The Short, Shaky Life of Lobero

Did the Lobero Stage Company have to die?

The Santa Barbara troupe, which had been promoted as a potentially major-league resident theater, presented only two productions. The board of Lobero Theatre Foundation, the organization that created the company and operates the theater in which it performed, pulled the plug on April 22, three days after the second show, “John Brown’s Body,” opened.

The very next day, when encouraging reviews for “John Brown’s Body” appeared, theater officials attempted to revive plans for the third production, “Fallen Angels,” but the talent had already dispersed to other projects.

Opinions are severely divided on the urgency of the board’s action. Nancy Moore, executive director of the parent Lobero Foundation, estimates that the company would have faced a shortfall of at least $300,000 by the end of its announced four-play season. Company officials themselves projected that the loss would have been between $50,000 and $75,000--and artistic director Peter Hunt claims he could have found donors who would have made up the difference.

Certainly the company’s early attendance projections were too optimistic, and its star power wasn’t as bright as many had expected. Hunt had frequently cast stars in his productions at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts, but those productions were in the summer. The lure of lucrative TV pilots in the spring cut more deeply into his Lobero casting efforts than he had anticipated.

After the season was announced, ticket sales went well for two or three weeks, then virtually stopped, Moore said. Cast announcements were expected to stir up further sales and draw crowds of theatergoers from Los Angeles, but there were no famous names in the first production, “Death Takes a Holiday.” Without star names, box-office projections made no sense, Moore said.

Not that everyone agreed on what a “star” is or which ones were likely to appear. One board member suggested that Andy Williams might want to do a play, Hunt said. Another board member talked about getting Al Pacino and Robert De Niro to appear together, said a company staff member.

One movie and TV star, JoBeth Williams, was rehearsing for the now-aborted “Fallen Angels,” but after it was canceled, she immediately accepted a job on the TV movie “Access Denied.” The next day, she was told that the Lobero might want to do “Fallen Angels” after all--but that the shop where the scenery was being built had already moved on to another project. “They put us on an emotional roller coaster,” Williams said.

Hunt believes the decision to close, made while he was in New York on business, “was premature. . . . Had even two or three days been taken for an assessment, we’d be running happily now.”

Moore acknowledged that the decision not to mount “Fallen Angels” might have been “hasty,” but she said the larger decision to close the company was unavoidable.

Hunt attributed some of the haste to underlying financial problems of the Lobero Foundation: “We were building a house on a shaky foundation, no pun intended,” he said.

Moore acknowledged the foundation has “no endowment, no reserves” and will lose $100,000 in revenue that the Lobero Stage Company would have provided if the season had unfolded as expected. However, in contrast to the debacle that followed the Pasadena Playhouse’s withdrawal from the Lobero in 1994, Moore said the 1,861 Lobero Stage Company subscribers will get their money back for the unstaged shows, unless they choose to donate it.

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A PICKET LINE: Actors’ Equity plans to picket this week’s “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” at Long Beach’s Terrace Theater. Produced by the Troika Organization, it’s the only non-Equity production in the “Broadway by the Beach” series.

According to an Equity statement, Troika’s lower costs are “not passed along to the subscribers. . . . The public should be aware of the mixed bag that they are being offered as though it were all a ‘Broadway’ by the sea. No non-Equity productions of ‘Joseph’ have ever played on Broadway.”

Series officials did not return phone calls by press time.

The Long Beach “Joseph” is not to be confused with the Music Theatre of Southern California’s “Joseph,” currently in San Gabriel. The San Gabriel cast includes eight Equity members.