The Stage: Three in the West

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Whatever movie fans may have thought, the big event in Los Angeles was not the Oscars but the dedication of the city's now completed Music Center of Los Angeles County.

The original building in the three-unit hilltop complex—a 3,250-seat music hall named the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion after the center's prime mover—opened 2½ years ago. Last week two handsome new structures were opened: the 2,100-seat Howard Ahmanson Theater for drama and musicals and the 750-seat Mark Taper Forum for chamber music and experimental plays. Together they give Los Angeles a visual fulcrum, not to mention one of the most versatile performing-arts centers in the country.

The theaters are named for two Los Angeles bankers who contributed $1,500,000 each to Mrs. Chandler's fund drive. The three-building complex cost only $34 million, much less than half the $91 million that New Yorkers paid for their four-theater Lincoln Center. Another individual who eased the cost was Architect Welton Becket, who contributed over a million dollars in services.

Intimate Shane. Inside its drum shape, Becket's Taper Forum boasts a thrust stage surrounded by a semicircle of seats banking gracefully upward for 14 rows. The farthest spectator is just barely 16 yards from the action and the sound is superior. Considering its impressive size, the Ahmanson Theater is also remarkably intimate; as in the trail-blazing Chandler Pavilion, Architect Becket has replaced the traditional shoe-box-shaped auditorium with an almost perfect square. The proscenium is as wide and as high as the walls and ceilings, the stage semithrust.

For openers last week, the Ahmanson mounted Man of La Mancha with the original Broadway leads, and the Taper presented John Whiting's The Devils. Both productions were polished and professional, and the performances were first-rate. Elliot Martin, director of the center's Theater Group, hastens to point out that he is not running a rental hall for touring New York shows. Last week he announced that his first work of the fall season, a more characteristic center production, will be the U.S. premiere of Eugene O'Neill's last play, More Stately Mansions. The star: Ingrid Bergman, in her first U.S. stage appearance in 20 years.

Good Start. Gordon Davidson, the Taper's artistic director, plans to follow The Devils with two new dramatic works by U.S. Playwrights Romulus Linney and William Murray, and with Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi.

Both Davidson and Martin are aiming for a theater life for Los Angeles that will compare with or excel Broadway's best. They've got a good start. By last week, the Taper had virtually sold out its first season with more than 30,000 subscriptions.