Cerritos Venue No Problem for Center, Officials Say : Presentations: Competition is unlikely, they say, because the L.A. County hall is smaller than the one in Costa Mesa.

Officials at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, and those at the regional performing and presenting groups that use the Costa Mesa facility, have been discounting any possible competition with the brand-new Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, which opens today.

While there is some overlap in performers scheduled in the upcoming months--Pinchas Zuckerman in recital and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, for example--arts officials are saying for the record that there is enough audience to go around.

“I don’t suspect it’s going to have a great impact on our audience,” said Erich Vollmer, executive director of the Orange County Philharmonic Society. The society sponsors local performances by touring orchestras and is the organization most likely to come up against direct booking competition with the Cerritos center, which sits barely a mile over the border in Los Angeles County.

Officials of the Orange County center, which presents touring dance and musical theater productions that play the hall, say they don’t anticipate a problem, largely because of the different sizes of the venues. Segerstrom Hall, at 2,994 seats, will generally play host to Broadway and dance performances of a different scale than will be able to play the new Cerritos hall, which can be expanded from 900 to 1,963 seats. (There will be exceptions, though. A touring production of “Meet Me in St. Louis,” which visited the Orange County center in 1991 plays a week at the Cerritos Center starting Tuesday.)

“If you were talking to me about a 3,000-seat hall going up within 25 miles, that would be a different matter,” OCPAC President Thomas R. Kendrick said. As it is, “I think (Cerritos) is an exciting, flexible center. It’s going to add to the landscape.”

Competition isn’t the only possible effect of the Cerritos center’s opening, though. Since its first year, Segerstrom Hall has been booked to what officials say is “full capacity,” leading some arts officials to publicly express frustration at their inability to expand the number of dates they can play there. Center officials say they must book multiple-engagement dance and theater runs around concerts and other single-date events that sometimes are reserved years in advance.

Some of that pressure to expand has been cooled by the prolonged economic slump and a consequential drop in the number of touring attractions. But if the economy begins to turn around, might Cerritos prove an attractive venue for local groups looking for a place to grow?

Victor Gotesman, general manager of the Cerritos center, has made much of the booking flexibility allowed by the fact that the new hall has no resident companies. (The Orange County center, although it is considered home by many local groups, has declined to confer “resident” status on any of its regular tenants.) At the same time, Gotesman has expressed interest in eventually establishing regular relationships with performing groups in Southern California.

Officials of some Orange County groups are cautiously returning that interest. David DiChiera, executive director of Opera Pacific, has toured the Cerritos hall and pronounced himself impressed with the facility. It could be a site for a chamber-opera series, DiChiera said, something that has been in the company’s long-range plans for years; the Irvine Barclay Theatre, with 750 seats, is another possible location.

Such a series would require significant underwriting, a fact that will keep it on the drawing boards for now. “I feel we need to have a comfort level that the economy has really turned itself around,” DiChiera said.

Another group that has expressed interest in performing at Cerritos is the Pacific Symphony. “It would be a great place for a run-out (concert) or even a pops program,” said executive director Louis G. Spisto. He noted that he has not, however, discussed such an arrangement with Cerritos officials.

While it does not currently tour, the Pacific Symphony is bringing one of its concerts to Palm Desert this season and has performed at the South Bay Center for the Performing Arts in Torrance. Playing Cerritos is “something that we would desire,” Spisto said. “There would be no reason not to.”

The Cerritos Center has landed at least one big attraction that would have seemed a natural for the dance-conscious Orange County center: the much-hyped pairing of dancers Twyla Tharp and Mikhail Baryshnikov. And Vollmer said he was not able to book the respected St. Louis Symphony this year because of a booking conflict with Opera Pacific; the orchestra will play Cerritos on Feb. 23.

Ultimately, local arts officials still seem to believe that the solution to booking problems lies in long-delayed plans to add more halls at the Orange County center: a concert hall of 2,500 seats and a small theater of 1,000 seats or under. Kendrick said the opening of the Cerritos center does not change those plans.

Because of the economy, however, center officials have been unable even to plan a capital campaign for the theaters. They have commissioned detailed proposals for the facilities, which theoretically will allow the project to move forward more quickly when the economy is deemed sufficiently recovered to start a major fund-raising effort. The concert hall alone probably would cost more than the $72.8 million price tag on Segerstrom Hall, which opened in 1986.

Again, the effort would be paid for with private dollars. Cerritos, a city of about 50,000, built its $60-million hall with public redevelopment money.

If a new Orange County concert hall ever becomes a reality, it would be reserved for single-date events, primarily classical and pops concerts by the Pacific Symphony and by touring orchestras presented by the Orange County Philharmonic Society. Segerstrom Hall would be used for multiple-date engagements: expanded offerings of touring musical theater, dance and opera.

The smaller theater, according to plans, would be a venue for “younger and lesser-known” artists, according to Kendrick. (The center has never been a breeding ground for artists or art forms spawned since World War II. And recently, Kendrick said that in the face of the current economy, “to put on a lesser-known or unknown talent (in Segerstrom Hall) has become impractical.”) Disciplines might include modern-dance, chamber music and recitals.

Even if the economy makes an unexpectedly fast recovery, however, those halls are years away. In the meantime, some groups may look to Cerritos and elsewhere to absorb some of the pressure to grow and reach new audiences.

The opening of the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts is more likely to affect “booking the new (Orange County) facilities rather than building them,” Kendrick said, as Orange County officials watch to determine the long-term booking strategies at Cerritos.