THEATER NOTES : Plans for a Post-Canon Beverly Hills

It’s beginning to look like curtains for the Canon Theatre.

For years, the 382-seat Can on (formerly the Solari) has been one of the L.A. area’s few mid-sized professional theaters. Theater observers often decry the scarcity of mid-sized theaters and mid-sized productions in L.A.--last summer, more than 1,000 people attended a conference devoted to the subject.

But Federated Department Stores recently bought the Beverly Hills building that houses the Canon and plans to demolish it as part of a proposal to build a Bloomingdale’s and adjoining retail stores on the same block.

The deal requires the use of land owned by the city of Beverly Hills, as well as a city lease of some of the Federated-owned property, so it hinges on an intricate (but so far non-binding) agreement with the city, which plans a series of public meetings to discuss the proposal.

Still, the plan is moving full speed ahead. The only specific complaints heard at a Beverly Hills City Council meeting on Feb. 21 were from theater people: Center Theatre Group artistic director Gordon Davidson, producer John Clark (whose “Shakespeare for My Father” is currently at the Canon) and the Canon’s executive co-director Joan Stein. Davidson and Clark also carried a letter from actor Charlton Heston.

Heston’s letter, read to the council by Clark, called the pending elimination of the Canon “a serious danger to the cultural identity of Beverly Hills . . . it’s unthinkable to imagine that there is no room for it in the Gargantuan complex Bloomingdale’s has in mind.”

Beverly Hills Mayor Vicki Reynolds responded that the city would try to “preserve the cultural programs” at another site--most probably the city’s former main post office at 469 N. Crescent Drive.

Since December, 1993, the city has had an exclusive negotiating agreement to buy the old post office from the Postal Service. Reynolds said last week that her goal is to turn it into a multiuse building that would include a theater of “maybe up to 500 seats” as well as an exhibition hall, a visitors center and even some of the retail postal services that are already there. “We’re very close,” she said of the progress of the negotiations.

The Burton Green Foundation has pledged $1,750,000 to launch the programming at the post office--subject to its acquisition by the city, Reynolds said. A $50,000 feasibility study is being completed, she added.

The Canon is a commercial theater--one of the few in Los Angeles. Civic-operated theaters often consider nonprofit productions to be their first priority. But Reynolds said of the post office: “We could put a commercial theater in there, as long as we had some time blocked out for community activities.”

Center Theatre Group’s Davidson, who has long looked for a mid-sized theater that he could use for more intimate Mark Taper Forum shows, praised the post office proposal before the Beverly Hills City Council and also said he applauded “the coming of Bloomingdale’s . . . I’m a New Yorker and I miss Bloomingdale’s. It’s a very theatrical experience.”

However, Davidson warned the council: “Don’t assume that the (proposed theater in the) post office can exist alone. I know that our organization and others cannot survive isolated and alone.”

“It would be fine to get the space in the old Post Office,” wrote Heston in his letter to the council, “but that bird is still in the bush. Let’s make sure we end up with a theatre, not a promise.”

Heston’s suggestion that a theater also should be incorporated into the Bloomingdale’s block is not presently being discussed, Reynolds said. The city is counting on using the space vacated by the Canon--which is actually adjacent to the proposed Bloomingdale’s--for retail rentals, and that revenue is an essential ingredient of the whole plan.