Theater Budget

Orange County arts groups will receive thousands of dollars more from the California Arts Council this year, but, in most cases, that doesn't mean the council thinks those groups have improved artistically. The council on Monday voted to award 17 county organizations a total of $435,419, 36.6% more than what 15 groups got last year. All but one got larger subsidies, and four of this year's grants were at least twice as big.

After three decades of perfectly conventional behavior, the city of Thousand Oaks may soon leap into show biz. The glittery world of Hollywood and Broadway may seem impossibly distant from the city bureaucracy's daily routine. After all, how do operatic trills and choreographed frills fit in with the mundane chores of paving roads and treating sewage? But with the Civic Arts Plaza's grand opening just six months away, theater boosters think Thousand Oaks is ready for the big time.

Lyman Saville's son was born just before Saville took his cue on stage at an Old Globe Theatre production 17 years ago. He made his entrance, and a fellow actor marked the event with an impromptu line neatly woven into the dialogue. Saville, 48, no longer finds time to act, but his love of the stage is lavished on San Diego City College drama students. He is director, teacher, costumer, coach, psychologist and designer at the college theater, and has been for more than 20 years.

Leslie Caveny admits that nobody put a gun to her head two years ago and forced her to give up the lucrative TV writing work that had been increasingly coming her way so that she would be able to write a play. No, Caveny says, it was all her doing. "I am probably committing professional suicide," she says, almost hiding her face in laughing embarrassment. "I lost my agent. I'm down to nickels and dimes." Sounds grim, but if Caveny's new comedy, "Impact This!"

Until the Royal Shakespeare Company enlisted John Kane earlier this decade to adapt "The Wizard of Oz," it was a strange phenomenon that one of the best musicals ever written, care of composer Harold Arlen and lyricist-writer E.Y. "Yip" Harburg, wasn't done onstage. (And, no, "The Wiz," that other stage version of the L. Frank Baum classic, is no substitute.) Now "Oz" is regularly onstage, yet you have to wonder whether this constitutes progress.

Noel Coward's "Present Laughter" is the kind of play in which people don't just wear pajamas--they wear silk pajamas. Happily, in director Darlene Hunter-Chaffee's revival at Newport Theatre Arts Center, they're really wearing silk pajamas. For a production on a community-theater scale, the absorption of things Coward is pretty impressive.

Soon, the curtain will rise. Backstage, sopranos' scales slip from dressing rooms and costume matrons fly down corridors on tiptoe, gowns and wigs slung over their shoulders. From the orchestra pit rises the piping of flutes, the saw of strings and the squall of brass. The pre-curtain flurry is a familiar rite in the iconic Bolshoi Theater, commissioned by Catherine the Great in the year of American independence.

The Los Angeles Theatre Center is working energetically to survive in a tough venue--downtown's Spring Street. The theater is both a linchpin of the hoped-for rejuvenation of Spring Street and, when it is doing its best work, a source of rejuvenation for drama in the city as well. Because the theater's survival is so important, the public can only applaud moves by its chief financial "angel," the Community Redevelopment Agency, designed to put the center on firmer footing.

Your money or our life. That's the choice three San Diego theaters have offered theatergoers in the last year. Recession is not the best of time for theaters to raise money. But these companies, all in fragile financial positions, have announced crises requiring extensive infusions of contributed income on which their directors claim hinge their theaters' survival.

Actor Richard Kiley, calling America "an adolescent country" culturally, interested only in "muscle flexing and instant gratification" and "cost-effective" arts, made a dramatic appeal before a House subcommittee Tuesday for support of individual artists.