Monster Mash: LACMA's red ink; Charlie Chaplin museum in Switzerland; Galileo's fingers

-- Financial trouble: LACMA loses 23% of its investments in the last fiscal year. One victim is Jeff Koons' dangling train project, which was scheduled to arrive at LACMA in 2011-12, and is now delayed for three more years. (Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg)

-- Little tramp: A long-planned museum dedicated to Charlie Chaplin, pictured, will be constructed at the site of the actor's former home in Switzerland. (Radio Suisse Romande)

-- Discovery: Two severed fingers and a tooth belonging to Galileo have been identified by a museum in Florence, Italy. (CNN)

-- Landing on their feet: Two actors from the recently closed Broadway revival of "Brighton Beach Memoirs" have landed roles in the upcoming revival of "A View from the Bridge." (New York Times)

-- Major project: A $208-million concert hall in Helsinki, Finland, is intended to improve on the existing Finlandia Hall, but it's already 50% over projected costs. (Bloomberg)

-- Winner: Jez Butterworth's "Jerusalem" was named best play at the London Evening Standard Theatre Awards. (Playbill)

-- Operatic great: Swedish soprano Elisabeth Soderstrom has passed away at age 82. (Telegraph)

-- Moving up: "Enter Laughing," which has had two runs off-Broadway, is aiming for a Broadway engagement in the fall of 2010. (Variety)

-- And in the L.A. Times: The L.A. Philharmonic's "West Coast, Left Coast" festival begins; a look at the Broadway production of "Fela!"

-- David Ng

Photo:  Charlie Chaplin with Virginia Cherrill in a scene from "City Lights." Credit: Los Angeles Times

LACMA loses 23% of its investments in meltdown year

No arts nonprofit is apt to show a rosy balance sheet for the year of the great economic meltdown, unless by rosy one means red ink.

In the case of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which recently posted on its website the audited financial statement for the 2008-09 fiscal year ending June 30, the bad news includes a 23% decline in the value of its cash and investment portfolio, from $254.7 million to $196 million.

Barbara Pflaumer, the museum's chief spokeswoman, said that by quickly reining in spending when the economy tanked, including a hiring freeze, canceling some exhibitions and postponing a $50-million segment of its ongoing expansion and renovation program, LACMA avoided "any major hiccups that kept us from operating on a normal basis" and managed to escape the large-scale layoffs that have hit many other big museums, including L.A.'s J. Paul Getty Trust and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

With L.A. County footing nearly a third of the bill, LACMA's expenses -- including such mandatory costs as depreciation and interest on its $385-million debt -- came to $74.1 million for the year, down a tick from $74.4 million in 2007-08.

Eight jobs were lost, however -- six by layoffs, and two via retirement vacancies that won't be filled  -- leaving a LACMA staff of about 350. An additional 16 openings won't be filled until finances improve.

Of greatest concern, LACMA saw donations shrink from $129.7 million to $29 million. This is while the museum is trying to reel in major gifts to fund the $450-million campus "transformation" campaign that's in the second of three planned phases, with about $134 million still to go.

On the positive side, LACMA was able to acquire new art valued at $42.8 million via purchases and donations, down slightly from $45.7 million the previous year. And attendance grew to 853,000 from 825,000, Pflaumer said. Maybe $12 general admission for a day looking at art -- and free for those 17 and under -- has its appeal in a rotten economy.

Click here for the full story.

-- Mike Boehm

The Theatre@Boston Court's 2010 season to promote new work, and sharing

Sharing the artistic cred -- and the risk -- of producing new plays is a guiding principle for the 2010 season at Pasadena's The Theatre@Boston Court, which has announced four world premieres, three of them in cooperation with other theater companies.

It will be the Boston Court's first season consisting entirely of world premieres.

The partner stage companies range from L.A.'s Circle X Theatre Co. to the National Asian American Theatre Company in New York, Oregon's Portland Center Stage and the Magic Theatre in San Francisco.

The playwrights offer geographical diversity as well: L.A. veterans Luis Alfaro (pictured) and Tom Jacobson, and newcomers Moby Pomerance from Great Britain and Jordan Harrison from New York. 

