Performing Arts Center Expansion Plans Applauded

Local arts leaders happily greeted the Orange County Performing Arts Center’s decision this week to step up expansion plans but said it is too soon to know exactly how their organizations’ programming would grow with a larger facility.

“We’re very pleased to hear that the plans for expansion are beginning to firm up,” said Louis G. Spisto, executive director of the Pacific Symphony, one of six regional groups that use the center. “The potential for expansion is great. But no, I can’t say our season will expand by X number of weeks. It’s premature.”

At its annual meeting Tuesday, the center board was told that a research firm in Connecticut has recommended doubling the center’s size and capacity, to four halls encompassing 600,000 square feet and 6,400 seats. Though the board did not vote on the recommendation, it did decide to “explore” the matter, including financing. It was the board’s first public action in recent years toward expansion, which has long been on its wish list.

AMS Planning & Research has recommended construction of a 2,000-seat music hall modeled after the Ordway Music Theatre in St. Paul, Minn.; and a 750-seat theater, mostly for use by neighboring South Coast Repertory. The 299-seat Founders Hall would be transformed into a 200-seat black-box theater for experimental productions.

Construction could cost between $90,000 and $105,000, center President Tom Tomlinson reported.

Until now, speculation has centered on one additional theater only, to be used for symphonic music. The 2,000-seat hall proposed by AMS would accommodate various forms of music as well as dance and other performing arts.

Increasingly in recent years, center officials have said they do not have the seats or open dates to offer all the programming they would like. On Tuesday, Tomlinson said that nearly 60% of those questioned in the AMS study had “attended a venue other than the center most recently,” indicating that “we have a significant population that is being underserved by us.”

The study showed that Orange County now has 1.13 theater seats per 1,000 people, Tomlinson said, compared to Minneapolis/St. Paul, with three seats per 1,000, and Seattle, with four per 1,000.

The Pacific Symphony’s Spisto said that expansion of the center could enable the orchestra to expand “from nine to 12 weeks of classical programs per season, and we certainly think we could add two to three more weeks of pops programming and free concerts for young people.”

“But,” he added, “free concerts for young people, for instance, is not necessarily something we can do much more of without additional fund-raising, and additional classics or pops concerts will be undertaken when we believe the market is there. The market is there for some expansion, no doubt, but to what extent we don’t know. We’re going to have to take a serious look at what we want to do.”

SCR also has no definite expansion plans, said its producing artistic director, David Emmes. “But we do believe a larger theater would provide us opportunities to undertake productions of perhaps greater scope, and more seats [could] help support the expanded budgets that would be involved,” he said.

Dean Corey, director of the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, which presents music and dance groups from around the world, agreed that more space is needed at the center, asserting that his group has “pretty much hit the ceiling” of what it can do there.

An empty lot across from the center--owned by a partnership involving the Segerstrom family, which donated the land where the center is now--has been considered for the new halls, but no agreements have been made, Tomlinson said.