Los Angeles Theatre

Use the link that Richard W posted in April.

Ken, that 1931 photo must have been taken on the opening night. City Lights, indeed!

The auditorium of this great looking theatre is beautiful. Not too large a capacity either for transformation to a full scale programed theatre. My god, i love that auditorium so much. THe side boxes are fantastic.

We were told, when the cast of Manon Lescaut was given a tour of the theater, that the wigs of the French nobility on the curtain were made of real human hair.

You can see an excerpt of the Manon Lescaut on YouTube. Unfortunately, it doesn’t show much of the interior of the theater, but it does give you an idea of what a production looked like on stage (I am on the far left – stage right – as “The Sergeant” – and am barely audible!).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqqMLrFae0I

Beautiful smogless sky over Los Angeles.

There is another batch of interior photos on this page:
http://tinyurl.com/37mq4a

I was in the cast of the opera performance mentioned above â€" I had a small part in Manon Lescaut as “Le sergent” and sang in the chorus. When I auditioned for the company I didn’t know where we would be performing, but was thrilled when I learned that it would be at the fabulous old Los Angeles Theater, since I remembered the theater vividly from my childhood.

In the mid ‘50s, my mother used to take my brother and me downtown from Culver City, and we’d go to a movie at the stunning Los Angeles Theater, and have lunch at Clifton’s Cafeteria across the street (still operating!). I remember seeing “The Robe” and “Demetrius and the Gladiators” there, and being terribly impressed by the over-the-top performances of actor Jay Robinson as Caligula in both movies (I also remember seeing Bette Davis in “The Virgin Queen,” which Jay Robinson was also in â€" more about Mr. Robinson later!).

Much later, in my adulthood, I also met the architect, S. Charles Lee, at a showing of the movie “The Seven Year Itch” at the theater. I was introduced briefly to Mr. Lee, a spry and friendly old man, who was doing what the rest of us were doing, standing just inside the front door, watching the amazed faces of people as they came in and saw the lobby for the first time!

And then, decades later, I was able to perform in the theater myself. The pseudo-French architecture of the theater suited Manon Lescaut perfectly, I think, though the theater was really too large for our purposes. One of the other cast members, Greg Iriarte, was a docent for the L.A. Conservancy, and I imagine that this is how the venue was obtained. Greg would have preferred the Orpheum as a performing venue, and it’s true that the Los Angeles had a very shallow stage and inadequate dressing rooms for a cast the size of ours. But I was thrilled to be at the Los Angeles, and it was a gift that it had dressing rooms at all, thanks to the fact that stage performances had taken place between movies in the early years. The dressing rooms had been furnished with modern mirrors and lights, but there were no tables or chairs, so we brought our own. One of the larger rooms, obviously designed for “the star,” had original mouldings and “French” tracework, and it was easy to imagine it as it might have been.

The acoustics of the theater seemed fine to me, and I didn’t feel I had to force at all in my solos (and, of course, we sang unamplified â€" even the spoken dialogue was unamplified), but some people remarked that the men’s voices traveled better than the women’s, so perhaps there was a lack of upper resonance in the theater. Though the place looked shabby in the strong rehearsal lights, in performance, when the auditorium was evocatively lit, the place looked overwhelmingly festive and gorgeous.

At our six performances we had an audience of about 600 people a night, a surprising turnout for an unknown/forgotten opera. However, it was obvious that the theater itself was bringing them in, because when we put on our next production, Verdi’s second opera, Un Giorno di Regno, at the Palace across the street (having lost the use of the Los Angeles Theater for undisclosed reasons), hardly anyone attended its six performances, and the company was forced to cancel the rest of the season. The Palace is the right size for an opera house, in my opinion, being about the size of a normal European opera house, e.g. the Stuttgart Opera, and it has better acoustics than the Los Angeles. But the Palace has nothing of that latter theater’s magnificence and glamour, faded though it may be.

Back to actor Jay Robinson: Southern California suffered some severe storms earlier in 2006, and the basement of the Los Angeles Theater was flooded, ruining the parquet flooring in the downstairs ballroom, and causing a dank, musty smell. During those same storms, out in the San Fernando Valley a tree fell on the parked car of a friend of mine. The tree happened to be on the property of Jay Robinson in Sherman Oaks (on Milbank at Woodman) near where I live, and because of this unfortunate circumstance, I got to meet him during the period of my performances of the Los Angeles Theater, where a half century before I had seen his (filmed) performances that had so impressed me. In fact, I found out his birthday on the internet, and took a card over to him and got invited in for a nice chat and a look at his movie and stage memorabilia. This icon from my childhood has lived a block away from me for the last 30 years! I felt that my experience with the Los Angeles Theater had gone full circle.

Rickard Roudebush

This theater is a real beauty. I remember driving by it a couple years back when I was in LA. I had no idea it was so beautiful inside though!!

It’s behind the float.

Here is a 1951 photo showing the marquee from the USC Archive:
http://snipurl.com/vsw2

We had tickets to the “Rebel Without a Cause” show, but missed it due to another committment. Yesterday, though, we took the Conservancy walking tour, and were lucky enough to get inside the Los Angeles. We happened to be there when the door was open, and our docent quickly spirited us inside! She says that it is difficult to get access to this theatre, so we felt very very lucky.

Because we were “sneaking” in, we didn’t get to explore it at our leisure like Mike did above, but, boy, what we saw was fantastic. The lobby takes your breath away! It’s like Versaillles! We could see the bare brick stage wall through passageways beneath the grand stairway with the fountain, and it was lit, so we went in there. The cleaning crew was vacuuming, and let us look around undisturbed. The decor was magnificent. I only wish my photos of it came out! The front of the stage has little footlight shades along the front that look like shells. I was so busy looking that I didn’t sit in the seats, but my fellow tourists said they were comfortable – I believe they are the original seats. The ceiling has a beautiful dome painted with murals.

We went down to the basement, where there is an incredible oval space, wood-floored, like a ballroom. Then off that was the ladies' room, which is incredible. There is a mirrored ladies' lounge, very opulent, The stalls lead off that; they are completely enclosed, floor-to-ceiling walls, not booths; each with its own detailed door. The room with the sink was tiled – I got a photo I will try to post. The most amazing thing was the downstairs nursery, with painted walls and ceiling designed to evoke a circus tent; the walls were decorated with murals of circus dancers and carousels and animals like monkeys, parrots, and peacocks.

We had to hustle out — there was a general sense of urgency to avoid being locked in by the roll gates. But it felt like a real stroke of luck to get inside.

The tour was definately worth taking; I want to take it again. I advise anyone taking the tour to bring a good flashlight with new batteries, and if you can figure out how to take photos in low light, please do so. We also saw the Arcade, the Cameo, the Million Dollar, the Warner and the Orpheum. We came tantalizingly close to sneaking into the Palace, too! Will update those theatre pages.

Hi Joe,

I was able to get a seat in the third row. The seats were sold by section rather than by aisle and number. Being close to the stage, the acoustics were great. I tried moving further back after the intermission (just so I could have a better view of the auditorium), but had a hard time understanding the spoken dialogue (the dialogue in this opera was simply spoken rather than being sung as recitative), so I moved up to the 5th row. There were plenty of people sitting further back, so the problem may have been mine more than the acoustics. The second balcony was not open, and the staircases were too closely watched for me to sneak up during the performance. I also noticed the stumps of what must have at one time been drinking fountains near the bases of each staircase up to the 1st balcony.