Performing Arts Center: The Past and the Future : Arts: As the center marks its fifth birthday with a weeklong series of galas, leaders of the organization are looking to expand.

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, and 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 in Costa Mesa 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.

Other local arts leaders agree that 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 local groups.

In the process, the center itself has settled in as the county’s highest profile cultural landmark, and serves as a focus for a burgeoning social scene. A center-sponsored survey 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 answer that because they receive no government support, they cannot afford to subsidize works that do not sell tickets.

Still, 2,994-seat Segerstrom Hall has provided a premier venue for opera, large-scale musical theater and dance programs that were not regularly seen here before.

That 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 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 there is a local 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 severalfold. The center also was the impetus for creating Orange County’s first opera company, Opera Pacific.

“The center is doing what it was built to do,” says Thomas R. Kendrick, the center’s president. He came to Orange County from Washington’s Kennedy Center.

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 are considered full use. Free nights are needed for rehearsals, scenery building and removing and 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 multiperformance runs of dance, opera and musical theater.

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 considering the Irvine theater for a possible summer series of chamber and contemporary operas.

A second, smaller multi-use hall always was planned as part of the center, but the timing for a capital campaign to build it has never been deemed right. And plans for it and other 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 up the center’s scheduling logjam.

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 gave a ballpark range of $60 million to $80 million. And that was two years ago.

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 but may change its tune for the building of a new concert hall.

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

“You have to convince all the people that went through the process the first time (that a second hall is needed),” Kendrick acknowledged. “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 article.