ENCORE! CELEBRATING 25 YEARS OF THE MUSIC CENTER : TODAY : A DAY IN THE LIFE of the Music Center: Visits with 16 people who have roles in its round-the-clock operations-- from out front to backstage, from music to maintenance, from sales to security

L.A. Times Archives

Sept. 10, 1989 12 AM PT

<i> Reporting on A Day in the Life of the Music Center were Zan Dubin, Lynne Heffley, John Henken, Robert Koehler and Ray Loynd</i>

Most properly and most officially it’s called the Music Center of Los Angeles County . For while it may fill a block of downtown real estate, this complex of buildings and people is as diverse as the county itself. A multifaceted city within a multifaceted county.

Take, for example, one day (and part of a night) at the Music Center. Almost any day. Say a day last spring:

From his Pavilion office, Music Center coordinator Roger Parrell, the liaison between the County and the Music Center Operating Co., scans the day’s schedule: Pavilion--Performance ‘Orpheus,” 8 p.m. Mark Taper Forum--performance, “Stand Up Tragedy,” 8 p.m. Ahmanson Theatre--performance, “Phantom of the Opera,” 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Eldorado--Breakfast Club marketing breakfast (30 people), 7 a.m.-9:30 a.m. Blue Ribbon--Pete Schabarum reception (200 people), 5 p.m.-8 p.m. Founders--Coopers & Lybrand lunch (40 people), 11:30 a.m.-2 p.m. Pavilion Restaurant--11:30 a.m.-2 p.m., 5:30 p.m.-8 p.m. Otto Rothchilds--7:30 a.m.- 11 a.m. Backstage Cafe--11 a.m.-8 p.m.

An arts complex with only artists? Hardly. To maintain its many cultural and social activities, the Music Center operates much like a self-contained city, a city of more than 500 citizens. Here is a glimpse at how this city functions.

SCOTT POLLACK

For glamour and adventure, Scott Pollack has one of the most underrated jobs in the complex. He commands the 17-man security force that ferrets transients out of stairwells, returns lost diamond broaches and keeps groupies from assaulting the Pavilion Artists Entrance.

Only 22 and a captain for Burns International Security Services (contracted by the county), the native New Yorker looks snappy in his starched white shirt with badge. “Most of the work is fairly slow,” he says, “but there are moments.”

During their post-performance lockup of the three theaters, Pollack and his men have found diamond watches, as well as cameras, binoculars, items of clothing and wallets. “Once we found a $6,000 diamond ring,” he says. And once he discovered a homeless couple living in a Pavilion stairwell. The young man and woman had been there two days; the pair had set up bed and lodging.

Last year a burglar broke into the gift shop on the courtyard. But most of the time there is little problem because the grounds are patrolled on a 24-hour basis. (L.A. County Safety Police also provide building security.) A wide-angle video lens sweeps the courtyard with a ubiquitous eye.

Fans often try to con their way through the Grand Street Artists Entrance, says Pollack. “They will say that such and such a performer had left their name at the entrance, and it isn’t their fault if it’s lost.”

PAGE MESSERLY

“Often we are a person’s very first theater experience,” says Page Messerly, box office treasurer for the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. “Sometimes people are intimidated to come to the box office. If we treat them well, they will enjoy theater more.”

This day, Messerly, 30, a UCLA theater-arts graduate who used to design lighting for Equity Waiver productions, is busy on three fronts: taking ticket orders for the July 1 and final performance of “Orpheus of the Underworld,” handling advance sales for the summer Pavilion presentations of “Gypsy” and “Fiddler on the Roof” and doing subscription work for the 1989-90 Music Center Opera season (which just opened with “Tosca”).

Messerly started in the telephone-orders room of the Pavilion four years ago, moved to group sales and took over as box office treasurer last year. Her department numbers 11 full-time staff members.

“Just now I had to explain to a customer at the window that we are not the Ahmanson,” Messerly says. “People often confuse our Pavilion box office with the other theaters.

“Most sales, though, are not over the wicket but through ticket outlets and telephone and mail orders.

“The important thing is communication, learning how to extract information from people quickly. It’s a lot easier when a customer says, ‘I want to see this show on this date and here’s the money I have to spend.’ It comes down to what price people want to spend. Some have to have a seat on the aisle. And one patron, when buying for the Joffrey Ballet, always sits in Row 22, insisting the Joffrey can only be appreciated from Row 22.

“When it comes to opera, we find that word of mouth, not reviews, is particularly important.”

NEAL ALVAREZ

He writes plays on the side and oversees a 130-person usher pool for all three theaters. “I started ushering here in ‘73,” says Neal Alvarez. “It was a job to get me through college.”

