Los Angeles Theatre Center

Black dance with a British accent: That's Irie!, the eight-member, 2-year-old London company that appeared over the weekend at the Los Angeles Theatre Center as the sole dance attraction in the ongoing UK/LA Festival. The subjects in the five-part Irie! program proved familiar--African roots, the Caribbean heritage, contemporary urban experience.

Ten new plays produced by Latino theater companies from around the United States will have their world premieres in downtown Los Angeles in 2014, in the inaugural installment of a National Latino Theater Festival and Conference that's envisioned as a biennial event. The festival, still in its planning stages, came to light Tuesday when the National Endowment for the Arts announced a round of grants that includes $50,000 to the L.A.-based Latino Theater Company, which will host the gathering at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

Is there life on Spring Street? Los Angeles Theatre Center, the city-owned downtown theater complex, has seldom lived up to its name since its resident company collapsed in 1991. But last week came word that the L.A. premiere of a Stephen Sondheim musical, "Assassins," will be presented at LATC beginning Nov. 22. It will be just one of four shows the Los Angeles Repertory Co. plans to stage at LATC over the coming season.

The Los Angeles Theatre Center, newly renovated and renamed the New LATC, will reopen on Oct. 25 in downtown L.A.'s historic Old Bank district with an inaugural performance event, "The World Stage Festival." The Latino Theater Company, the center's operating entity, is expected to make that announcement today. The festival, which will run through Dec.

Hundreds of supporters of the Los Angeles Theatre Center packed the house Sunday for the final performances of the critically acclaimed but hopelessly insolvent company, as city officials prepared to padlock the unique four-stage complex. After six stormy years in which the innovative company presented nearly 100 works and constantly dodged financial disaster in the pursuit of artistic brilliance, the theater's board of trustees last week decided to ring down the final curtain.

Edit Villarreal calls it "like rising out of the ashes." She was talking about Estela Scarlata's set for Villarreal's play, "My Visits With MGM (My Grandmother Marta)": the burned-out shell of a house, filled with family memories. Long before the recent riots and the torching of the inner city, it was a key image in the playwright's mind.

The Los Angeles City Council voted Wednesday, by a surprisingly lopsided margin of 11-2, to buy Los Angeles Theatre Center. But last minute negotiations yielded a written promise from the LATC production company not to make future requests for any city subsidies for building maintenance, beyond a transitional sum of $750,000 included in the package that passed. The building, at 514 S. Spring St., will cost the city as much as $5.

The press opening Wednesday of Athol Fugard's "My Children! My Africa!" at the Los Angeles Theatre Center marks the third time that this play--and this La Jolla Playhouse production of it--has surfaced in Southern California.

If the cultural scene in Los Angeles is a great, multicultural experiment-in-the-making, then theater is the central laboratory. The experiment requires regular infusions of new blood. That is particularly true in the theater, where high costs and subscription audiences tend to force companies into safe, conservative choices. Yet those same companies know that without young artists with fresh perspectives, they will petrify and the new blood will flow to more lucrative veins.

The Los Angeles Theatre Center, newly renovated and renamed the New LATC, will reopen on Oct. 25 in downtown L.A.'s historic Old Bank district with an inaugural performance event, "The World Stage Festival." The Latino Theater Company, the center's operating entity, is expected to make that announcement today. The festival, which will run through Dec.

The Latino Theater Company has received final approval of a $4-million state grant that will allow it to assume management of the Los Angeles Theatre Center in downtown L.A. City Councilwoman Jan Perry's office, which represents LATC's downtown district, said that the Latino Theater had secured the grant the week of March 1. The funds, from the California Cultural and Historical Endowment Board, will be used for LATC's renovation.

THE Los Angeles City Council voted Wednesday to award the Latino Theater Company a 20-year lease to manage the Los Angeles Theatre Center, the municipally owned complex on Spring Street in downtown L.A. The decision was made as part of a series of measures approved by consent and without debate. However, the issue had been discussed Tuesday at a meeting of the council's Budget and Finance Committee, which voted 4 to 1 to approve a city report recommending the lease.

A city report recommends that a consortium of two Latino arts groups should manage the municipally owned Los Angeles Theatre Center. A proposal from the Latino Theater Company and the Latino Museum of History, Art and Culture was rated higher than one from downtown developer Tom Gilmore and the Will & Company troupe.

THERE'S a simple rule one should always observe in Mexico's vast, unforgiving northern wastelands, says Angel Norzagaray: Move too fast, and you'll dry out and die. So Norzagaray has developed what he calls a "desert aesthetic," a list of artistic guidelines for making theater on the edge of nature's blast furnace. First, do away with inessential action and extraneous dialogue.

The first clue that Sheila Callaghan's "Crumble (Lay Me Down Justin Timberlake)" is onto something new arrives after riding our elevator from the EdgeFest-pummeled Los Angeles Theatre Center lobby to Theater 5. Inside, Shannon Kennedy's skeletal domestic setting is, even by Moving Arts standards, acutely oddball. Then "Crumble" begins, with thematic tableaux of Richard Foreman proportions.

WANTED: anyone who worked at Los Angeles Theatre Center when it had a full-fledged resident company from 1985 to 1991 or anyone who worked at that company's predecessor, Los Angeles Actors' Theatre, between 1975 and 1985. All of the above are invited to an Oct. 1 reunion at the downtown theater complex. They're also invited to submit funny stories about their LATC/LAAT experiences to the party's organizers at www.celebrate-latc.org.

That was a strong, clear bottom line that was drawn in the artistic sands of both the Music Center and the Los Angeles Theatre Center this week. Wednesday morning the City Council voted to take over the Theatre Center's building with a buyout payment of $5.2 million, and a one-time $750,000 subsidy to the resident performance group. Plus a strong message that that was all the company could expect from the city.

The turmoil surrounding the Los Angeles Theatre Center revives the ongoing debate about theater in Los Angeles. There are local and national observers who dispute that L.A. is--or ever could be--a theater town, primarily because of the overweening presence of the film and television industry and the lack of a historic stage culture such as New York's. Yet there are also those who maintain that the L.A. boards have begun to come of age. Is there a vital theater culture here?

The Center Theatre Group, which welcomed a new boss in January, has been quietly polling playgoers on possible new names. But before anyone gets too alarmed or excited or starts campaigning for "Rosebud," CTG marketing director Jim Royce hastens to say "there is nothing imminent. In fact, my life would be hell if this place decided to change its name."

The Spring Street neighborhood around the Los Angeles Theatre Center, in downtown L.A., looks surprisingly springy these days. The area, which remained a dead zone during most of LATC's creative heyday from 1985 to 1991, is bouncing back as more people choose an urban loft life in downtown L.A.