, uniting vision has begun to lose its traction.

More and more, theater communities and much of their audience have begun to the think of the big companies as dinosaurs, irrelevant to what they do on their own stages. In Portland, other, smaller centers of theatrical activity have taken root: Artists Repertory Theatre, with two stages and its eye on a third; CoHo Theatre; the east side's Theater! Theatre!, which houses several groups; Miracle Theatre, Imago, the Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center, the Back Door and others. In addition, suburban cities have begun to grow their own theaters -- some, such as Lake Owego's Lakewood and Tigard's Broadway Rose, quite successful.

Do such groups gain from a healthy Center Stage, even if they pay scant attention to it? What is the place in contemporary American culture for a one-stop shopping center theater? Does this kind of company face the same challenges that newspapers, old-line television networks and even public political debate face -- are they attempts to provide a unified field theory for a culture that doesn't want to be united?

Long-term, the question is pertinent, and it helps explain Coleman's eagerness to reposition Center Stage as something new and exciting in the public's eyes.

The company has asserted its centrality in several ways, notably with its annual JAW/West festival of plays in progress. Coleman has made new plays a focus of what the company does, and the Gerding's smaller studio theater is bound to attract younger, adventurous audiences that have considered Center Stage too staid for their tastes.

But for the Center Stages of the country, designing a season that will appeal to a broad sampling of audiences has become a precarious balancing act. Go too swiftly into experimental waters and you'll lose your vital traditional base. Stick too much to the tried-and-true and you sacrifice your future.

Most large regional companies also see the exploration and reinvigoration of the classics as one of their primary responsibilities, and Center Stage will continue to do that, even if its younger target audience opts to stay home. "West Side Story" will almost certainly be a box-office success, yet a lot of theater people in town have complained that it's a tired old thing, a boring way to kick off the first season in the armory.

Coleman disagrees. "It's such a seminal piece of American drama. It was so groundbreaking," he says. "So much of it is about, 'Where's my place? There's gotta be a place for me, where I'm comfortable, where I'm safe, where I'm with my people.' "

And that, he says, is emblematic for Center Stage as it moves into the armory. "There's gotta be a place that fits us. And that question's been around for 18 years." All across the town

What does the opening of the Armory mean to the city's larger arts culture? It could be just the first of several doors to open -- but don't expect to see the new ones swinging anytime soon.

"There's a lot of performing arts in this town," says the ballet's Stowell. "Ultimately to make things work they're going to have to have homes."

And homes they really want, not homes they're stuck with.

As big-league baseball and football teams have moved away from multipurpose stadiums in recent years and toward stadiums designed for their specific sport (think Seattle's Kingdome, imploded to make space for baseball's Safeco and football's Qwest fields), so have arts groups longed for performing spaces that meet their particular needs. Center Stage's move to the armory could be just the first big real-estate shift among the city's major arts groups.

Money, of course, is a key factor, and with the opera, ballet and symphony all racking up big operating deficits in the past fiscal year, nobody's saying it's a good time to start hitting up donors for more building projects. The general feeling is that the art museum and Center Stage construction projects have tapped the market out for a while.

Still floating around town are the 2002 recommendations of the Keewaydin Group, a national arts consulting firm that first suggested moving Center Stage into the armory. Keewaydin's 10-month study also called for a new 2,000-seat house to be shared by the symphony and opera.

"There was a lot of that study that was incomplete, and there were some assumptions that were inaccurate," PCPA's Williams says.

Nevertheless, the dream -- or one something like it -- remains. Long-term, the symphony still wants its own space. The opera and ballet, art forms that fit together naturally, dream of a new building that's big enough to make sense financially but small enough to let audiences experience the art the way it's meant to look and sound.

And that's why other arts groups hope the Gerding is a hit.

"If they're successful, then maybe five or 10 years from now we can start a conversation about a new opera house -- that state-of-the-art, 1,800-seat opera/ballet house," the opera's Mattaliano says.

If anything kick-starts a new round of building, it could be pressure on the barn that everybody loves to hate, Keller Auditorium. The Keller's big artistic disadvantage -- it's a cavernous hall with 3,000 seats -- is also its big financial attraction to producers: You can sell a lot of tickets there.

"I think we need to have a conversation about the Keller, because they're packed," Williams says. "Just shoulder to shoulder."

That means that groups such as the opera and ballet and even Oregon Children's Theatre, all of which use the Keller as their main home, can't easily expand their programs.

It also means that touring shows -- the "Lion Kings" and "Wickeds" of the world -- often can't get the dates they want or can't play as long as they would otherwise. For the arts center, that is very lucrative business, and producers have been banging at the door, wanting to get in. If the opera and ballet were to move to a new building, Williams believes, the Keller could break into a whole new level of business.

All of which brings the subject back to Center Stage. In a curious way, its success in the armory is vital to every other major performance company in town.

Coleman feels the pressure, and the opportunity.

"We need to do something that raises the hair on people's backs this first season," he says.

And raises the stakes on the future of Portland's performing arts.