It's grandly hip, so make it a hub

Very late in the game, CalArts wormed its way into the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Once it had become clear that construction would begin after many years of delay and desperate fundraising, the school tossed in a mere $5 million -- less than 2% of the concert hall's budget -- and got a high-profile piece of a spectacular pie. CalArts, which was founded by Walt's brother, Roy, seemed to be trading on the Disney name in buying for a song a possibly inappropriate downtown showcase for its students and faculty.

I was a doubter until I saw the black box space and how it was equipped with a fabulous high-end sound system, along with really great projection and lighting equipment. I figured CalArts must be serious when it hired away Mark Murphy from the highly regarded Seattle alternative space On the Boards. I was encouraged by acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota's clever use of reversible walls. One side is wood to reflect natural sound for acoustic music; the other is absorptive material ideal for the loudspeakers.

Stiffing Patina from the bar/lounge was another excellent move. Inviting Dutton's to hand-select books to sell proved pure inspiration (and the mini-bookstore is still in operation despite the closing of the Brentwood institution). A gallery? But of course. REDCAT (the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) turned out to be a very cool cat.

For its opening five years ago, CalArts commissioned a work, "Voyage," from a Japanese new-media dance and theater troupe called dumb type. Out of pitch blackness came peculiar figures doing peculiar things. Six women and one guy came out as identically dressed office girls. A diminutive female astronaut lip-synced a bass rendition of "Over the Rainbow." I knew then that REDCAT would keep the fat cats in the big hall upstairs from getting complacent.

REDCAT initially promised that the ratio of professional productions to CalArts presentations would be about 3 to 1, and it has kept that promise. The school has imported a wealth of major work we would not likely have otherwise seen, and let us see it in ideal conditions. Peter Sellars' staging of Antonin Artaud's "For an End to the Judgment of God" as an attack on the Iraq war was something no one else in America was daring to do in 2004.