Orange County Arts Center Plans Cuts : Stage: There are too few ‘quality attractions’ to reasonably fill a 3,000-seat house, an official says.

The lingering recession has created a “quiet crisis” in the performing arts that is prompting the Orange County Performing Arts Center to cut the number of events it presents by at least 20% and scale back its budget slightly for 1992, center officials announced late last week.

The economic slump has caused arts organizations nationwide to cancel tours, postpone or scotch new works or fold entirely, thereby diminishing the range and number of productions available, center president Thomas R. Kendrick said at the organization’s annual meeting.

“There are simply too few quality attractions to offer a reasonable hope of filling a 3,000-seat house,” Kendrick said.

The center will be dark about eight weeks this summer and performances of touring Broadway musicals will drop by 26 to a total of 53 this year, he said. Such shows, along with the center’s annual ballet series, constitute the vast majority of performances presented by the center itself. (Other groups that use the center, such as the Pacific Symphony, Orange County Philharmonic Society and Opera Pacific, rent the facility and assume all financial risk for their own presentations.)

“The reservoir of identifiable future attractions is swiftly running dry,” Kendrick said.

However, by 1993 and 1994, he said, touring Broadway revivals--as opposed to new shows--may be somewhat more plentiful. (The center already is slated as a tour stop for national productions of the “Will Rogers Follies” in 1993 and “Phantom of the Opera” in 1994.) Kendrick said the center will go ahead this year with its annual jazz series, American popular song performances and chamber-music programs.

Projected expenses at the center for 1992 have been reduced by $1.5 million to $17.4 million and revenues are expected to drop $3.7 million to $11.9 million, Kendrick said. That will leave a gap between expenses and revenue of nearly $5.6 million, but center officials set aside $800,000 from a 1991 fund-raising surplus to reduce the 1992 gap, now projected at $5.2 million (including about $400,000 in capital costs). The transfer of funds helped officials “hold the line” on the amount of private donations--$5.2 million, the same amount raised in 1991--that will be needed this year, Kendrick said.

Ticket sales are meeting projections so far and ticket prices will not be raised in 1992, Kendrick said. A hiring freeze, begun in 1990 shortly before the recession began, has recently been lifted, he said.