THEATER:The show will go on at the Playhouse

Push ultimately came to shove for the Huntington Beach Playhouse this week.

The community theater group is in rehearsal for its next production, “Lend Me a Tenor” (replacing the originally scheduled show, “The Royal Family”), but until Monday evening it was uncertain where — or if — the show would open.

Use of the Central Library Theater simply had been priced out of the playhouse’s reach. And the City Council nodded in agreement.

The playhouse’s board of directors had delivered an ultimatum of sorts to the Huntington Beach City Council at the council’s previous meeting — either cut the overhead by nearly $40,000 a year or lose the playhouse as a tenant.

On Monday, the city council directed their staff to accept the theater group’s proposal for reduced payments. This means the playhouse will likely call the library home for at least the next three years, although some details in the proposal may be revised.

Payments from the playhouse to the city would continue to be quite substantial — about $60,000 per year — but this is a huge improvement over the nearly $100,000 the theater group paid in 2006.

“The City Council voted unanimously to accept the new payment structure we proposed to them in January,” noted playhouse board member Bettie Muellenberg. “It’s still pretty high rent, but considerably better than it was.”

A glance at the theater group’s budget over the past seven years provides an eye-opening insight into its fiscal predicament. In a letter delivered to the council two weeks ago, along with the oral presentation by board member Joe Syiek, it was revealed that the cost of maintaining a community theater operation has skyrocketed since the turn of the century.

“As you know,” Syiek told the council, “the playhouse has leased the Central Library Theater from the city of Huntington Beach for the past 13 years. In addition to monthly rent, over the term of our last five-year lease, the city imposed and collected a surcharge based on the number of occupied seats.

“This began as a $1 charge and was increased last year to $3,” Syiek said. “As a result, the amount that the playhouse paid the city rose from $39,582 in 2001 to $98,423 in 2006.

“This is nearly a 150% increase over the past five years, and is clearly extraordinary and without market parallel — especially when inflation during that same time has been only 3% to 8% per year.”

These figures hadn’t just recently come to light. According to Syiek’s letter, “For many, many months, we have communicated to both library and city officials that, as a not-for-profit community service organization, we cannot afford to extend or enter into a new lease at the current terms.

“We have pleaded for relief but the city has not acted upon our request,” Syiek wrote. “We are now operating on a month-to-month extension using the same terms as our last lease.”

The playhouse’s board of directors came up with the alternative plan, which was accepted by the council on Monday. Under this setup, the show would continue to go on at the Library Theater at a cost of $3,004.72 per month, totaling $36,056.64 per year.

On top of this output, the playhouse proposed cutting the surcharge from $3 back to $1 per occupied seat with a minimum guarantee of 200 occupied seats per performance. Based on the 120 performances scheduled in 2007, this would add up to at least $24,000 this year, and could be more depending on attendance.

The playhouse also offered to surrender its use of the Maddy Room at the library for auditions and rehearsals. This would free that facility up for 592 hours a year, offering another revenue-generating opportunity for the library.

“This ensures the city at least $60,056 in revenue from the Huntington Beach Playhouse in 2007,” Syiek told the council.

The city fathers agreed that would be quite sufficient, and the show, as they say, will go on.