ORANGE COUNTY: CURTAIN UP

On the evening of Sept. 29, conductor Zubin Mehta will take the stage, lead the Los Angeles Philharmonic and officially launch the brand new Orange County Performing Arts Center. Arts and business leaders queried by Calendar for this article say the center reflects the area’s growing strength philanthropically as well as culturally.

More than 10 years in the planning and three years in the building, the privately financed institution reflects the efforts of 5,000 volunteers who raised $70.7 million for the building’s construction in Costa Mesa and another $65 million for its future endowment.

Center executives predict a full house--at $250 to $2,000 a ticket--at the 3,000-seat theater on opening night. Festivities begin at 7 p.m. with assorted welcomes and the national anthem, followed by the world premiere of William Kraft’s “Of Ceremonies, Pageants and Celebrations” (whose title incorporates the first letters of each word in the Orange County Performing Arts Center), which the center commissioned earlier this year. Led by New York Philharmonic music director Mehta, the orchestra will also play Aaron Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait,” with James Whitmore serving as narrator, and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

Among the first-year attractions: the New York City Ballet, the New York City Opera, the American Ballet Theatre, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, the Warsaw Philharmonic, the Orchestre National de France and the Orange County-based Pacific Opera and Pacific Symphony. The New York-based Pace Theatrical Group last week announced plans to book four touring musicals on a new subscription series.

How does it all look? Here are some opinions:

Esther Wachtell, executive vice president, Music Center, Los Angeles:

“We have operated at the Music Center throughout our history under the premise that what’s good for the arts is good for all of us. Our audiences grow. Look at the proliferation of small theaters that developed since the Mark Taper Forum opened.”

While no figures are available on the total number of Music Center theatergoers from Orange County, the Los Angeles Philharmonic reports that 7% of its Music Center audience and 8% of its Hollywood Bowl audience last season came from Orange County. Asked if the Music Center might lose some of its audience to the Orange County center, Wachtell said, “Our theaters are so well subscribed, it isn’t an issue. It’s our job to attract new audiences. . . . People who are supporting us have supported them and vice versa.”

Wachtell also sees opportunity ahead. “The Music Center is a producing center. We have five performing-arts organizations that produce original works of art in our theaters, which is why so it’s so expensive and very risky. In order to amortize some of those costs, we need additional audiences and performances so we need presenting houses. And we hope they’re (the Orange County center) going to let us do that. They’re opening with the Los Angeles Philharmonic so that’s a good beginning.”

Robert Reid, director, California Arts Council:

“I think it is going to be a boon for the whole region. . . . It’s similar to sports. When a second team moves into an adjacent market area, the other team begins to feel threatened. But the Rams are good for the Raiders and the Raiders are good for the Rams.”

Ian Campbell, general director, San Diego Opera:

“The statement the center makes about the people in Orange County is tremendously valuable: These are not just open-toe-sandaled technocrats. These are human beings who care about the cultural fabric. They aren’t just skating through it on their skateboards or their boogie boards.

“One of the remarkable things about that theater is that it came from the grass roots. In so many cities, some politician says we’re going to have the theater, the government is going to pay for it, and you’re going to enjoy it. This one clearly came from the community.”

Pebbles Wadsworth, director, UCLA Center for the Performing Arts:

“It strengthens the position of presenters in California because we now have another strong presenter to utilize in block bookings and bringing acts here. . . . Los Angeles is certainly the most important city in the country in terms of the Pacific Rim, and it enables us to bring artists here from that area.

“When (Japan’s Grand) Kabuki was coming (in 1985), it was going to the Kennedy Center and the Metropolitan Opera and Los Angeles wasn’t even a consideration. The Japanese American Cultural and Community Center and UCLA went in and said, ‘How can you overlook the most important city on the Pacific Rim?’ After long and hard negotiations, we were added to the tour. Now, with another major presenter in Southern California, we can start putting together tours ourselves from the Pacific Rim area.”

Roger L. Stevens, chairman, John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts:

“Congratulations to those responsible for building, financing and planning the center. It is in the right place and at the right time. It is bound to have a successful future and I hope we are a part of it.”

Michael Eisner, chairman and chief executive officer, Walt Disney Co.:

“Disneyland stands apart from any county, city or country,” but Eisner also said Orange County has been synonymous with Disneyland since the park opened 31 years ago. Disneyland’s “culture and philosophy will coexist beautifully with the Orange County Performing Arts Center,” he said.

Disney plans to support its new neighbor for many reasons, Eisner said. “We have decided that we really owe something back to Orange County. . . . Emotionally and financially, our business is in Orange County and many of the people who work at Disneyland live in Orange County.”

“Ours is a creatively driven company, whether it’s a new movie or a new park, and we are sympathetic to any creatively driven enterprise and highly enthusiastic about it.”

Wayne Shilkret, director of performing arts for the Ambassador International Cultural Foundation:

“When a company wants to come out here (to the West), the more venues it has and the more we share, the more possibility there is. It happens almost daily that we receive calls from managers asking, ‘Where else can we play?’ Now that we can say ‘Orange County,’ I think it can have a very large effect.”

While acknowledging that no one will know how the house works until it opens, Shilkret considers it “very promising--the shape of the house, the ambiance. . . . Usually, 3,000-seat houses have acoustical problems initially. I don’t predict that for this house because it seems to be built in a scale where the back wall is closer to the stage than most other halls. I stood on the stage during construction and felt it seemed to be a very warm house.”