Now, as supervisor of all ushers, which include ticket takers and footmen (the uniformly dressed personnel who work the front of the box offices), Alvarez, 35, has a career.

Many current, full-time Music Center employes were once ushers and several, Alvarez says, went on to become L.A. policemen, lawyers and judges. The most famous is actor John Ritter, Music Center usher class of 1969-70.

Dressed in blue blazers or gray blouses and slacks, the ushers this evening were moving through their post-show routines, clearing out the houses, checking to see that restrooms were empty, and clearing with Alvarez the next day’s schedule for a children’s drama festival.

But ushering is not as passive as it may look. Take heart attacks.

Says Alvarez: “People don’t realize it, but some theatergoers are alive today because we’re trained in CPR.”

The night before, at a soiree hosted by California Federal Savings for the opening of the Music Center Opera Company’s “Orpheus in the Underworld,” a patron suffered a seizure and toppled out onto the courtyard in front of the Pavilion. Alvarez and the house manager rushed to his side and called the Music Center registered nurse, Virginia Bidwell, who works full-time in a large first-aid room at the Pavilion. Paramedics were on the scene in less than five minutes. The man was saved, which Alvarez credits to a policy that ushers be Red Cross-trained in CPR.

“Major illnesses are common here,” says Alvarez. “When all three theaters are running, plus the usual tourists and strollers, you can have more than 6,000 people here.”

A graduate of Los Angeles City College and UCLA, Alvarez calls ushers “the Music Center’s unsung heroes because we are the people who represent the Music Center to the public.”

Beginning ushers earn $4.67 an hour, senior ushers, $5.39. Above them come head ushers, house managers, then Alvarez himself.

They are highly motivated, says Alvarez. “The prerequisite is that they have to be students, either high school seniors or in college. They may work 30 hours a week--and they get to see a lot of plays.

Says Alvarez: “There have been 6,000 ushers here since the Center opened. Ushering here is an educational experience, like going to an arts college.”

DON LA PANE

Don La Pane, director of sales for Pavilion Catering, was having a typically crazy day. Not only was he yanked into emergency service as a maitre d’ in the pastry department but--dressed in suit and tie--he had to jump into a catering truck to speed deliveries to an off-the-premises party.

Says La Pane: “This job is crazy but wonderful. Nothing is routine. What we really do in the catering department is run a hotel without sleeping rooms.”

Pavilion Catering, with 200 employees, not only operates all three restaurants--the 200-seat Pavilion dining room, the 175-seat Otto Rothchilds and the 205-seat Back Stage Cafe (including its 175-seat outdoor capacity)--but also handles the assorted banquets, parties and private lunches that daily fill the Music Center culinary schedule.

Catering is a big-budget item here. A post “Orpheus” opening-night party the evening before, for 400 invited guests, cost $25,000.

“A lot of downtown corporations don’t even know there’s food here,” La Pane says. “I sell the Music Center as a destination. We do a lot of off-premise catering. No potential client will talk to you if you say you’re from a catering company, but if you say ‘Music Center’ the reaction is different.”

“Our business is word-of-mouth. And our business is predicated on how successful the theaters are. The ’88 summer was slow. But ‘Phantom of the Opera’ has changed that. The success of ‘Phantom’ has compelled us to bring back brunch at the Pavilion.”

La Pane was checking out decor, theming, flowers and entertaining for a private banquet in the Pavilion’s Grand Ballroom: “Eight hundred man-hours can go into a sit-down dinner. People step into a party and don’t think a thing about the preparation, how much must be done in a short amount of time.”

MIREYA JONES

Mireya Jones strongly attacks the idea that volunteers are socialites with nothing better to do.

“We’re the best-kept secret in Los Angeles,” says Jones, outgoing president of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Affiliates, an umbrella organization for volunteers at the Music Center. The group began working for the Philharmonic Orchestra in 1923 with a handful of volunteers and today has 2,400 members in 22 autonomous committees.

The group is “getting something done--that’s where volunteers want to be. We’re not the tea-and-crumpets broads that (Ernest Fleischmann, Philharmonic executive vice president) expected when he came here from England,” she says.

Typical of the work done by the Affiliates is planning for the Philharmonic Ball, an event last year that raised $130,000. Recently, Jones, incoming president Frances Muir, Philharmonic Ball chairman Joan Riach, Fleischmann and Ann Giesler, coordinator of volunteer activities for the Philharmonic, met to hear progress reports on the next ball--which will be held on the Pavilion stage Dec. 5, the eve of the 25th anniversary of the Music Center. Topics of discussion ranged from Fire Department regulations to table arrangements, from the labor costs of doing fund-raisers at the Music Center to the restrictions on fund raising.

