THE CENTER : <i> A Year of Discovery </i> : Locally Based Artists and Nearby Firms Enjoying Prosperity

For Cynthia Ellis, the Orange County Performing Arts Center has been more than inspiration. It has meant a living for the 28-year-old flutist and piccolo player from Brea.

Ellis and her trumpeter husband, Tony, have increased their combined incomes by 50% since the 3,000-seat Center opened last Sept. 29.

And for violinists Edward and Roxie Persi, the Center has not only provided more work, it has changed the way artists--and perhaps the public--view Orange County.

“It creates an atmosphere where we feel like we are in a cultural hub,” said Edward Persi, 36, of Placentia. “There is exposure to some very fine playing.”

The $70.7-million Center has also been a boon to local commerce, acting as a magnet drawing customers and tenants to surrounding hotels, restaurants and other business places.

But nowhere has the impact of the Center’s first year been greater than on the community of performing artists and local companies.

Arts groups report that attendance records have swelled beyond expectations since they have moved into Segerstrom Hall. And while the groups remain concerned about the relatively high cost of putting on their productions at the Center, none so far has plans to head for cheaper digs.

“There were people who said none of us (local groups) could fill the 3,000 seats,” said Keith Clark, music director of the Santa Ana-based Pacific Symphony, which reported capacity or near-capacity attendance for its 16-performance classical subscription series at the Center. “Well, most of us believed we could, because all the signs of our growth had indicated we were capable of it.”

Better still, from the perspective of many arts organizers, the Center has helped local groups reach previously untapped audiences.

“The first season confirmed the audiences were there in Orange County, and that significantly large numbers were first-time concert-goers,” said Erich Vollmer, executive director of the Orange County Philharmonic Society. The society’s presentations of 12 touring ensembles, including the Chicago Symphony, were sold out.

The five major Orange County performing arts organizations have reported dramatic increases in their budgets for the coming season and ambitious plans for productions that would lure more subscribers.

While these are ambitious times for the local groups, their directors are not forgetting that when the novelty of the new Center has worn off, they may suffer a drop in subscribers.

“There’s still the factor . . . of people becoming more selective and not willing to buy a whole season,” said one local arts administrator, who asked not to be named. “Some of these people aren’t coming back, at least in the same way.”

But meanwhile, musicians and other performing artists are at least finding growing opportunities to work where they live, largely because of the Center.

“We have more work,” said Beverly Reidling, executive assistant to the president of Local 7 of the American Federation of Musicians.

“My opinion is that the Orange County Performing Arts Center is encouraging the growth” to support union programs comparable to those offered by its big-city cousin, Local 47, in Los Angeles, she said. Officials of Santa Ana-based Local 7 said there has been a 17.59% growth in income for its 1,380 members in 1985-87, adding that under consideration now are contracts that require employer contributions to health and pension funds.

Reidling said the local itself has grown by 8.33% in the last year as more musicians have found the expanding professional horizons in the county. Now, about 55% of its members live in Orange County, while 37% live in Los Angeles and Long Beach.

The Center--which offered 215 performances of dance, opera, musicals and symphonic works in its first season--creates work for musicians in three ways: It provides a stage for orchestral groups, it offers a home to the newly created Opera Pacific and it presents touring Broadway-style musicals that need pit orchestras. And Local 7 has contracts with most groups that present music regularly at the Center, including the Pacific Symphony, the Orange County Master Chorale and Opera Pacific.

Another spinoff, musicians said, has been a demand for more musical accompaniment at dances and parties.

“It’s made a great difference for me,” said Ellis, who plays flute and piccolo in the Pacific Symphony when she is not taking other jobs around the county.

She said she played at the Center in nine performances of “The Nutcracker” ballet, 22 of the musical “West Side Story” and three of “La Boheme,” and in about 35 concerts with the Pacific Symphony.

Placentia violinist Persi said he believes the Center could create even more opportunities for local musicians if it offered lower rates to performing organizations that rent the space. But both he and his violinist wife seem satisfied to be exposed to the caliber of international musicians and artists that now perform in Orange County.

Mickey Nadel, a Los Angeles bassist, said he joined Local 7 in 1978 in part because he sensed that Orange County was on the verge of cultural growth.

According to Nadel, who also works as a contractor of free-lance musicians for traveling Broadway shows, assembling specialized, temporary ensembles for specific needs, the Center has created “a great deal of employment in Orange County.”

Comprehensive studies are yet to be completed on the Center’s first-year impacts on restaurants, bars, hotels and other commercial enterprises that cater to the theatergoing, arts-minded crowd. But its reverberations in the business community appear to be significant, said Betty Moss, executive director of the Orange County Business Committee for the Arts.

“The only word (for the impact) is simply--tremendous,” said Lucien Truhill, president of the Orange County Chamber of Commerce. “No question about it. It is bringing about the status of a first-class economy.”

For the Westin South Coast Plaza hotel--located near the Center and South Coast Repertory Theatre in the emerging complex of high-rise office towers, up-scale restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, trendy lunch haunts and cocktail lounges--the Center has brought in such big-name guests as Mikhail Baryshnikov and Zubin Mehta.

While the Westin has pretty much been the only game in town in what has been dubbed the “South Coast Metro” area, during the last year competition arrived in the form of the Beverly Heritage Hotel, across from the Center, and the Red Lion Inn, a short drive away.

Open less than three months, the Red Lion Inn has already been chosen as the host hotel for an Opera Pacific benefit in January featuring tenor Luciano Pavarotti, according to hotel general manager Russell Cox.

“As a result of that alone, we are anticipating significant business,” Cox said.

Restaurants within walking distance of the Center are finding the Center a boost for their clientele.

The Copa De Oro restaurant, a few blocks from the Center, has felt a “great impact” and as a result is offering more pre-concert dinners and similar specials, general manager Amando Sanchez said.

Restaurateur John Pohl said he has expanded the hours of his nearby bistro because of the demand and has seen “a tremendous increase, too, in repeat business.”

The Center’s opening hasn’t, however, spurred a heavy demand for Happy Star hamburgers at a couple of nearby Carl’s Jr. restaurants. Spokesman Patrick Flynn said Carl’s Jr. branches in South Coast Plaza mall and at the corner of Sunflower and Bristol streets have seen “no discernible increase” in business attributable to Center performances.

People are not only attracted to the area to knosh or hoist a glass, they are moving there to live.

At the Lakes at South Coast apartment complex across from the Center, five of a projected nine apartment towers have been 95% leased before they even opened, leasing consultant Marilyn Decker said.

She attributed much of their success to the location across from the imposing Performing Arts Center, which provides what she called the “most cosmopolitan” area in Orange County. “The traffic generated (by the Center) . . . absolutely has impact on our activity,” she said.

The Center and a sense of an emerging cultural hub in Orange County has even been used as a recruitment tool by local corporations seeking to entice topflight employees.

“We know that when people are seeking to move here for jobs, cultural amenities is one of the first things they ask, along with what’s here in education and in recreation,” said Moss, the executive director of the county’s business committee for the arts, an informational and support organization created by Fluor Corp. and other corporations in Orange County.

Paul Schimmel, chief curator of the Newport Harbor Art Museum in Newport Beach, said the growing number of cultural institutions in the county all act as a draw to the best and brightest.

“Of course, the presence of our museum, the Laguna Art Museum, UC Irvine and South Coast Rep, and now the Center--these all play a strong role (in recruiting),” Schimmel said. “With this kind of high-level cultural mix, this area is more than ever a place in which to work.”