Local Groups Pay a High Price to Perform

So what does it cost?

When local groups began planning budgets last year to cover their first season at the new Orange County Performing Arts Center, they anticipated some whopping increases.

Pacific Chorale’s business manager, Rita Majors, who was used to paying about $600 a night at Santa Ana High School, budgeted $11,000 for each performance at the new facility.

As it turned out, however, her $11,000 figure was the low for the year. The high for the group was $17,500.

Virtually all the groups shared Majors’ discovery that moving to the Center was an expensive proposition. Yet none of them regret the move--or contemplate a return to Santa Ana High School.

“Our basic rent was $6,200 to $6,400,” Majors said. But that didn’t include costs for lights, piano, risers for the chorus, printing of tickets, personnel for the box office and entrances and other lesser fees. “It’s astonishing. Then you add stagehands’ costs, which came to almost $4,000 (more on top of those other fees).

“And still (Center President) Tom Kendrick insists that we don’t pay (what it costs the Center to operate) for a day. He says it costs them more to perate than what the groups bring in.”

The basic fee for nonprofit arts organizations is $2,500 or 10% of the gross, whichever is greater, according to Kendrick. (For commercial profit-making groups, the fee is $5,000 or 15% of gross ticket sales.) And they are competitive, he said.

“We didn’t put up our rates without researching them,” Kendrick said. “We set the rates knowing what the national rates are around the country and particularly in California.”

While base rates may be low at some centers, Kendrick said, there are often extra charges for cleaning, utilities or stagehands, among others.

“The point is, you can’t just call up a center and ask what they charge,” he said. “You need to have their rate sheets and know what all other charges are and know what percentage of the gross . . . (they) are. You will find that they all more or less average out.”

Fees for the Master Chorale of Orange County have ranged from about $12,000 to $26,000, with average costs of about $15,000, according to former administrative director Richard Tollefson.

“The highest expense,” Tollefson said, “was for our opening, Oct. 12, with the Joffrey Ballet, which required a fair amount of rehearsal space and some major changes to the stage during the production.”

While it has been expensive, Tollefson called the move to the Center “obviously vital to the growth and expansion” of the Master Chorale.

For Pacific Symphony, costs ranged from $3,696 for a Saturday morning family performance to $34,587 for three “Shirley Jones’ Christmas” programs, according to executive director Louis G. Spisto. But the regular evening concerts ranged from about $19,500 to $24,500, depending on the number of rehearsals.

Opera Pacific rented by the week at costs ranging from $75,000 to $150,000, according to marketing director Luke Bandle. “The low was for ‘West Side Story,’ which had no load-in (of sets) or load-out (charges),” Bandle said.

“It’s not an inexpensive proposition to present theater in Performing Arts Center,” Bandle said, adding that, on the other hand, “I don’t think we could have gotten 15,000 subscribers if we weren’t at the Center.”

The Orange County Philharmonic Society paid from $7,000 to $17,000 for single events, including a rehearsal beforehand, according to executive director Erich Vollmer. The majority of events fell toward the low end of the range, he said.

Vollmer said that overall, he was “very surprised at the cost of stagehands” and especially “chagrined” at the cost of moving the orchestra shell (a sectional “fly-away” structure placed behind and above the players to help focus the sound toward the audience).

“For us, to move the shell went from a low of $330 to a high of $2,900--just to move the shell. And that doesn’t include other stagehand costs,” he said.

“I think it’s really a crying shame. All the groups have to contend with that. I think that is really the most unfortunate situation that we have to deal with.”

Kendrick said, however, that while local groups accounted for half of the Center’s events last year, they paid only about $500,000 during its first year, hardly enough to offset the facility’s first-year operating deficit of about $4.1 million.

What they pay, Kendrick said, covers only about one-third of the facility’s overhead costs, which include maintenance, cleaning, manpower, utilities and capital replacement costs, as well as general office overhead. “That’s the problem in running an arts center, you have to subsidize it.”

For all that, Kendrick said costs will be frozen at current rates for next year. “I can’t guarantee that in the following year,” he said, adding, “We should be given credit” for holding the line on fees.

Kendrick said he can understand the complaints about costs of moving the orchestral shell, but he pointed out that is what enables the Center to function as a multipurpose hall. “The great advantage is lower overhead because you only have one hall; the great disadvantage is that you are trying to put four disciplines into one hall,” he said. “I’m not arguing it’s not expensive to change over. But it takes less than four hours. . . . We spent $1.5 million to automate it, and that primarily benefits the regional groups.”

In the future, local arts groups may be faced with raising ticket prices and beating the bushes for more corporate support. But none seems ready to abandon the center.

Still, Vollmer said he had no regrets about moving to the Center.

“Without question, it was worth it,” he said. “Who would go back to Santa Ana High School? We all wish expenses (at the Center) weren’t quite so exorbitant.”