ARTS CENTER : HALL NAMED FOR SEGERSTROMS

The Orange County Performing Arts Center’s main theater, which opens Sept. 29, will be formally named after the Segerstrom family in a dedication ceremony Sunday at the Costa Mesa site.

The family, which runs the C.J. Segerstrom & Sons development firm, is being honored as the Center’s chief benefactor. Their contributions include a donation of $6 million.

Members of the family, including Henry Segerstrom, managing partner of the firm and fund-drive chairman for the Center, will speak at the unveiling ceremony for the plaques outside the 3,000-seat multipurpose theater. The ceremony will begin at 2 p.m.

The Segerstrom family has been the Center’s best-known patron since 1979, when the family announced the gift of the five-acre site for the arts complex in the family’s South Coast Plaza Town Center office and hotel sector.

As fund-drive chairman, Henry Segerstrom has supervised a campaign that has topped $65 million in pledges and gifts toward the $70.7-million construction cost of the main theater. (Also planned is a 1,000-seat second theater, projected to be built in the late 1980s.)

(The South Coast Repertory Theatre’s 507-seat main playhouse is named Segerstrom Auditorium, after the family. In 1976, the Segerstroms donated a two-acre site in the same Town Center area for a permanent SCR complex.)

Other speakers at the dedication Sunday will include Timothy Strader, Center board president; Thomas Kendrick, Center executive director, and New York sculptor Richard Lippold.

Lippold is here to prepare the installation of his “Fire Bird,” a 60-foot-high sculpture to be located in the front entry of the theater. The work was commissioned by the Segerstrom family.

No date has been set for completion of the Lippold installation, although the sculpture is to be in place before the Center opens Sept. 29, Center officials said.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Zubin Mehta, will perform at the opening concert.