The Music Center regulates the fund-raising activities of the resident groups, primarily to keep them from competing for the same funding sources.

“I’m amazed that it works as well as it does,” Muir says of the fund-raising rules. “There are a lot of egos involved, and a lot of money.”

TONY DOMINGUES

When the Music Center finally goes dark, when the last lingering patron has left Rothchilds, a maintenance crew slips into the shadows with its mops and vacuums. It’s 4 a.m. in the underbelly of the Music Center. In what, to the casual observer, seems the toughest job, a crew of janitors hauls out its cleaning equipment and departs to myriad way stations of grime, dust and trash.

Tony Domingues supervises the 26 janitors. His shift, he explains, is the best time of day to dump the trash, scrub the restrooms, clean the offices and, once a week, steam clean the Plaza courtyard itself.

“Besides our regular work, we have to get ready for special shows, too,” says Domingues. “The 4 a.m. to noon shift is the most common for most of us.”

Like the ushers and guards, Domingues, spots his share of lost baubles, including wallets and a gold fountain pen (found in an elevator).

But nothing in Music Center lost-and-found legend compares with a janitor’s recent discovery at the Pavilion. There, wedged between two seats following a concert by the Philharmonic, was a cashier’s check for $10,000. The check was signed and the payee line had yet to be filled in. The janitor turned it in to Domingues who, in turn, gave it to the security guards in lost and found. The man who had signed the check was able to retrieve it within hours.

JAMES B. DOLAN

The tools of a music librarian’s trade have changed since James B. Dolan joined the Philharmonic the year before the Music Center was built. There are now computer filing systems and on-line data bases, photocopiers and fax machines.

But the basic tasks of proofreading and collating the music that appears on the orchestra’s racks for rehearsal and performance are still done the old-fashioned way--carefully, by personal examination of every bar of every part.

“You have to look at everything,” Dolan says. “You could work 24 hours a day and never get caught up.”

In addition to catching and correcting the errors and putting measure numbers in the parts where the publisher omitted them, Dolan must see to it that bowings and other indications are transferred.

He is not alone in his job. Only the fifth librarian in the Philharmonic’s 70-year history, Dolan is the first to have two assistants--Kazue Asawa McGregor, wife of Philharmonic trumpeter Rob Roy McGregor, and Katherine Dolan, his daughter.

Together, they are responsible for getting the correct music on the stands and, indeed, for obtaining the music in the first place.

A compact man of quiet pride, Dolan has an obvious love for the scores and parts the orchestra does own--many of them first editions. As Toscanini’s librarian during a career that began in Boston in 1934, Dolan himself is a walking library of music lore, and his stories are filled with the likes of Arthur Fiedler, Leonard Bernstein and Ferde Grofe (a violist for the Philharmonic in its first season in 1919).

DAVID RUBINSTEIN

Is there a phantom in the house? Not if David Rubinstein has anything to do with it.

Rubinstein, production stage manager for “Phantom of the Opera,” was roaming the cavernous backstage area at the Ahmanson before a matinee. He was checking on myriad details--from an actor’s tardiness to ensuring that set pieces lowered and raised from the stage didn’t bump into each other.

“It’s really about putting out fires,” he says about his job. “Some days they’re aren’t any, and my crew and I are able to sit down. Then we have those days when there are more fires than we can handle.”

Being a man of the stage (theater graduate of Temple University, veteran stage manager and/or assistant director specializing in musicals ranging from “Les Miserables” to “Peter Pan”), Rubinstein is frankly superstitious. Ask about a particularly tricky technical maneuver and he’ll knock his knuckles on whatever surface is nearby. And doing a show involving a Svengali-like phantom artiste who wreaks havoc to an opera house doesn’t make things any easier, though it does make for much half-nervous joking.

“We’ll mess up,” Rubinstein says, “and somebody will crack that the Phantom’s up to his old tricks again. Rubinstein coordinates four assistants, communicates with crew hands posted from up in the fly to below the stage, keeps a watch on monitors fixed on the conductor, the stage and the huge chandelier set piece, and controls a switchboard for hundreds of automatic and manual cues . . . and he also runs weekly rehearsals for cast understudies and sends daily reports on the performances to “Phantom’s” central New York production office.

NANCY DAVIS

“So you’ll send out the financial statement for the board meeting?” Nancy Davis says into the telephone. “. . . OK, I’ll fax the fund-raising report now.”

Davis is telephoning New York. In fact, she will talk to four people in one office in New York, scanning a “Weekly Minder” date book as she’s transfered from one extension to the next.

