David Beringer of Pasadena bounds up the stairs to the box office at the Pasadena Playhouse to buy tickets for a performance of "Camelot." Photo credit: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times

Some excellent commentary from both Charles McNulty (finally!) at the LA Times and Don Shirley at LA Stagewatch on the demise of the Pasadena Playhouse.

First Charles:

Ever since hearing the somber news about Pasadena Playhouse, I keep thinking of the title of Polish director Jerzy Grotowski’s book “Towards a Poor Theatre.” This revolutionary text from the late 1960s was all about returning to fundamentals. For Grotowski, the essence of theater was in the communion between actors and audiences. Sublime things, in short, could occur in meager rooms, with limited technical capacity and a paucity of props, when performers were illuminated with radical purpose and spectators were receptive to having their paradigms budged.

And:

The situation I’m describing—one in which marketing has in effect become the mission—is a widespread ill. But perhaps the notion of finding opportunity in adversity can turn out to be more than a tired cliche. Give the people something that they really need and they’ll find a way to afford it. The challenge is getting them to sample what they might not know to be good for them. Once theatrically bitten, twice shy. But courage is contagious, and loyal support will follow when souls are nourished.

Hear, hear. I’ve discussed this idea in a few posts myself, most notably in The Gift of Poverty.

And here’s Don:

It’s one of the great paradoxes of L.A. theater that the bigger theaters feel compelled to program smaller shows for financial reasons, despite the fact that those shows are aesthetically more comfortable in smaller venues, while the smaller theaters are free to do cramped versions of bigger shows – because their actors will work almost for nothing. What’s wrong with this picture? Plenty.

And:

While we honor the building, the best tribute we can pay to it is to make sure that it doesn’t turn into merely a museum – or into an ongoing corporate p.r. outpost, which is what the Ricardo Montalban Theatre (formerly the Doolittle and the Huntington Hartford) has become with its current Nike tenant. These great old buildings should be living, breathing theaters. Let the death-defying transfusions of support begin.

Yup. I played at the now defunct Doolittle years ago and it always saddened me that such a beautiful theatre could so quickly be transformed into a freakin’ theatrical mausoleum – a veritable shell of itself.

The Playhouse is in danger of a similar fate.

And now with the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department facing closure (or at least cuts) – hey, maybe Off-Hollywood is going to get it’s due sooner than I thought.