Daily News from New York, New York • 141

go3 1 1 ii3 cnftD By JENNIFER ALLEN rrrjrjRBAN renewal is sup- i I posed to repair areas of blight," says Lenore Love-man, pointing to the eight theaters that line 45th St. from Broadway to Eighth Ave. "This isn't blight It's the best block in the district" Forty-fifth is a packed jumble of porticos and blown-up photos from shows and loud signs with quotes cribbed from critics and marquees framed by strings of light bulbs like dime-store necklaces. This street, says Loveman, is Broadway in all its corny glory. Atlanta developer John Portman owns the Morosco and the Bijou on 45th and the Helen Hayes, with its famous wedding-cake facade, on 46th.

He plans to raze them (and the Ficadilly Hotel and Gaiety Theater) to make way for a hotel. Portman's project, trumpeted by its creators and by the city as the magnet for the sorely needed revivification of Times Square, was originally approved by the city in 1973, then languished during the city's most fiscally troubled years. Recently, it's suffered two sizable setbacks. In December, the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington denied it a $22.5 million Urban Development Action Grant (for what i 5ttf I -iiii nriir fi 111 j.MA.. jlillllll I 7 while eating all of It bounded by two white slabs that lend the structure all the affable warmth of what one opponent calls "a Buck Rogers toaster." It will also house a massive theater for large-scale musicals.

But it's not the design that the group Lenore Loveman co-chairs, Equity's Committee to Save the Theaters (and the 30,000 people who have signed its petitions), object to. It's the site. In the scattered howls of protest that have been raised against the $26.5 million Portman, no one has howled louder than those in the theatrical community who cannot abide the destruction of the theaters. Celeste Holm has offered to fling her body in front of the first wrecking ball. "Schmucky! It's so schmucky!" shrieked Tony Randall at one public hearing.

"Please don't let them tear down our memories," Gloria Swanson wailed in a written message. John Guare, a longtime opponent, foresees a future of "tasteless theater, fancy Velveeta" should the project become a reality. Behind the histrionics, however, lies a very real outrage. Actors, playwrights and directors, most of them allied with the Equity committee, have trooped forward time and again at rallies and hearings, via letters and petitions, to protest the demolition of the theaters that lie on portman's site. Their battle so far has hardly been heartening.

The city's Board of Estimate and Community Boards 4 and 5 have voted approval of the project The Picadilly Hotel withdrew its suit to block the use of federal funds to condemn their hotel, presumably because Portman upped his undisclosed asking price for the hotel. GQUITY'S COMMITTEE, however, has recently allied itself with a lawsuit against the city (and HUD, if its loan isn't dropped) for willfully neglecting to study the harmful effects that the destruction of the four theaters will wreak on the area. It has also begun a fund-raising drive to support a possible lawsuit of its own. Not everyone in the theater community has sided with the preservationists, though. The League of Theater Owners and Producers has saluted the Portman as the centerpiece In the area's resuscitation, as has the Schubert Organization, the theater management titan that runs 17 Broadway houses none of them due for razing.

(Preservationists point out that the Schuberts have long given cozy counseling to Portman on management of its hotel-theater and were even mentioned in the UDAG application as its possible managers.) Hal Prince, whose musicals are usually staged in Schubert-run houses; is also pro-Portman, and Dramatists Guild President Stephen Sondheim, most of whose musicals Prince produces, has flipped from an anti-Port- Please don't let them tear down our wailed Gloria Swanson. The planned Portman Hotel: 50 stories high and a theater. 8 a HUD press release called "technical reasons" and skeptics suggest was Portman's still wobbly private lenders' commitments or Mayor Koch's friendliness toward Reagan). And last week, President Reagan announced his intention to wipe out the UDAG program altogether. But Congress has yet to vote on Reagan's wishes, and both Portman and Koch who anticipate getting funding on March 31 if HUD doles out grants again are cheerfully optimistic that the UDAG program won't die.

Now, however, two groups anxious to save the threatened theaters and the look of the street are battling to banish the proposed hotel from its site. The building Portman intends to plant in place of the theaters will sit on Broadway from 45th to 46th Streets and stretch three-quarters of the way from Broadway to Eighth Ave. The design is pure Portman, a futuristic fantasy straight out of a Jetson's cartoon: 50 stories high, equipped with an atrium vast enough to give the sturdiest soul a touch of agoraphobia, those gondola-like elevators that glide up and down inside the atrium, and a revolving restaurant up top where woozy diners may practice keeping their balance man to a neutral stance. And Miss Hayes herself has demurred from taking sides; she agreed to the use of her name for the new theater to be tentatively called "the New Helen Hayes" then insisted that it not be used in support of the project "I'm not even onstage and I can be heard in the last seats in the balcony," says Loveman as she stands in front of the stage in the empty Morosco theater. "Herbert Krapp designed this theater.

He was a genius when it came to acoustics; he knew the secret Actors love to play here; the audience is close to the action onstage, and the performers don't have to use mikes, which real theater lovers can't stand." The Morosco is 80 years old. Its cream-colored interior is filled with elegant, neo-classical embellishmentspediments, columns and a Wedgwood-like design over the stage that make it one of Broadway's handsomest, if not architectually unique, houses. But the theater's chief treasures, are its acoustics and its venerable history. The Morosco is to theatrical history what Madison Square Garden is to fights: All the greats have played there, including original productions of "Our Town," "Beyond the Horizon," "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," "Death of a Salesman" and, more recently, "The Shadow Box," "Da" and "A Life." Last year, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation in Washington wrote Manhattan's Office of Midtown Planning and Development and requested that it examine the Morosco, the Bijou and the Picadilly Hotel for possible inclusion in the National Register as historic buildings. Byrne Zimmerman, who has been working on the Portman project for the OMPD, claims that the request was an "unfortunate" bow to pressure from preservationists, and argues that the head of the Advisory Council, a state preservation officer, a member of the city's Landmarks Preservation Comit-tee and OMPD director Ken Halpern all toured the site two years ago, as required by state law, and agreed that the Helen Hayes was the only theater that qualified as eligible under the Historic Register.

Says Loveman: "But the criteria for National Register status isn't just architectural. Two other criteria for theaters are acoustics and history. And this theater is a treasure on both counts. "There should be large theaters suitable for musicals," she continues, if.