The Joffrey Ballet was at home for 27 years in Manhattan’s City Center Theater, until it established a joint residency at the Music Center five years ago. While the now bicoastal troupe performs equally in each metropolis, many of its administrators spend most of their time in New York. That sets up daily obstacles of time and space for Davis, general manager of the Joffrey’s West Coast operations, and her eight-person staff.

“Yes, it is frustrating,” says Davis, squooshed into an office the size of a large closet. She nonetheless has a window with a view of Grand Avenue featuring the Museum of Contemporary Art. “You might not get a call back. You have good days and bad days.”

Davis, a former I. Magnin store manager with a chipper disposition and shiny blonde hair, coordinates Los Angeles activities--fund raisers, patrons, ticket, advertising and publicity agencies, and the company’s board of directors, about half of whose 73 members live in the L. A. area.

It’s not always paper-pushing. When the troupe is in town, Davis says, she and most of her staff watch performances every night. And, their suite of four small offices shares space on the fourth floor of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion with rehearsal rooms--the click-clack of typewriters punctuates muffled sounds of opera singers and orchestras.

Another of Davis’ tasks: arranging a free performance of the “Nutcracker” for 3,000 inner-city kids, made possible by a Joffrey donor. The cost of the gesture, she told the donor by phone, would total about $90,000 if every seat of the Pavilion was bought.

“You always want to be able to meet the needs of the donor,” says Davis. “This particular donor feels strongly about trying to find meaningful activities for inner-city kids. For many, this will be their first exposure to the performing arts. It is gratifying for me to put the right project together with the right donor. Also I have a sense of victory when it all works out and it’s great knowing that the children will benefit.”

JAMES M. FLOYD

A matinee for “Phantom of the Opera” means extra work for James M. Floyd, general manager of the Music Center garage. That’s when he runs an extra 700 to 800 cars.

“When the theaters are going,” says Floyd, “it’s a constant flow. Every hour something new is going on here.”

It’s 1:30 in the afternoon and cars are rumbling through the entrances for a matinee of “Phantom of the Opera.” Floyd is out on Grand Avenue directing traffic for all levels (1,800 spaces). “The trick,” he says, “is to keep all the entrances open and flowing.” Across the Plaza, on Hope Street, others on Floyd’s staff are manning valet parking.

But Floyd’s staff of 45, employed by a contracted firm called 5 Star Parking, has more to do than only work theater parking.

His crew opens the underground garage at 5 a.m. to accommodate city and county employees. Two men work from 11 p.m.-8 a.m. doing nothing but mopping up oil left by leaky engines on the slick garage surfaces.

Floyd views his job as “an adventure. It’s unique because it’s not routine. It’s a job of logistics. You have to be on the alert.”

WALLY RUSSELL

Wally Russell leaned back in his chair, sipped coffee from a paper cup and enjoyed the lull. “Orpheus in the Underworld” had opened two nights before and for the technical director of the Music Center Opera it had been two weeks of non-stop overtime getting everything ready to go--the lights, scenery, props, audio gear . . .

Says Russell: “The theater is like that. Very, very intense periods followed by a down time.”

Russell, 55, rumpled, easy-going, spoke from his disheveled, unadorned office, just roomy enough for a couple of large desks, a drafting table, a small refrigerator. Exhausted, he planned to go home at noon and dig into a mound of paper work piled up from his job at the opera.

But by 10 a.m., a phone call threatened to disrupt the welcomed peace. “Orpheus” star Dom DeLuise may have to fly to New York.

That would mean a rehearsal for understudy Roderick Cook, who couldn’t arrive at the theater until 7 p.m. In addition to overseeing all technical aspects of production and supervising 45 people on eight productions a year, Russell is responsible for scheduling all activity taking place on the stage. Therefore, he would also have to set in motion routine preperformance technical preparations, make sure cast and crew were notified of the run-through, then, to his displeasure, stay for the evening performance to “make sure everything runs smoothly.”

Leaving his office located one floor beneath the Pavilion stage, he ascended the single flight to meet property master Carmine Marinelli. “We may have to throw in a rehearsal this afternoon,” he told Marinelli without a trace of panic in his voice.

He is used to responding to emergencies, however.

Preparation may start as much as three years ahead of time, Russell says: “Someone might want to know how many shipping containers are needed for costumes coming from Amsterdam.” Or it may mean loading scenery into the backstage area of the theater two days before a premiere.

But problems--which cause delays--are costly. Actors, musicians and stagehands, all paid by the hour, go into overtime, which can total up to $3,000 an hour for the routine contingent of stagehands employed on a single production. Says Russell: “It behooves you to organize well.”

