5-Year-Old Arts Center Already Feels Need to Grow

Five years down the road, the story has started to take on a mythic glow.

Orange County’s heavy hitters wanted a performing arts hall, so they went out and built one themselves--beating the bushes for more than $70 million without going to government for a penny.

When it opened, the Orange County Performing Arts Center was heralded as a symbol of cultural independence from Los Angeles. Now, as the Center marks its fifth birthday with a weeklong series of galas, leaders of the organization are looking to expand, to accommodate the growth they have spawned.

Other local arts leaders say the Center has succeeded in raising the county’s cultural profile--bringing in touring attractions of a level not seen here before, while at the same time providing the impetus for a new local opera company and expanding the audiences for existing Orange County groups.

In the process, the Center itself has settled in as the county’s highest-profile cultural landmark, serving as a focus for a burgeoning social scene. A Center-sponsored survey released this year found that 86% of county residents are aware of the facility, and 80% have a favorable impression.

“I think that it has helped raise standards in the arts,” said David Emmes, producing artistic director at South Coast Repertory, across the street from the Center in Costa Mesa. “Not only does it enrich the audience, but it educates.”

Arts educators say they are starting to see an impact. “I’m quite overwhelmed at how many people are interested in dance that wouldn’t have been in the past,” said James Penrod, chairman of the UC Irvine dance department. “No question that it’s been a boon to people at the university and the dance community.”

The Center has drawn some criticism as well, in part for what some have called a lack of adventurous programming. Center officials respond that because they receive no government support, they cannot afford to subsidize works that do not sell tickets.

There has also been criticism that the Center does not serve Orange County’s diverse ethnic communities. “The multicultural community has not been impacted by the Center’s presence,” said Paul Apodaca, curator of Native American Art at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana.

“The Center has great potential to bring wide attention to the classical arts of the multicultural communities, which now dominate so much of Orange County’s population,” he added. “An outreach focus that could create programs and accessibility to the Center’s performances could have far-reaching benefits.”

Still, 2,994-seat Segerstrom Hall has provided a premier venue for artistic forms--opera, large-scale musical theater and dance--that were not regularly seen in the county before. This has been particularly true in the dance realm, with the first West Coast appearance of the New York City Ballet in a dozen years, visits by the Kirov and the Paris Opera Ballet, and regular stops by American Ballet Theatre and the Joffrey.

The Center has given visiting classical orchestras a more upscale hall than the old Santa Ana High School auditorium, and has provided a setting for recitals by such classical superstars as Leontyne Price, Luciano Pavarotti and Itzhak Perlman.

It has proven that there is an Orange County audience for such events. Paid attendance for all events at the Center has averaged just shy of 80% of capacity for the first five years--compared to what Center officials say is a national average for comparable halls of about 65%.

The Center has pushed the county’s biggest classical music organizations, the Pacific Symphony and the Orange County Philharmonic Society, to new levels, making possible a much bigger audience and multiplying the groups’ budgets several fold. The Center also was the impetus for creating Orange County’s first opera company, Opera Pacific, from scratch.

“The Center is doing what it was built to do,” says Thomas R. Kendrick, the facility’s president, who came to Orange County from the Kennedy Center in Washington in 1985. But in a sense it is doing something more than it was built to do, because the previous administration had planned the building as strictly an import house, all but rejecting the participation of local performing groups.

“When the Center was initially built, this was not going to be a place for the likes of the Pacific Symphony,” said Louis Spisto, the orchestra’s executive director. “We’ve proven we have a right to be there. . . . If there is a clear success story at the Center, it has got to be the Pacific Symphony.”

The orchestra’s ticket sales have gone from $202,780 the year before the Center opened to $2,928,521 in 1990-91. Spisto said the organization essentially has experienced in five years the equivalent of about 25 years’ growth for a typical regional orchestra.

David DiChiera, artistic director of Opera Pacific, echoed the sentiment: “We’ve grown in five short years to a level that many opera companies in other communities have taken 10 or 15 years to achieve.”

