Successful Norris Theatre to Expand Its Audience Base : Arts: Many of its subscription series sell out, leaving single-ticket buyers empty-handed. The managing director has added performances for the 1990-’91 season.

The Norris Theatre for the Performing Arts has been selling out many of its professional theater attractions.

That sounds like the answer to every theater manager’s prayer.

But to those who run the intimate, 450-seat playhouse in Rolling Hills Estates, that answered prayer poses its own problems.

Although an audience weighed heavily with subscribers has helped make the 7-year-old Norris financially sound, it has frustrated people who call about individual performance tickets and are told there aren’t any.

“A subscription house which is sold out is not healthy. It needs to be possible for new people to come in,” said Norris Managing Director Peter Lesnik. He said it is understandable that some see the theater, which was built with private contributions, “as a jewel box for the rich and famous of Palos Verdes.”

After seven months on the job, Lesnik has announced a remedy: an increase in the number of event categories from three to five, an increase in the number of performances per event from one to two, and a decrease in prices for all but the celebrity series. The changes will take effect with the 1990-91 season, which opens in October.

“We saw a need for the expansion of the audience base because the population was not being served,” he said. He said the theater, which provides a venue for community activities as well as professional entertainment, “needs to be South Bay-directed” rather than focused just on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

The theater is adding a four-part international series with Hungarian, Japanese, Soviet and Irish performers. The fall lineup will also include four shows for children as well as the established celebrity, music and dance and theater series. Twenty attractions will be seen in 40 performances.

The prevailing $35 ticket price will be retained for the celebrity series, which opens this year with satirist Mort Sahl. But for music and dance, theater, and the international series, prices will be $30 for Saturday performances and $25 on Fridays. Tickets for the children’s series will be $9. Subscribers receive a 15% discount off single-ticket prices.

The venture involves a stepped-up bid for corporate and private financial support, along with a marketing campaign that includes expanding newspaper advertising and mailing 40,000 announcements of the Norris season--twice the normal number--to households on the peninsula and in Torrance, the beach cities and San Pedro.

“The theater is well-known on the hill (peninsula),” Marketing Director Kathy Fleming said. “My challenge is to make other cities aware of it.” She said the theater’s goal is to sell half of the added performances on a subscription basis and the other half through individual sales.

Lesnik said the new children’s series is aimed not only at providing entertainment but also at building a future theater audience. As part of their engagement, performers for children will give lectures and workshops in 10 South Bay elementary schools.

The expanded schedule has increased the Norris operating budget from $650,000 for the season just ending to $1 million for 1990-91, which Lesnik said can be met by an overall two-thirds capacity audience for performances.

Roger Minor, chairman of the theater management board that governs the Norris, said the board greeted Lesnik’s expansion plan with trepidation and excitement. “It’s a big deal,” he said, noting that when the Norris opened in 1983, it had a budget of only $150,000.

Minor, who said the board would not have approved the plan “if we had not penciled out a pretty good budget,” described it as reaching out to new people, including children and the ethnic community. “The audience is there,” he said.

Lesnik said some board members were concerned that more professional attractions could squeeze out community programs, which continue to form the backbone of the Norris. Local theater and musical groups perform there, peninsula teen-agers put on a summer show in the theater, and organizations use it for meetings and fund-raisers.

Rather than cut into such uses, Lesnik believes that greater awareness of the Norris could increase them.

As the Norris prepares for expansion, Lesnik said the theater’s two resident professional groups are experiencing different fates. The Chamber Orchestra of the South Bay sells out every performance, he said, but the New Place Theatre Co. “has not been able to build a steady audience” or achieve financial support and is shortening its season next year.

Mimi Wilson, co-director of the acting company, contended that New Place has “a good, loyal audience.” When the company increased the number of performances for each of its four plays from six to eight this year, however, a larger audience failed to materialize. Nonetheless, she said the group, which received a $50,000 matching grant from the Norris Foundation, is on schedule in its 1990 fund raising. (The foundation also gives the Norris Theatre $100,000 a year.)

Wilson said that marketing is critical to the company and that it has applied for a $30,000 grant from the California Arts Council to pay for promotion, marketing and public relations. She said the group is “carefully looking at finances” in forming its 1990-91 season.

Wilson questioned whether Lesnik will be able to market his new attractions because they are the “same shows that tour the Southland. Will people come to see all these performances?”

But Philip Westin, who directs the South Bay’s largest performing arts operation at El Camino College, said the Norris plans are “very possible” because of the vast South Bay population and the small theater it has to fill. Westin said that when the college, which presented nearly 100 professional performances this season in its 2,048-seat auditorium, quadrupled its program four years ago, it brought in additional people. “People pick what they want to go see and go where (the shows) are,” he said.