Santa Monica College is bustling these days. After 10 years of anticipation, a performing arts complex envisioned by actor and SMC alum Dustin Hoffman, artistic director Dale Franzen and a host of artistic advisors is ready to take center stage.
This morning, donors will have their first opportunity to tour the Stage and Second Space theaters (formerly the Madison campus). The complex was designed by Santa Monica architect Renzo Zecchetto, who will be on hand along with Franzen, SMC President Chui L. Tsang and Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky.
"This is unbelievable," Franzen said Monday. "Shortly we'll be opening the doors on a state-of-the-art theater that I dreamed of 10 years ago. The college has been visionary in making this project happen. This is not a typical community college theater. Broadway producers' mouths have dropped open when they've seen it."
The Stage, a 499-seat theater, is scheduled to open in May. The Second Space, a 99-seat black-box theater and rehearsal space, began operations in August and will initiate a free concert series, "Under the Radar," at 7 p.m. Sunday with the Los Angeles Tango Ensemble.
The 70,000-square-foot complex is on the north side of Santa Monica Boulevard between 10th and 11th streets, site of a former elementary school, and cost $45 million. Of that, $40 million was raised through two city bond measures,, and $5 million came from private donors.
In designing the theaters, Zecchetto incorporated an aesthetic and technological "wish list" from a committee that included Hoffman; tenor Placido Domingo; the late Edgar Baitzel, former chief operating officer of L.A. Opera; Ruth Eliel, former executive director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra; Lynn Rosenfeld, vice president of special projects at California Institute of the Arts; and New York producer Ron Kastner.
"What makes the Stage unique is an apparent duality," Zecchetto said. "It's built upon simultaneous intimacy and grandness. It's big and small at the same time."
The design, inspired by the "horseshoe" shape of Italian opera houses, allows eye contact with the actors and musicians onstage from any seat in the house. But the theater, despite its small seating area, has a variable proscenium and, according to SMC officials, a stage larger than UCLA's Royce Hall, which seats 1,833. The Stage will be able to accommodate a full orchestra onstage and a 45-member orchestra in the pit. The acoustician is Chris Jaffe of Santa Monica-based Jaffe Holden Acoustics.
