Despite Number of Woes, O.C. Shows Went On

There was no shortage of headline-generating events in the Orange County arts community in 1993. Still, most of the action took place behind the scenes.

Some of the top arts posts in the county changed hands, and organizations continued to grapple with regional economic doldrums, but all the backstage noise had little visible effect--good or bad--on actual programs and offerings. For the ticket-buying public, it was pretty much the same show.

There were exceptions, notably GroveShakespeare, which finally ran aground after years of rough sailing. Once the county’s second-largest professional theater group, it had to scuttle its outdoor summer season in the face of big funding shortfalls, and prospects for salvaging the company’s future seem bleak at best.

The rock scene took a beating, too. Fans of local bands and touring alternative acts suffered with the recent closure of Bogart’s, a Long Beach club that sometimes had been a solitary champion of Orange County bands. The Rhythm Cafe, a concert club that had opened in Santa Ana with some fanfare on Halloween of ‘92, closed its doors in April, although there now are signs that it may reopen.

Economics was not a factor, but the Pacific Amphitheatre closed out what looks to be its last season as a rock ‘n’ roll venue. In May, the Orange County Fair Board announced a $12.5-million deal to buy the amphitheater and its long-term lease from promotions giant Nederlander Inc. The Pacific will enforce stricter noise limits, long sought by nearby residents, as part of the deal.

Rock fans were encouraged when the new Anaheim Arena opened this year, although the snazzy arena’s debut season as a concert venue turned out to be a tepid one, stretching from Barry Manilow to Billy Joel with a few middle-of-the-road country entertainers in between. Meanwhile, the 7-year-old Orange County Performing Arts Center finally stuck a toe into the rock ‘n’ roll waters, with a concert by Art Garfunkel in July.

The Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, just over the county line, came out of the gates in January with five concerts by the chairman himself, Frank Sinatra, and since then has offered a blend of classical music, dance, musical theater and a steady stream of pop performers ranging from Whitney Houston to Bela Fleck.

Some of the most notable changes in the local arts scene happened at the administrative levels, as two of the county’s biggest arts organizations underwent management shuffles.

At the Performing Arts Center, retirement announcements came in June from longtime president and chief operating officer Thomas R. Kendrick and his wife, general manager Judy O’Dea Morr. Kendrick vacated his post on Sept. 30 and was replaced by the 43-year-old former director of the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts, Tom Tomlinson.

One of Tomlinson’s first tasks has been an administrative overhaul. Morr has been replaced by Philip A. Mosbo, promoted from director of theater operations to the restructured position of managing director. OCPAC vice president for development Richard Tripp resigned in September; he was replaced by Mary Alice (Melly) Sutherland, whose title is managing director of development.

Tomlinson so far has shied away from public pronouncements on programming philosophy, deferring such matters to the center’s board of directors, but he is said to be negotiating amicably with officials of the Orange County Philharmonic Society over proposals for an ethnic series in the 1993-94 season.

Ethnic programming had been a point of contention between the Philharmonic Society and Kendrick, who objected to such acts as the Chieftains, a traditional Irish music ensemble, and Les Ballets Africains from the Republic of Guinea as non-classical and outside the society’s purview. The impasse was resolved temporarily in the society’s favor when Kendrick was overruled by the center board. Center officials have said there was no connection between the board’s action and Kendrick’s subsequent departure.

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The society had its own changing of the guard when longtime executive director Erich Vollmer resigned to take a post with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and was replaced by Dean Corey, formerly a San Diego Symphony official.

The year’s biggest pieces of good news: Both of the county’s major classical music organizations managed to make significant headway against a continuing stream of dismal economics. In July, the Philharmonic Society announced that it had closed the 1992-93 fiscal year with a surplus, allowing it to wipe out 70% of an accumulated deficit of $114,000.

And the Pacific Symphony dropped an even bigger bombshell in August with the announcement that it had eliminated a deficit of $658,000 three years ahead of schedule, and had surpassed a $5-million annual fund-raising goal three months before its Sept. 30 target.

