Coming Attractions of the Performing Arts Center

You don’t have to wait any longer; the Orange County Performing Arts Center is ready for viewing. Or more accurately, previewing.

The $65.5-million theater building, which is designed to bring us Music Center-ish programs without the drive to L.A., is not scheduled to open until October of next year.

But now, nearly two years after breaking ground, the building is past its sprouting stage. Though little more than half built, it has developed most of its outer appearance, and for the first time you can see what a truly imposing building it will be.

You don’t have to go out of your way at all. The center is right across Bristol Street from the South Coast Plaza shopping center in Costa Mesa. Turn east on Town Center Drive, and as you round the corner, you’ll see the center dead ahead and from the best perspective. The architects spent considerable effort and a half-ton of money to create this view. No other approach to the building is even half as impressive.

At first, you don’t really see the building at all. What grabs your attention and holds it is the huge granite facade that faces you--a towering, perfectly flat, seemingly unadorned wall with a 126-foot-tall archway. It looms over you, even from a block away.

After you move closer (the construction border fence keeps you maybe 200 feet away), the texture and edges of the wall’s rusty-pink granite slabs become apparent. It all suggests the massiveness of ancient, hewn-stone temples and monuments, an unusual feeling in a modern building.

If you can con the center’s management into a tour (offering to donate a few thousand to the endowment fund will do very nicely), you can get past the chain-link fence and see the building really close up.

From this perspective, the feeling of massive antiquity is heightened, in spite of the quite modern design. Standing on the concourse that runs between the facade and the theater itself, the spaces seem larger than they are. Behind the arch will be huge, unbroken panes of glass--each 75 feet tall--enclosing the various levels of walkways inside the building. From these inside angles, the arch will display Costa Mesa, framing views that will be unique in that neighborhood of high-rise office buildings.

The arch so dominates the Performing Arts Center that it has been adopted as the center’s logo. They call it the Grand Portal. It does its job so effectively that you don’t notice how ordinary the rest of the exterior is by comparison.

The rest is poured concrete, tinted and textured to complement the granite of the arch. The arrangement of these exterior walls is pleasant but was more or less dictated by a more important consideration: the interior layout of the theaters. (There will be three, seating 3,000, 1,000 and 300.) “They designed this building from the inside out,” said Dick Kitzrow, the center’s spokesman.

Inside, the building is far from complete. Every cubic inch in the main theater seems filled with scaffolding, and the concourses and stairways behind the seating areas are cluttered with stores of building materials. Yet you can sense how well the architects have made small spaces seem large and large spaces seem intimate. When you have finished touring the building, it seems the outside dimensions are too small to contain all that you have seen.

The concourses and stairways, all of them looking outward into some other section of the theater or grounds, seem much more sweeping than they are. But inside the main theater, the unusual, asymmetrical layout of the seats makes the large room seem much smaller. (Kitzrow said the last row is 14 feet lower and 14 feet closer to the orchestra than at the Music Center.) The seating layout is the major innovation of this theater, and if it does what the architects and engineers say it will, this will be a remarkable place for both the eye and ear.

In effect, the theater has the usual orchestra and balcony seating, but each of those two levels has been divided into two subsections--like a loaf cut diagonally. The subsections have been slightly separated and offset, one a bit higher than its counterpart. The walls along the edges of these subsections run diagonally through the center of the auditorium, providing sounding boards that designers say will provide spectacularly better sound than the traditional, fan-shaped auditoriums. Acoustical tests of a one-tenth scale model have confirmed the design’s effectiveness, architects say.

All the better. After seeing the incomplete interior, I can only say that this odd seating arrangement seems to bring you closer to the stage. The forward rows of the balconies seem very close, indeed, and the seats at the very back, unlike those at, say, the Schubert Theatre, do not require a high-altitude pressure suit. Standing on the stage, you look out to the back of the room and feel it would be no strain to talk to the cheap seats.

Concerts will be even nearer than plays. For concerts, the stage will roll out over the orchestra pit and the first three rows of seats, placing all the strings on the audience side of the proscenium arch.

We’ve been reading about all this for a long time--a new theater and all the talent it will attract for a potentially large Orange County audience. But now there’s something you can actually see, and after actually seeing it, I’m ready to buy my tickets. Its success seems like a sure thing to me.