Arts Center Meeting to Focus on Study of Future Plans

Orange County Performing Arts Center officials are expected to meet Friday with a team of marketing and design consultants about a proposed study to shape the Center’s long-range plans.

The study would assess the county’s artistic growth over the next decade and what the Center should do to meet future community needs, including possible construction of a much-debated second theater next to Segerstrom Hall. The study will not, however, address the crucial issue of how to finance a Center expansion.

Tony Allen, who heads the Second Theater Committee, which will oversee the study for the Center’s board of directors, said in a recent interview that “it will not tell us whether funds can be raised.” He added, moreover, that “if it were to come in with the idea that we need a second theater as early as three years from now, I’d be very surprised.”

Center Chairman Henry T. Segerstrom and President Thomas R. Kendrick have declined to discuss the nature or the scope of the proposed study except to call it “broad” and “strategic.”

Sources familiar with feasibility studies say their parameters, if not their findings, tend to be shaped by what the client wants to know. Harrison Price Co., the Los Angeles-based firm that will present its proposed study to the committee Friday, generally does not look into the availability of funds.

However, the Center’s slow pace regarding the second theater has given rise to speculation about officials’ eagerness to embark on any new expansion.

“They’re on the horns of a dilemma because they’re strapped for cash and they’re afraid of a new capital campaign,” John Rau, a former board chairman and past president of the Center, said Wednesday. “By now they should have been well into the planning stages for a second theater.

“What they are trying to do is to renege on their commitment yet do so in such a way that nobody can get mad about it. They can say, ‘We went through all the motions.’ But I think their decison-making process is badly flawed with preconceptions. I have a gut feeling they’re going to come back and say there is not enough demand and too much expense.”

Rau, an outspoken critic of Center policies, served on the Center’s board of directors for nine years and left it in April, 1987. He was chairman of the board from 1982 to 1984 and president of the Center from 1980 to 1982.

Original plans for the Center called for a three-theater complex, which evolved into two theaters of 3,000 seats and 1,000 seats. Escalating construction costs forced a cutback. When the Center opened in 1986 at a cost of $73.3 million, it began operations with a single concert hall of 3,000 seats. A temporary parking lot stands where the second theater was to have been built. (Founders Hall, essentially a “black box” rehearsal space, is sometimes used for small-scale performances and children’s theatrical productions. It seats 300.)

Segerstrom and Kendrick vowed in a recent interview that the Center is committed to construction of a second theater because of anticipated programming demands by visiting and local arts groups. At the same time, however, both Center leaders praised Allen’s committee for its cautious pace.

“The whole thing is market-driven,” Segerstrom said. “It’s like any development. You can make up your mind what you’re going to build. But if there isn’t a market for it, you’ve built the wrong thing. That’s where the deliberateness of our committee is so valuable. They are looking at needs.”

Kendrick, who is also the Center’s chief operating officer, hastened to emphasize that “nobody is abandoning a second theater.” The committee just wants to “look at this whole thing again” to decide “on the kind of theater” that he says will be built.

Depending on whether a multipurpose hall is needed or a simpler recital hall, the cost of construction could vary substantially, Segerstrom said. “You could be talking the difference between a $15-million project and a $50-million project.”

In the meantime, there has been “absolutely no discussion” of actual costs within the Second Theater Committee, Allen said.

Nicholas Winslow, president of Harrison Price Co., will present the proposed study to the committee on Friday. He will be joined by Jill Bentley, the author of the proposal. The firm did the Center’s original economic viability study and conducted the Center’s search for a chief operating officer in 1985.

Steve Wolfe, manager of the New York office of Theatre Projects Consultants Inc., will also be at the meeting. Theatre Projects, which provides architectural services, has collaborated with Harrison Price on many studies, including plans for the Los Angeles Theater Center, the Civic Center in Escondido and the Civic Auditorium in Santa Monica.

Another company reportedly in the running for doing the study--Arts Development Associates in Minneapolis, Minn.--submitted its proposal to the Center last March. But it has not been asked to make a presentation.

“All we have heard from them is that their schedule for picking a firm had slipped considerably,” the president of the firm, Brad Morrison, said Wednesday. “They said they were going to make a decision by the end of May.”