The financial news, coupled with the announcement of Corey’s hiring, seemed to put to rest persistent rumors of a merger between the society and the orchestra, which have distinctly different missions: The Pacific Symphony is a performing group; the Philharmonic Society presents touring orchestras and chamber ensembles.

In June, the orchestra announced its most substantial commission to date, an hourlong symphonic and choral work being composed by Elliot Goldenthal to “musically memorialize the suffering of the Vietnam War.” The piece is to premiere in 1995.

On the theater scene, Shakespeare Orange County, led by Thomas F. Bradac--who had founded GroveShakespeare and who had been ousted as its artistic director--completed its second season with an 8% rise in attendance.

In November, Bradac announced that his troupe had signed Alan Mandell, one of the premier classical actors in Southern California, to star next summer in “King Lear.” Mandell was to have played Lear last summer for GroveShakespeare, but the company collapsed just days before the production was to open.

The Laguna Playhouse in Laguna Beach announced just last week that it is buying a building to provide a second stage, this one for adventurous contemporary plays. A season could be launched as early as next summer in the new building, several miles south of the company’s main stage downtown.

South Coast Repertory, meanwhile, enjoyed a quietly prosperous year, staying in the black and (also last week) announcing an expansion of its own. Orange County’s largest professional theater company will nearly double its warehouse space with the purchase of a building in Santa Ana, which will serve as a rehearsal hall, secondary scene shop and office facility.

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Expansion also has been on the minds of officials at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, although not on the scale they once had envisioned.

The museum announced in September that it would expand into adjacent library space when the city’s new library opens in the spring. The move will more than double the museum’s gallery space. But the museum had ceded its claim on a 10 1/2-acre site on Coast Highway where it had hoped to build a high-profile new home before the grim arts fund-raising picture forced abandonment of that dream.

In 1993, the museum laid off its 10th employee in the last two years, director of education Ellen Breitman. Three other staff members resigned, including associate director Jane Piasecki, who took a job with a museum in Santa Fe, N.M.

The Laguna Art Museum enjoyed a splashy 75th anniversary year, highlighted by one of its most popular shows ever. “Kustom Kulture” put the spotlight on California’s hot rod culture with cars designed or adorned by Von Dutch and Ed (Big Daddy) Roth. The exhibit strived to show how their aesthetic influenced such contemporary painters as Robert Williams.

In April, the museum announced the largest grant in its history, a matching grant of $1 million from the Harry and Grace Steele Foundation, to go toward the museum’s endowment.

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The Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana had one eventful week in November, announcing that it would reduce expenses by reducing operating hours (it will close an hour earlier beginning Jan. 1), by cutting salaries across the board, and by laying off two part-time employees.

In the same week, the Bowers received word that it had received accreditation from the American Assn. of Museums. Of nearly 8,500 museums in the United States, fewer than 750 have been so accredited.

Earlier in the year, the museum opened a semi-permanent collection of works from the Tishman Collection of African art, owned by the Walt Disney Co. and kept largely in storage since a 1981 exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Back in January, real-estate heiress Joan Irvine Smith opened the private, nonprofit Irvine Museum to showcase California Impressionist art. The museum is to occupy its current home, on the 12th floor of an office tower in Irvine, for five or six years until a permanent facility can be built, officials said.

1993 was another brutal year for municipal arts programs as many city arts budgets were trimmed or eliminated altogether: Even Costa Mesa, the self-proclaimed “City of the Arts,” cut its entire $87,500 arts grant allocation in February.

The saga of Henry Korn provides a telling illustration of the state of affairs. In 1990, amid grand visions of expanding its city arts program, Irvine hired Korn away from Santa Monica to fill the newly created post of cultural affairs manager.

But California’s recession hit soon thereafter and those grand visions were scaled back and scaled back again. In June of this year, the Irvine City Council voted to eliminate the jobs of Korn and his secretary, and in July, Korn announced that he had taken work as executive director of an arts complex in Long Island, N.Y.

* In Tuesday’s Calendar: On Orange County’s visual arts scene, the recession painted a dismal picture, with fewer shows and a pervasive lack of substance. Plus, critic Cathy Curtis’s best/worst of the year lists.