Alfaro's "Oedipus El Rey" -- workshopped last year at the Getty Villa -- finds him again spanning the distance and millennia between Sophoclean Athens and Latino L.A., as he did in "Electricidad," staged at the Mark Taper Forum in 2005. This time, the king of the barrio isn't a murdered gang lord, as in Alfaro's loose adaptation of "Electra," but a live parolee who heads to East L.A. after serving time in the federal pen. "Oedipus El Rey" opens Feb. 27 with Jon Lawrence Rivera directing -- a month after an inaugural run opens at the Magic Theatre but with a different director cast and crew.

Jacobson's "The Twentieth-Century Way," opening May 8, combines his past interests in history and gay experience in a two-actor, multi-role play based on actual events from 1914 Long Beach -- an entrapment campaign against homosexuals frequenting public restrooms. The staging is by Michael Michetti, co-artistic director of the Boston Court.

Pomerance's drama, "The Good Book of Pedantry and Wonder," focuses on a historical figure from the late 1800s, John Murray, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. Opening July 31, with John Langs directing, it's a co-production with Circle X. 

*Live on the Web: Forum on how to measure artists' economic impact

In the arts, composers, writers, painters, sculptors and performers grab all the glory, but they also serve who sit and wonk.

And we, the people, are invited to watch 'em in action Friday as the National Endowment for the Arts presents a live webcast of its daylong Cultural Workforce Forum. From 6 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, an assortment of academics, federal bureaucrats, and staffers from private think tanks and research organizations will assemble in Washington, and in cyberspace at www.nea.gov. They'll attempt to elucidate, ponder and talk about how to broaden and improve the statistical evidence supporting the notion that what those composers, writers, painters, et al do is not just fluff and filigree, but part of the dollars-and-cents fiber of the country.

Panel topics include "What We Know About Artists and How We Know It," featuring an economics professor from Northeastern University, an executive from the AFL-CIO, and arts researchers from the NEA and Columbia University; "Putting the Research to Work";  and "Widening the Lens to Capture Other Cultural Workers."

Arts organizations fishing for funding have tried to play the economic-engine card for years, amassing enough studies and surveys on arts spending and its multiplier effects to fill a bookcase.

But there's at least one recent, specific reason for arts advocates to be seeking better data to support their case:

Italian Opera Festival planned for Dana Point begins raising needed $2 million

Professional opera is back on the monetary scoreboard in Orange County, if not yet fully back in business.

The Dana Point City Council voted last week to appropriate $50,000, plus free use of Lantern Bay Park (pictured), overlooking the Pacific, for the Italian Opera Festival, whose organizers aim to make it an annual event, with the first one scheduled Sept. 10-19, 2010. A successful launch would put opera back on the O.C. cultural map from which it has disappeared for a year and counting since the 23-year-old  Opera Pacific went bankrupt after failing to establish a strong enough donor pool to carry it through last fall's economic meltdown.

The impetus for the Italian Opera Festival comes from the mother country of opera, where conductor Stefano Vignati runs the annual Tuscia Operafestival in Viterbo, a small city about 65 miles from Rome.

For Vignati, the prospective festival's artistic director, and his allies in Dana Point, the heavy lifting toward a projected budget of about $2 million begins Saturday with a Founding Members Gala at the St. Regis Monarch Bay Resort, priced at $500 and $1,000 per ticket, with assorted extra perks for donors who give $5,000, $10,000 or $25,000.

Programming for the festival, which will seat an audience of about 1,300 for each of the seven or eight planned performances, is to be announced at the gala. Barbara Manconi, a spokeswoman for the Italian American Opera Foundation established to organize the festival, said there will be one fully staged opera and several concerts that offer an assortment of operatic highlights or an opera done in concert form.

"It's going to be a big production, very high end," she said; tickets will go for $40 to $250, with comfy seating and a well-appointed temporary stage promised for Lantern Bay Park.

