Hussein Blamed for Arts Center’s Problems : Entertainment: But Thomas R. Kendrick, Center president, admits that some of his programming choices were ‘risky.’

Faced with potentially crippling downturns at the box office and in fund-raising efforts, the president of the Orange County Performing Arts Center, Thomas R. Kendrick, is blaming world politics and resulting troubles in the economy. But he does acknowledge that several of the programming choices that ended in financial failure were chancy undertakings, even under normal circumstances.

Kendrick said the Center has suffered $1 million in losses this year in ticket sales alone.

“The wall came down” on the Australian ballet in early August, he said, despite the excellent reviews the company had received in New York and Washington. “We woke up in the morning and Hussein had invaded Kuwait. (Ticket sales) stopped, just about like that. It just didn’t move. And then it deepened.

“During the summer we used to go out there and wonder where all the people had gone, (if) they really had gone to the beach. And maybe they did, because the beach didn’t cost money.”

In addition to the $250,000 loss (called a “subsidy”) budgeted to underwrite the ballet, the center lost $26,000 in ticket sales.

Two weeks later came a co-production with the La Jolla Playhouse of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” which also was well-reviewed. But again, there was bad news.

“That was the troop commitments, the beginning of the budget crisis buildup,” Kendrick recalled. “It all hit in there. That wall that had come down the day after the Kuwaiti invasion just stayed there and got worse.”

Kendrick said that “Forum’s” failure cost $400,000, including the center’s production investment.

“There’s no argument that (‘Forum’) was being done in the summer, which is risky,” Kendrick admitted. “There was no subscription, which is risky, and there was no star--it had all those things against it. . . . We knew a year and a half ago, two years ago, when we got involved with Australia and ‘Forum,’ that these were risk projects because they were occurring in the summer period, which is a risk period for all arts.”

But, he continued, “the success was so extraordinary in the summer of 1989 that it gave us the impetus to go forward in 1990. Remember, we didn’t have a crystal ball of what the economy would be in 1990.”

A late adjustment the Center made in programming, picking up a return engagement of “Starlight Express” for the first week in September, also proved to be a disappointment.

“We did engage ‘Starlight’ to provide some insurance,” Kendrick said, largely because it had drawn strong houses in May when it was part of the Center’s Broadway series.

But the second time around, “the best you can say about ‘Starlight’ is we broke even,” Kendrick said. “It makes you nervous when you’re in a hall and it isn’t full.”

The New York City Ballet, which sold out in its last appearance at the Center, sold only 85% of the seats in late September. “I don’t consider that any kind of triumph,” said Kendrick, noting that the subsidy for the New York Ballet was even larger than that for the Australian Ballet.

There were still more losses in October when Britain’s D’Oyly Carte Opera Company performed “Pirates of Penzance” and “The Mikado.” Just over half the seats were sold, despite good reviews. People “didn’t buy anything but the expensive seats,” Kendrick said.

“To some extent,” he added, “(D’Oly Carte) got lost in the events that were going on” in the “Festival of Britain,” in which various arts events were scheduled in conjunction with a retail promotion at nearby South Coast Plaza.

There may be more losses to come, Kendrick warned.

“There are some things planned, and they are really long-term investment type things, that perhaps we wouldn’t have done if we had 20-20 foresight,” he said. “We cannot move overnight to adjust.”

The major bright spot, Kendrick said, is that the current Broadway series closed out subscriptions at 78% of capacity, with almost no promotion. “It was a strong series,” Kendrick explained. “It had the element of a sure thing. . . . People are buying the sure thing. They are buying what is safe. “