Concert Heralds Escondido’s Leap Into Arts Scene

It’s a concert ahead of its time: a performance Sunday by the San Diego Symphony alongside an Escondido construction site.

The occasion is part celebration for a year’s progress, part whetting of North County’s appetite for what’s to come.

By January, 1994, the construction is scheduled to be completed on the $74-million Center for the Arts, Escondido’s entry into top-drawer culture that will host everything from Broadway productions to opera, pop music and ballet. There will be art galleries and convention meeting rooms, banquet facilities and classrooms to teach children how to mold clay or create that next piece de resistance to be stuck to the refrigerator door.

Escondido, they say, is coming of cultural age--and some don’t want to wait any longer.

Thus, the Sunday night pops concert, a 7:30 freebie at Grape Day Park alongside Broadway at Valley Parkway. The park anchors a downtown block that already features City Hall and the Heritage Walk collection of historical buildings and now the arts center itself, sprouting up like a steel girder garden.

“It’s time to really start focusing the people of North County on this site and what’s in store, that this rather incredible facility is coming on-line, and here’s a taste of what’s to come,” said Oleg Lobanov, president and executive director of the year-old Center for the Arts.

Oleg’s staff lined up the symphony for its Sunday “popspourri” concert and another Aug. 28 featuring a collection of Mozart favorites. For supporters willing to pay $50 a pop, there will be cabaret seating, box dinners, wine and a tour of the arts complex that for now is little more than concrete and steel girders. Others can enjoy the concert free, with grass seating in an area large enough to accommodate 5,000 people.

The center has also lined up noon concerts for 12 consecutive Fridays starting July 10. The concert venue will again be alongside the construction site and feature musical flavors including jazz, classical, Dixieland, rhythm and blues, and bluegrass.

The idea here, Lobanov said, is to get downtown Escondido workers, merchants, shoppers and visitors used to the idea that culture is just around the corner, and to help feed the notion, now mostly a fantasy, that downtown can be a happenin’ place.

The concerts will trumpet the second year of operations for the Center for the Arts, a nonprofit organization led by a board of trustees that will operate the arts programs and events to be that will take place at the city-financed arts complex.

With its fiscal year closing June 30, the arts board so far has raised about $350,000, Lobanov said. Eventually, the board wants to raise $1 million or so annually to subsidize ticket sales and other revenues so the center breaks even.

“Having gone from zero to that amount in a recession is, in my humble opinion, a wonderful success story,” he said. “We’re trying to raise money at a time when many giving sources--most--are cutting back on their donations because of the economy. In the face of that, look what we’ve done.”

The city has kicked in another $236,000, and the rest of its opening annual budget of $800,000 came from interest on a city-funded endowment program.

For the fiscal year starting July 1, the center needs to finance a $1.4-million budget and hopes to raise $700,000 in donations.

Lobanov’s first year has been spent with a skeletal staff and consultants, hiring key lieutenants and dealing with some of the most basic issues: How much to charge for use of the convention meeting rooms, which, with the ability to seat 550 for dinner or 800 for meetings, would be the largest in North County. Which caterer should be given the food contract? How should the center’s various components be promoted and marketed? What kinds of art presentations should be invited into its three galleries? What sorts of art, dance and other classes should be offered to adults and children, as it takes over the instructional programs previously funneled through the Felicita Arts Foundation?

Perhaps the biggest single question is, what sorts of productions, musicals and shows will be staged at the complex’s centerpiece, the 1,500-seat Lyric Theatre? The theater will be larger than Poway’s 2-year-old, 815-seat Center for the Performing Arts, the 1,200-seat Theatre East (previously known as the East County Performing Arts Center) in El Cajon and downtown San Diego’s 1,450-seat Spreckels Theater--and half the seating capacity of the San Diego Civic Theatre.

Lobanov said bookings for the theater will begin within six months for the theater’s debut season.

“The stage is adequate to handle anything out there. It’s the seating capacity that will limit certain shows,” he said. “The first time that the ‘Phantom (of the Opera)’ goes on the road, it won’t play at 1,500-seat halls. But maybe it will the second time around.”

When the center was designed, much debate centered on the seating capacity of the theater, with some arguing that 2,500 seats or more would be needed to lure some shows to Escondido. Economics won out for the downsized theater, and, Lobanov says, “How many times do we need 2,500 or 3,000 seats?”

Besides the 25,000-square-foot conference center for trade shows, seminars, banquets and the like, and the Lyric Theatre, the Center for the Arts will include a Visual Arts Center with its sculpture garden and three galleries to display paintings, photographs, sculpture, crafts and folk art; a School of the Arts with workshops, classes and ceramic and photography studios and a 400-seat Community Theatre--with balcony--for smaller productions, film, fashion shows, lectures, chamber music and recitals.

But, for now, Lobanov is looking forward to Sunday night’s outdoors concert next to the hard-hat area.

“If symphonies have ever played on a stage alongside a construction site, it escapes me,” he said.