I guess I would ask the question why SHOULD Los Angeles be a major theater city when that's clearly not its primary show business industry? Why does Los Angeles have half a dozen huge film studios each with dozens of sound stages and numerous smaller ones and yet New York with thousands of available actors and billions of dollars in available capital only has a mid sized one in Queens and not much else?
New York has a history dating back to the 1600's and a history of live theater that actually got its start in the 1700's and grew in the 1800's. Without the means to record performances, that was one of the main forms of live entertainment as the city's population grew. It also experienced an influx of immigrants from various points in Europe that were involved in theater in their homelands and sought to recreate theater to feel more at home, the growth of the Yiddish theater being a perfect example. Over the years, people who were interested in performing in that medium gravitated there filling the city with available talent to continue its growth. Los Angeles on the other hand, although founded in 1781 was a small town largely until the early part of the 1900's when silent films and then talkies were all the rage and the city experienced explosive growth but unlike New York, that growth did not include a sizeable portion of European immigrants with a tradition of live theater in their blood. But Los Angeles had the talent, the resources of people moving west to build a career and plenty of cheap land and labor to build film studios. Most importantly, it had a year round temperate climate which made location shooting much more economical than almost any other place in the country with few filming days lost to bad weather, so it's logical that the film industry grew up there and became the dominant show business industry.
So, just because Los Angeles is a show business town, there's no reason it should be expected to have a live theater scene that rivals Broadway any more than New York should be expected to have a film and television industry that rivals Southern California.
With that said, if you think the Los Angeles theater scene is "2 main theatres and several smaller ones", you clearly don't know the Los Angeles theater scene. You have the huge houses like the Pantages and the Dolby in Hollywood, the Ahmanson in L.A. and the Segerstrom in Costa Mesa that dwarf the size of any Broadway theater and get the tours and periodically sit down productions that can last several months to occasionally several years. You have a number of quality midsized theaters, most of which would satisfy the seating capacity requirement to be considered Broadway theaters like The Mark Taper Forum, The Kirk Douglas, The Geffen, The Pasadena Playhouse, La Mirada Theater, South Coast Rep and a number of others that host excellent original productions some of which ultimately transfer to Broadway or Off-Broadway and then you have dozens and dozens of smaller 99 seat theaters putting on some outstanding shows that would rival almost any off-Broadway house often with recognizable names from TV and Film who want to keep busy in between movie and TV projects. Some of the pre-eminent 99 seat houses are the Odyssey with 3 theaters, the Road Theater Company, East West Players, A Noise Within, the Echo Theater Company and dozens of others too numerous to mention. And I haven't even included anything going on in San Diego, just L.A. and Orange County.
So there's plenty of great theater in Los Angeles if you know where to look. Does it have 41 500+ seat theaters to rival Broadway? No, but there's no reason why it should.
