U. names new chief for Annenberg Ctr.

Michael Rose will join the Center in the midst of a tough reorganization. After a six-month search and a short delay in the actual appointment, Interim Provost Michael Wachter named a new managing director for the troubled Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts yesterday. Michael Rose, formerly the executive director of the Glassboro Center for the Arts at Rowan University in New Jersey, will begin his new post at Annenberg on March 16. Rose replaces Stephen Goff, a 1964 University graduate who had held the position for 22 years before resigning last August amid the center's continuing financial troubles. Rose "brings very strong financial, marketing and managerial skills" to the center, making him "the ideal manager of a performing arts studio in the 21st century," Wachter said. Rose's appointment comes in the midst of Annenberg's three-year reorganization process, the result of a six-month internal review led by Wachter last year. The restructuring plan -- a response to the theater's recent financial difficulties -- calls for adding concerts, film series and lectures to the center's current offerings in children's theater, student performances, dance and professional productions such as 1996's Angels in America. With the demise of the Drama Guild -- a performing arts company that presented many of its plays at Annenberg and was a prime part of the center's financial operations -- four years ago, the center was faced with a budget deficit. It subsequently responded by cutting back on programming. The center has run a deficit for six of the last nine years. According to recent University budget figures, the Annenberg Center was budgeted for a $293,000 deficit for fiscal year 1998, which ends June 30, 1998. "As the environment became more difficult, it became more critical to us to have the kind of dynamic leadership that can deal with that environment," Wachter said. Wachter said he first heard of Rose while driving along the Schuylkill Expressway one morning and hearing a radio advertisement Rose created for a performance in Glassboro. "If somebody is trying to get me to go to the performing arts in South Jersey, that's the person I want here on campus, getting people into University City," Wachter said. Rose led Glassboro for 10 years, and focused much of his work on community outreach, including organizing a matinee program to bring area schoolchildren to performances. Rose said he hopes to bring this kind of community outreach to Annenberg, noting that universities "tend to be too isolated from the communities that surround them." He also said collaborating with student groups in putting together programming for the center would be a priority because he "can't work in a vacuum." Diversifying the professional performances offered at the center, Rose said, might draw larger student audiences to Annenberg, although he insisted that he doesn't "have a specific agenda." "I think what I need to do when I get here is? listen to a lot of people and get a sense of what will work," he said. A "broad base" of offering gives the theater "much more stability," Rose added. Annenberg's reorganization process will not affect student performance groups, which Wachter said are "very strong." He added that he hopes Rose will succeed in attracting students to the center's professional performances. The search for the new managing director was conducted by a seven-member committee chaired by Wachter, which included College senior Liz Scanlon, the chairperson of the Performing Arts Council. Members of Annenberg's staff were initially told that the search would be completed by January, according to Goff. Goff had agreed to stay on at the center during the transition. But, as Wachter explained, the search committee "wanted to be thorough," adding that he was "more deliberate than [he] might've thought."