Eli Broad dangles a museum and a $200 million endowment in front of Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, and a west side city to be named later*

Eli Broad is ready to build himself a west side museum to house his 2,000-piece contemporary art collection, and send it into the world with a $200 million endowment that he reckons will give it a $12 million a year budget before another penny is earned or raised. That would be the largest single hunk of cash ever bestowed on the arts in Southern California, save for the $700 million 1976 bequest ($2.65 billion in today's dollars) with which J. Paul Getty launched the Getty Trust. [*An earlier version of this post listed the amount as $2.65 million.]

The main questions facing Broad are where and when. At age 76, he wants the "when" to be ASAP, with a minimum of bureaucratic red tape. As for the "where," city officials in both Beverly Hills and Santa Monica are vying  to provide it -- Beverly Hills on the southeast corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Santa Monica Boulevard, a property that Broad says the city would have to acquire then lease to him for a token amount, and Santa Monica on 2.5 acres the city already owns next to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.

Meanwhile, the "what" has gotten much bigger since Broad's plans to build a new headquarters and museum for his Broad Art Foundation surfaced a year ago. A conceptual design he sent last month to city planners  in Beverly Hills call for nearly 50,000 square feet of exhibition space (including a 6,100 square foot outdoor area for sculpture), up from the 25,000 previously estimated.

Hope stirs, but the sounds of silence linger at O.C. opera scene since Opera Pacific folded

Opera Pacific died a year ago, and as far as professional opera in Orange County is concerned, the rest has been silence.

The Orange County Performing Arts Center, whose 1986 opening in Costa Mesa set the stage for Opera Pacific’s launch the same year, hasn’t offered opera since last Nov. 1, the final performance of Opera Pacific’s swan song, “The Barber of Seville.”

“It’s definitely on our planning radar, and I’m confident that sooner or later we’ll pull it off,” the center's president, Terrence Dwyer, said Tuesday. Overtures to opera companies around the United States and abroad, including the Los Angeles Opera and San Diego Opera, haven’t borne fruit.

“Cost is the main thing,” Dwyer said. “It’s very expensive, and ticket sales are not the easiest.” After an opera-less season, Dwyer said, nothing has developed for the 2010-11 season, either. Opera is the most expensive and complex performing art, and the center, which has cut back staff in the down economy, is coping first of all with “the challenge of properly sustaining what we’re already doing.” There’s an audience for opera in Orange County, Dwyer says, and “we’ll have to find a way to do it.”

For fans who can wait six months — and who are open to new work as well as the standards by Puccini, Verdi, Mozart, Wagner, et. al. — operatic opportunity is scheduled to knock on May 15 at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, when the Long Beach Opera is booked to mount a single performance of Grigori Frid’s 1969 opera, “The Diary of Anne Frank.” Far from a traditional grand opera, it’s a chamber work for a single soprano singing excerpts from the diary kept by the doomed Dutch-Jewish teen while her family hid from the Nazis.

MOCA's biggest exhibition to celebrate 30th anniversary -- and survival

L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art is getting ready to throw a two-pronged celebration this weekend, centered around a Saturday gala at which pop star Lady Gaga will do a one-off performance with dancers from the Bolshoi Ballet, and, the next day, the opening of the largest exhibition in MOCA's history, drawn almost entirely from its own collection. For the full story on MOCA, its issues and its art, click here.

One reason to party is the 30th anniversary of MOCA's founding in 1979, when a group of contemporary art lovers won the support of Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and began planning for a major museum devoted to the art of the present and the post-World War II past. Aficionados of contemporary art in LA. had felt disenfranchised by the 1974 failure of its main previous outlet, the Pasadena Art Museum, which was bailed out by collector Norton Simon and merged with his collection into the wider-ranging Norton Simon Museum of Art.

MOCA's initial venue, now called the Geffen Contemporary, opened in a former city auto repair shop in Little Tokyo, followed in 1986 by the museum's Grand Avenue headquarters. The exhibition "Collection: MOCA's First 30 Years" will occupy all of the Grand Avenue building and half of the Geffen Contemporary, with a single one-day admission covering both venues. The show, featuring about 500 artworks including paintings, drawings, sculpture, photography and video and installation art, will run through May 3.

