1995: THE YEAR IN REVIEW : Healthy, Wealthy-Wise : Start-Ups, Expansions and New Projects Overshadowed Flops and Cutbacks of Local Organizations

Given the bankruptcy Grinch that stole into Orange County last Yuletide, it could have been a year of severe contraction around here. Instead, the maturing arts community generally got bigger and richer in 1995.

Consider these developments, each expanding the local scene, which in recent recessionary years already had suffered plenty of downsizing and outright shutdowns:

* The county gained a major pop-culture venue when the Big One, Edwards Cinemas Inc.’s $27-million, 21-screen theater opened last month at Irvine Spectrum. The Newport Beach-based exhibitor says the 6,400-seat, 158,000-square-foot popcorn palace is the biggest in the world.

* The county gained a major cultural venue when the Huntington Beach Art Center opened in March. Despite a short-lived controversy over its inaugural show, the risk-taking center hasdeveloped into one of the area’s most distinctive art outlets.

* After half a dozen years of failed attempts, a countywide arts council came to be. Arts Orange County made its debut in February with modest initial goals: To further unify the local arts scene and publicize arts activities.

* Downtown Santa Ana’s much ballyhooed, long-planned Artists Village picked up speed. This year, Cal State Fullerton purchased historic Grand Central Building for a graduate art student center. Also, about 45 artists leased studios on or near North Broadway, the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art announced it will open there in mid-September and a handful of galleries set up shop in the Soho wannabe.

* Ballet Pacifica, the county’s most prominent tutu troupe, opened a conservatory in September. The Irvine facility doubles as a headquarters for the company, which has never had a real home in its 33-year history.

* Newport Harbor Art Museum was given the deed to the former Newport Beach Public Library and received $500,000 toward the $6 million it needs to fund a long-sought expansion into the site, its next-door neighbor.

On the downside, three smaller organizations met with misfortune, but not because of the bankruptcy.

* The Decorative Arts Study Center had to take up smaller digs when it lost its city-owned home because cash-strapped San Juan Capistrano stopped making payments on the site in April. The center now maintains offices and its library on Los Rios Street but has no room for exhibitions.

* In August, the BankAmerica Gallery in Costa Mesa lost its space entirely. BankAmerica Corp. moved all its offices out of the building, which housed the gallery, in order to lease the property.

* And, Way Off Broadway Playhouse, a basement operation in Santa Ana that had been on the ropes for years, closed in February when it could no longer pay the rent.

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Also, litigation woes once again clouded the future of Pacific Amphitheatre. In October, the Orange County Fair Board sued the amphitheater’s previous operator, the Nederlander Organization, for allegedly misleading it about noise restrictions that the board claimed make the venue unusable. The board wants to get back the $12.5 million it paid Nederlander for the Pacific.

Irvine’s Severin Wunderman Museum--dedicated to preserving and promoting the art of Jean Cocteau and which had long been looking for a roomier location--closed in February when owner Severin Wunderman apparently couldn’t find a suitable new site in the county.

Meanwhile, paltry attendance earlier this month at San Francisco Ballet’s mixed-bill performances--39% of capacity--set a new low for paid attendance at a dance series at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. This in the same year that the center charted only 38% paid attendance for a rare local appearance by the Metropolitan Opera orchestra under conductor James Levine.

And, the Pacific Symphony and Laguna Playhouse lost some subscribers, which company officials attributed to lingering effects of the regional recession.

Outside of these dips--plus worries about the weak economy and concerns that the bankruptcy’s full effect on the arts was yet to come--many county arts groups enjoyed a banner year.

Among the highlights: Opera Pacific, experiencing its best attendance of 10 years, had to turn patrons away; Pacific Symphony set a record for private donations (about $3.2 million); South Coast Repertory mounted one of the highest-grossing productions in its 31-year history; the Philharmonic Society of Orange County achieved financial stability after years of unsteadiness and brought in mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli for a recital, one of the hottest tickets of the year.

In addition, each of these organizations, plus the Irvine Barclay Theatre and Laguna Playhouse, reported that their annual budgets hit new heights.

Indeed, in at least one very sizable way, the bankruptcy was a development director’s blessing in disguise.

Laguna Beach arts lover William J. Gillespie, who had promised to give millions to county arts groups in 2008, decided to accelerate the terms of his trust largely because of his concerns over the bankruptcy. In May, he gave $6.6 million for five organizations to divvy up.