And while there have been and are growth pains for groups using Segerstrom Hall, leaders of all the organizations acknowledge that the Center has launched them to a new level that they could not otherwise have achieved. “It impacted us financially and artistically,” said Philharmonic Society executive director Erich Vollmer. “It increased our visibility, and exposed us to a much broader audience.”

Ironically, the growth of the local groups and the Center’s own success with its dance, Broadway and jazz series has compounded the need for a long-promised second hall, pushed back indefinitely by the economic recession.

Segerstrom Hall reached its projected “full utilization” in the first year. There were 226 performances there in 1990 (not counting morning children’s events), down from 237 in 1989 but still above the 205 nights that consultants pegged as full use. Free nights are needed for rehearsals, move-in and move-out dates for stage productions and routine maintenance, Kendrick said.

The tight schedule has created what Kendrick calls a booking nightmare. Single dates for visiting classical performers sometimes must be booked as much as three years in advance, reducing the Center’s flexibility in scheduling multi-performance runs of dance, opera and musical theater.

Segerstrom Hall’s full schedule also has affected Opera Pacific, which would also like to expand its offerings. “We are at a plateau in terms of the number of weeks that can be guaranteed to us on a yearly basis,” said company director DiChiera. “At this point, our growth is restricted by the availability of time rather than the availability of audience.”

Some groups already have expanded to other venues: Pacific Symphony, with a five-concert summer series at the Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre, and the Philharmonic Society, which co-presents a chamber music series at the 750-seat Irvine Barclay Theatre. Opera Pacific is exploring a summer series of chamber and contemporary operas, with the Irvine theater as a possible venue, DiChiera said.

A second, smaller multiuse hall was always planned as part of the Center, but the timing for a capital campaign to build it has never been deemed right. Meanwhile, plans for it and additional halls have been evolving.

A marketing study completed in 1989 called for a four-hall complex, and put the highest priority on a hall of between 2,300 and 2,800 seats built specifically for classical music. A multipurpose hall of fewer than 1,000 seats, for theater, recitals and chamber music, was a close third. A fourth theater of 1,200 to 1,500 seats was proposed but remains the most distant possibility, Kendrick said.

The 2,500-seat concert hall would do the most to clear the Center’s scheduling logjam. Single-date classical events would go into the new hall, freeing Segerstrom Hall for more and longer-term engagements of dance, opera and musical theater.

But the price tag for such a hall would at least approach, if not surpass, the $72.8 million needed to build Segerstrom Hall. The marketing survey--conducted by Harrison Price, which consulted on the campaign to build Segerstrom Hall--gave a ballpark range of $60 million to $80 million. And that was two years ago.

As long as the recession lingers, the Center is not offering a time line for funding or building the hall. But while it waits for economic clouds to pass, it has commissioned a nearly complete “specific needs” study for the hall, the document that would be handed to an architect when and if the time comes for an actual design. Completing the study now could shave up to two years off the planning process if a campaign for the hall is launched, Kendrick said.

A significant sidelight to future plans is the possible role of the Pacific Symphony, or a combined Pacific Symphony-Orange County Philharmonic Society, in building the hall. The Center has stayed away from resident affiliations in Segerstrom Hall but may change its tune for the building of a new concert hall. While there is some skepticism within the Center organization about such a role, Kendrick said, the orchestra could become a partner in its construction and even a part owner.

The biggest questions remain: Will Orange County be up to another fund-raising campaign of that magnitude? Can the benefactors of Segerstrom Hall be persuaded to dig deep and give again?

It may not be easy, Kendrick acknowledged: “You have to convince all the people that went through the process the first time (that a second hall is needed.) There is a real need for this Center to grow to meet its potential, to become the Center that is envisioned.”

Times staff writer Chris Pasles contributed to this story.

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Big Crowds at Arts Center

The Performing Arts Center’s average paid attendance for all events is staying well above the national figure of about 65%. Paid percentage of capacity: 1986*: 91.0% ‘87: 79.1% ‘88: 77.7% ‘89: 80.6% ‘90: 76.8% ‘91**: 81.3% Avg.: 79.5% * Partial year: Sept.--Dec. ** As of Sept. 30, 1991 Source: Orange County Performing Arts Center