Cal State Fullerton Awarded $1 Million for Arts Complex

Cal State Fullerton’s School of the Arts has been awarded $1 million--the largest cash grant in its history--to help underwrite the costs of building a campus performing arts complex that school officials believe will greatly enhance arts education as well as better serve the surrounding community.

The grant, to be delivered in seven annual installments of $143,000 starting in 1997, was awarded by the Leo Freedman Foundation, an Anaheim arts charity that has doled out $6 million to Orange County cultural organizations since 1991.

The university already has on the drawing boards a proposed $30-million complex that includes a 1,200-seat auditorium, dance studios, rehearsal halls, a recording studio and facilities for students studying costuming and set construction. When built, it will more than double the seating capacity for performing arts events on the campus.

The proposed complex will be used mostly for performances and study by the 450 students majoring in dance, theater and acting, but it also will host the university’s Performing Artists in Residence program, which currently presents professional artists and troupes from around the world at Fullerton’s Plummer Auditorium.

“I think it’s going to usher in a new era for our performing arts,” an elated university President Milton A. Gordon said Friday.

The school’s existing facility “has been too small,” Gordon said. “We have over 22,000 students and 3,000 staff members,” as well as county residents who attend productions. “But the largest facility on campus, the Little Theatre, seats at most 500 people.”

Most of the project’s cost is expected to be provided by the $3 billion in education facilities bonds that the state has submitted for voter approval on the March ballot.

School officials are confident the ballot measure will pass, and they say the complex is tentatively projected to open in early 1998.

“We hope we’ll have a first-class performance facility for the entire county,” said School of the Arts Dean Jerry Samuelson, “but we certainly need one in North County. There are really no new, up-to-date performing arts theaters in this area.”

Ellis Stern, a trustee of the Freedman Foundation, said the grant was awarded in large part because of the school’s proximity to Anaheim. The foundation’s charter requires that its grants give emphasis to arts in Anaheim, where the late developer Leo Freedman built properties.

“We felt [the new complex] would benefit many people in the area,” Stern said, “both within the school community and without.” The foundation, which has awarded $1-million grants to the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa and Santa Ana’s Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, also has awarded about $40,000 in scholarships for university arts students in the past three years.

The proposed 133,000-square-foot complex is being designed by the architectural firm of Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates and will be attached to the school’s existing arts building, which houses a 500-seat Little Theatre, a smaller recital hall, an experimental “black box” theater, classrooms and studios.

Jay Bond, the university’s acting vice president for administration and campus architect, said the project’s “working drawings are virtually complete, so we are ready to build it almost immediately” when funds become available.

Samuelson said the planned complex would give the school some sorely needed space and would allow theater productions and music and dance concerts to run up to three weeks, instead of the present maximum of two.

“Right now we have no rehearsal space for theater productions,” he said. “In the evening, students go into a large classroom, take all the chairs out and put them in the hall, then go in and do their rehearsal and at 11 p.m., they have to drag all the chairs back into the room.

“Our dance studios are converted classrooms with 7-foot ceilings and less than perfect floors,” he added, “and we only have two.” With the new complex, “we’ll have three new ones,” he said.

Samuelson also hopes to add more Performing Artists in Residence programs--the school now presents about eight programs a year. Wallace Farrelly, who administers the program, said he doesn’t have any specific plan for how it would change, but he expects a new theater would alter the complexion of the programming significantly.

School officials said the idea of a performing arts complex was part of the university’s master plan from day one, but they began serious planning in 1988 when California State University trustees ruled that large campuses should have 1,200-seat auditoriums. Such halls recently were built at Cal State Long Beach and Cal State Los Angeles.

All $30 million earmarked for the project would be used for construction. Funding for operations will be provided by the state, which increases its support when campuses add facilities, Gordon said.

While university officials celebrated their new grant, news of their impending expansion was greeted with less than enthusiasm at Orange Coast College, home to the 960-seat Robert B. Moore Theatre.

“That’s not good news,” said George Blanc, dean of administrative services. “It’s obviously new competition, and they’re funded so much better than we are that we can’t even compete.”

The Moore theater puts on about 50 professional performances a year and 60 to 80 student productions, Blanc said, and hustles every year to come up with funding.

“We have no budget. We have people giving us money, the faculty making donations and things of that kind,” he said.

Times staff writers Lisa Richardson and Chris Pasles contributed to this report.