“The idea,” Richard A. Gadbois III, Gillespie’s spokesman, said when announcing the gifts, “is to immediately guarantee the future success of the organizations.” The elated recipients, who called the pledge the largest of its kind in the county’s history, were Pacific Chorale ($1 million), SCR ($940,000), the Philharmonic Society ($680,000), Pacific Symphony ($1.2 million) and the center ($2.8 million).

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The Gillespie gift wasn’t the center’s only good news of 1995. In January, the organization reported that it not only ended the previous year in the black but reversed a downward financial trend that began in 1992. Earned revenues came to $18.8 million and fund raising yielded $5.1 million. Both figures far exceeded expectations.

(In March, however, the center took a bath when New York’s vaunted Met orchestra drew startlingly low attendance. But long-term problems such as the economy weren’t blamed. The expensive Met booking hadn’t been confirmed until after the deadline to make it a subscription offering, and marketers couldn’t depend on their subscriber base.)

In October, the center kicked off its yearlong 10th anniversary celebration, one of several observed: Laguna Playhouse turned 75, Irvine Fine Arts Center turned 15 and Opera Pacific turned 10.

Throughout the county, the local Vietnamese community marked the 20th anniversary of the first Vietnamese refugees’ arrival in the United States and their achievements here with Project 20. The commemoration consisted of a variety of arts activities, including the world premiere of “1975,” a symphony composed by Khoe Le of Orange.

Another world premiere signaled a different sort of cultural maturity. New York composer Elliot Goldenthal’s “Fire Water Paper: A Vietnam Oratorio,” commissioned by Pacific Symphony, was unveiled in April.

While the piece didn’t fare well with critics, the occasion was a benchmark for the county, better known for its conservative taste than for the creation of new work. And in the long run, a community’s significant artistic impact is probably better measured by the new work it creates than by the age of its institutions.

Those institutions received more good cheer this year from Orange County Superior Court Judge James H. Poole. Poole ruled in September that the widow of developer Richard H. Barclay must pay the remaining $600,000 of a $1-million pledge her husband made to build the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

Arts officials were relieved upon Poole’s ruling that donors are legally bound to pay up when they make a pledge and get something in return, whether that’s a monthly newsletter or their name on a theater.

“It’s a relief to all of us who manage nonprofit organizations” which annually receive thousands of dollars in pledges, said Louis G. Spisto, Pacific Symphony executive director.

On the personnel front, the big news this year was Laguna Art Museum’s January appointment of Naomi Vine as director. Vine, a first-time museum director who had held key positions in various arts groups during the previous 15 years, replaced Charles Desmarais, who had been fired 10 months earlier.

Also at the Laguna museum, Bolton Colburn moved up from curator of collections to chief curator, replacing his wife, Susan M. Anderson, who left to become an associate producer at KOCE-TV Channel 50, the county’s public television station. Elsewhere, Jill Beck became UC Irvine’s School of the Arts dean and Jane Bledsoe was named director of Muckenthaler Cultural Center.

On the award front, SCR founders David Emmes and Martin Benson won Theatre LA’s annual lifetime achievement award, which was doubly notable since SCR has never joined the group and therefore its productions have never been eligible for individual Theatre LA awards.

SCR also swept top honors in the eight annual National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People Theatre Awards for its production of Cheryl West’s “Jar the Floor,” the company’s first and only work by a black American playwright. The comedy won prizes for best professional production (SCR), best direction (Benny Sato Ambush), best actress (Juanita Jennings) and best playwright (West).

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VOICES ’95

“He could be throwing money down a rat hole, doing crazy things, but he does these constructive things, and it’s wonderful.”

--Ron Gray, a friend of philanthropist William J. Gillespie, who in May gave $6.6 million to five arts organizations in the county.

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“I stayed away from politics....I just stuck to things that came from the heart.”

--Composer Elliot Goldenthal on “Fire Water Paper,” his oratorio commemorating the suffering caused by the Vietnam War. The Pacific Symphony commissioned the piece and premiered it in April.

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“If one is a snotty New Yorker, one thinks of Orange County as being the home of President Nixon and a hotbed of California Republicanism, so I’d not expect people there to be taking a more radical route. I find it very encouraging in that part of the world.”

--Nick Debs, executive director of Visual AIDS, the coalition in New York that conceived A Day Without Art, on the Orange County arts community’s Day Without Art observance in December.

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“The center remains committed to its dance series and to building our audience over the long term.”

--Orange County Performing Arts Center spokesman Gregory Patterson in December when attendance for mixed-bill programs by the San Francisco Ballet drew only 39% of capacity--a new center low.