The other reason to celebrate is that MOCA is still here to celebrate, and no longer in apparent financial jeopardy, a year after it publicly declared a state of financial emergency. As much as arts institutions relish being front page news, they don't want the headline to be "L.A.'s MOCA in Deep Financial Trouble," as it was in The Times last Nov. 19.

More than a month of drama and brinkmanship followed, with MOCA's board eventually choosing a $30-million bailout offer from Eli Broad (one of those 1979 founders) over a proposal from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to take MOCA under its umbrella in a way promised to preserve MOCA's separate identity.

MOCA officials say that on top of Broad's bailout, they've raised $30 million in gifts and pledges over the past year, mostly from museum board members -- and that the gala is expected to bring in $2 million. On a more chastening note, "MOCA New," as the chapter kicking off this weekend has been dubbed, is also at the moment "MOCA less," with spending and staff reduced 25%, and just one exhibition other than the 30th anniversary retrospective currently announced for the two downtown venues.

-- Mike Boehm

Photo: MOCA's chief curator, Paul Schimmel, stands in a gallery displaying Mark Rothko paintings. Credit: Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times

Related:

MOCA faces serious financial problems

MOCA accepts Eli Broad's $30 million lifeline, appoints CEO

MOCA cuts staff and exhibitions to balance its 2009 budget

MOCA has gifts, officers and trustees; pronounces finances fixed

Monster Mash: Sotheby's earnings slump; Dia Art Foundation returning to Chelsea; Barnes Foundation's new curator

-- Slumping: Sotheby's reported a wider third-quarter loss over the same period last year due to continued weakness in global art sales. (Bloomberg)

-- New digs: New York's Dia Art Foundation is planning to build a new home on the site of its former home in the Chelsea neighborhood. (New York Times)

-- Major appointment: The Barnes Foundation has named the Brooklyn Museum's Judith Dolkart as its new chief curator. (Philadelphia Inquirer)

-- Musical Bard: Tony-winning rock musician Stew will write the score for a new production of Shakespeare's "Othello" in Connecticut. (Playbill)

-- Flat broke? The Honolulu Symphony said it no longer has enough money to make payroll. (KITV)

-- In the black: The new Durham Performing Arts Center in North Carolina gives more than $400,000 to the city, which owns the building. (News Observer)

-- Job crunch: Emerging architects are having trouble finding jobs in Britain. (The Architects' Journal)

-- And in the L.A. Times: Producers of Broadway's troubled "Spider-Man" musical still face a budgetary shortfall; Cirque du Soleil's "Viva Elvis" is set to open in December in Las Vegas.

— David Ng

Photo: Sotheby's in New York. Credit: Daniel Acker / Bloomberg.

Milan's big showing of a Da Vinci notebook recalls L.A.'s Leonardo that got away

In light of recent controversies, most folks who care about art know that it's a really big deal for a museum to even think of unloading a masterpiece. (Consider Brandeis University's attempt to sell off the collection of its Rose Art Museum to rescue the university from budgetary woes, brought on partly by some of its major donors’ fondness for investing with Bernie Madoff.)

The Hammer Museum might wish for the case of the long-gone Leicester Codex -- Leonardo da Vinci's handwritten, illustrated notebook that’s primarily about the properties of water -- to be water under the bridge. But once you auction off Da Vinci's handiwork for $28 million, as the Hammer did 15 years ago this month in the granddaddy of L.A. deaccessionings, well, people tend to remember.

Especially when there’s news that a library in Milan, Italy, is going to get six years of exhibitions out of episodically displaying all 1,119 pages of its much larger Da Vinci notebook, the Atlantic Codex.

Plans at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, which opened in 1609, call for showing 44 or 45 pages at a time, for three months, then cycling in the next group of pages. That’s to save the light-sensitive work from potential damage from overexposure. The first set of pages went on display in September, divided between two venues – the library itself and the nearby Santa Maria delle Grazie convent, which also houses Leonardo’s “The Last Supper.”