What’s It Cost When the Piper Has to Pay?

If you and your group of operatic sopranos, krummhorn blowers and incipient ballerinas are thinking of renting the Center for an evening, what is it going to cost you?

And what do you get?

Well, that depends.

Charges begin at $2,500 or 10% of gross ticket sales, whichever is greater, if you are a nonprofit group. If you are a money-making commercial venture, the basic rate rises to $5,000 or 15% of gross ticket sales, whichever is greater. Neither rate has changed from the Center’s first year.

What you get for that money is, essentially, an empty building, heated and lit. You must pay every person needed to work there, from stagehands to box office people to ushers to the folks who sell refreshments. Lights and equipment, and special needs, such as risers for singers to stand on, will tack on even more fees.

Here is how the tabs broke down for the major groups using the Center last year:

* According to W. Andrew Powell, the orchestra’s marketing director, rent paid by the Pacific Symphony averaged $21,500 for each pair of its subscription concerts (the orchestra generally plays each of its programs twice, on succeeding days). The high for the year was $23,000; the low was $18,000. Before each concert, the orchestra paid an extra $2,500 to use the building for dress rehearsals.

“You can’t really halve those figures to get a per-concert cost,” Powell said. “It would be at least three-quarters of the total if you just had one concert, just from the logistics of the thing.”

* For the Pacific Chorale, costs ranged from $11,000 to $12,350 a night for the regular subscription concerts, according to Chorale development director Bonnie McLain.

* For the Master Chorale of Orange County, costs ranged from a low of $10,000 to a high of $22,000 for the massively staged Andrew Lloyd Webber program that opened last season, said Linda Yana, the chorale’s acting administrative director. (The Master Chorale presented three concerts at the Center. The third concert cost $14,300.)

* The Orange County Philharmonic Society paid from $6,000 to $19,000 for single events, depending on whether they were recitals or orchestral programs which included an extra rehearsal, according to press spokesman Bruce Hartman. “The average would be $10,000,” Hartman said.

* Opera Pacific rented the Center by the week, according to Martin Weil, the company’s managing director. “We did eight weeks of performances, at about $85,000 a week,” Weil said. “Total cost last year was almost $678,000. Rent and all other fees for rehearsal, performance, fees and charges were $336,396. Stagehands were an additional $341,436.”

Weil attributed the stagehand costs--about 10% higher than budgeted--to “the complexity of ‘Aida,’ which was a massive undertaking, and also (mounting) a new production, ‘Die Fledermaus,’ in the facility.”