JUDITH TOWNSEND: ANNE E. WAREHAM

In Gordon Davidson’s offices, command central of the Music Center’s Center Theatre Group, the phone never seems to stop ringing. Secretary Judith Townsend coolly handles the incoming barrage like an air-traffic controller. Executive assistant Anne E. Wareham is keeping tabs on all of the day’s, and week’s, meetings to follow.

The trips and the office load have only increased since last September, when Davidson took over the artistic directorship of the Ahmanson Theatre while remaining at the helm of the Mark Taper Forum. By their own accounts, Wareham and Townsend have a handle on the additional load, which is best appreciated by scanning their shoe-box office. Every desk surface is covered in paper. Seven large file cabinets stand behind them, on top of which are stacks of produced and unproduced scripts.

Townsend wears a headset “so I can keep my hands free” while answering calls. Eight big address card files line Townsend’s desk, while Wareham has four and counting. (Townsend: “Each day, I add 10 new numbers and Gordon averages 25 messages.”)

Wareham describes herself as Davidson’s “lifeline between him and whomever he’s working with.”

Townsend is traffic cop for the flurry of phone calls (“We’re swamped when he’s in, since everybody seems to know when he’s in”). Perhaps even more demanding is maneuvering house seats for Davidson’s guests. Townsend often finds herself having to place a takeout lunch in front of the artistic director. “Otherwise,” she says bemusedly, “he’ll completely forget about it.”

FRED STEGEMAN

When Frank Gehry’s design for the $100 million Walt Disney Concert Hall complex was chosen last year, it was described as “a lush garden oasis nestled among towers.”

When project-management consultant Fred Stegeman of Stegeman and Kastner Inc. heard that repeated, he was bemused. He explains that he has to think in somewhat more mundane terms--”acoustics, lighting, escalation, nurses’ stations, parking stalls and toilets.” In short, Stegeman is assessing the “oasis” in terms of all those practicalities needed for the Philharmonic’s future home adjacent to the Music Center.

Stegeman, a fit 51, talks about his job as “the man in the middle,” responsible for finding out what Gehry wants, what the property owners want and what’s possible. He ensures that the contractor makes it happen and that all parties are kept up to date with every development.

“Concert halls are very expensive items and very complex,” he says, “and we have to produce (this one) relatively fast.” Although there is as yet no specific target date, completion may be possible for the 1994 season.

“Five years, actually six, sounds like an awful long time,” Stegeman says, “but many of these things can take nine or 10 years.”

JOHN HOWLETT

The June morning after the Music Center Opera opened “Orpheus in the Underworld,” the company’s director of marketing and public relations was deep in planning the campaign for the new season in September. In the selling department, the future is always now.

The meeting in John Howlett’s spare, functional Music Center office covered ad designs for the upcoming operas and grappled with budget constraints. With “Tosca” and “The Rise and Fall of the City Mahagonny” opening almost simultaneously, are two ads necessary or can both be covered in one?

The ads featured the phrase “L. A. Opera.” Though the company is not formally parting with its Music Center Opera designation, Howlett finds the L. A. Opera concept a useful tool.

“We have gone very quickly from non-existence to being perceived as a major company,” Howlett says. “Now we need to be seen as friendly and as part of the larger community.”

Howlett himself feels very much a part of the community here, both within and without the opera offices. “I feel everything I’ve done has led to this job,” he says. He had been vice-president for marketing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where his work on the Next Wave festivals was much what it is here, “basically a matter of positioning, and getting a new audience.”

Howlett’s planning meeting was constantly interrupted by a flow of phone calls and people.

“My job description from the beginning has been to do whatever has to be done. The organization is remarkably egoless in doing that,” Howlett says. “The organzation is basically Peter (Hemmings, general manager) and everybody else. We all have to pull together.”

RAE MACDONALD

In a minuscule office in a boxy trailer across the street from the Music Center, the telephone is ringing--again. The woman sitting at the cluttered desk on this warm June afternoon apologizes for another interruption and politely answers, “Master Chorale, Rae Macdonald.”

Tall and cordial, with short and curly dark hair, this busy woman industriously marking rehearsal schedules and fielding phone calls is production coordinator for the Master Chorale. “Right now,” she explains, “I’m re-adjusting the opera schedules for our January through April rehearsals so we can get our availability slips out and solicit singers (for the opera choruses).”

That is part of keeping the Master Chorale’s organizational wheels turning, but Macdonald has another formidable task: taking care of the group’s 133 altos, tenors, sopranos and other voices.

One day in the life of the Music Center, a day that in many ways impacted on the hundreds who visited and the 500 who work there. It was just one day.