Bill Bushnell, artistic producing director, Los Angeles Theatre Center:

While praising the center’s “tremendously positive influence,” Bushnell worries about “. . . their lack of resident constituent companies. . . . It may be difficult for people in Orange County to develop a kind of kinetic or emotional connection or identification because many of the companies performing aren’t local. And even the local companies performing there are booked into the house and not part of a larger concept the way the Philharmonic and Taper are with the Music Center. “

Francis Dale, president, Music Center, Los Angeles:

Interviewed just after a tour of the new Orange County facility, Dale ticked off several technological advances his own institution might emulate. He made note of the larger backstage and rehearsal facilities, of the more ample dressing room space, and the high proscenium. Dale said: “In our own continuous remodeling here, we are thinking about some of the things they are incorporating from the very beginning.”

The executive also considers the Orange County facility a potential customer for such services as the Center Theatre Group’s scene building and costume-renting operations. “Many of (the Center Theatre Group’s) services could be used and I’m sure will be used by the center. . . . It’s a matter of bidding. “

Bella Lewitzky, dancer and founder of the Dance Gallery:

“There are so few spaces for dance that sometimes a company is hard put to find a performing space. . . . I am delighted to find another space for dance and am devoutly hoping that there is a resilient floor on that stage. The New York City Ballet is among the groups opening that facility, and Mr. Balanchine (the late NYCB patriarch) was adamant that his dancers wouldn’t perform on spaces that weren’t resilient and let’s hope that policy still is current.”

Lewitzky also said she considers the center a turning point for the community it serves. “If a large and affluent community does not have a proper arts complex, it becomes suburbia to me.”

Nathan Leventhal, president, Lincoln Center:

It’s been more than 20 years since Lincoln Center opened on New York’s West Side, and Leventhal sees advantages and disadvantages of opening a major cultural center in the ‘80s.

One prime advantage, said Leventhal, is center executive director Kendrick, “who spent a good deal of time running Kennedy Center. It’s rare that you have somebody running a performing arts center who ran a performing arts center before. . . . It seems to me that the Orange County center (can draw on) the institutional experience of all of us, and the specific experience of Tom Kendrick.”

For instance, Kendrick has long talked with colleagues and tried to address the continuing scarcity of traveling shows, Leventhal said. “As we’re seeing a proliferation of performing arts centers around the country, a problem that has arisen, particularly for those without substantial resident companies, is a lack of available product. . . . We have these facilities but do we have enough product to put in them?”

Des McAnuff, artistic director, La Jolla Playhouse:

“The performing arts are about people, not about buildings. So it’s a question of what happens with the building. Who uses it? How talented are they? Does the audience enjoy going there? What it provides is an opportunity, not an accomplishment.”

It’s also been an opportunity for McAnuff and colleagues. While he feels a 3,000-seat house is too large for dramatic works, he considers it “a very nice size” for musicals like the La Jolla Playhouse-nurtured, Tony-winning “Big River.” That show will be at the center in 1987 as part of a musical theater series, along with three other shows presented by the center with New York-based Pace Theatrical Group.

Jack Shakely, president, California Community Foundation, which granted the center $300,000 from its Chevron Fund:

“Orange County’s ability to raise more than $70 million for the center was not only achieved but we do not see that there has been any diminution of fund raising for other organizations. . . . This leads us to believe it is new philanthropic money.”

What about raising all the additional money each year for operations and programming? “No problem. Orange County is an enormously wealthy community and sees itself as a community, which is such an important aspect of all this. I don’t think they’re going to have any problem at all keeping the level of philanthropy high.”

Peter Pastreich, executive director, San Francisco Symphony:

“Our experience in San Francisco (which opened its Davies Symphony Hall in September, 1980) was that a new concert hall breathes new life not only into our orchestra but into the whole cultural life of the city.”

When asked, Pastreich replied that his orchestra would “certainly be interested in playing there some time. . . . We certainly welcome the addition of another good concert hall to the state.”

Robert Fitzpatrick, president of CalArts and director of the Los Angeles Festival:

“If you look at a single gas station on a corner, it’s just a lonely gas station. If you have four gas stations, or four banks, it becomes the focal point for banking or buying gas. Every time I heard the debate that one major museum in this city was enough, and that we couldn’t afford the Museum of Contemporary Art as well as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, I cringed. My feeling was that not only could we, but LACMA (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) would be better because of the existence of MOCA (the Museum of Contemporary Art). And I think that has proved to be the case; the creation of MOCA served as a stimulus and both museums are flourishing.”

Fitzpatrick had a warning or two, however: “I think as a country we still suffer from the near fatal belief that the building is primary and after that everything is easy. Even after 20 years of existence, the Los Angeles Music Center still is paying the price for not having built an adequate endowment. . . . The real test of Orange County is not going to be simply a question of acoustics or building debt. It’s going to be year after year the adventurous programming that it will present which will require enormous underwriting and those funds are not yet guaranteed.

“It wasn’t designed to be a local concert hall but a national cultural center. Now we’ll see if it lives up to its promise.”

ABOUT THE COVER . . .

Calendar commissioned artist Phoebe Brunner to create a painting for the cover that depicts the arrival of the Orange County Performing Arts Center on the Southern California landscape.

Brunner, a third-generation Californian who resides in Santa Barbara, attended CalArts, Chouinard Arts School and the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara where she received a bachelor of arts degree in 1972. Her work is represented by the Louis Newman Gallery in Beverly Hills. Tom Lutgen of the Times editorial library assisted with the research for this article.