Public Appearances, in Very Private Way

The Orange County Performing Arts Center takes no government funds. No other nonprofit arts center can make that claim, according to arts industry experts.

The center was built with private money--$73 million--and continues to operate that way, annually raising from $4 million to $5 million to subsidize annual budgets recently averaging about $20 million.

The country’s three largest performing arts complexes--Lincoln Center in New York, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and the Denver Center in Colorado--not only accept government subsidies but also, a Kennedy Center spokesperson said, they could not operate without them.

Even in wealthy West Palm Beach, Fla., $20 million of the $60-million construction cost for the nonprofit Kravis Center for the Performing Arts was publicly funded. That 1-to-2 ratio of public to private financing is the lowest for construction of any performing arts center in Florida, where several other spectacular complexes also have gone up in recent years.

The Orange County center’s ability to manage without government funding is the envy of arts executives regionally and across the country. They contend that the advantages of operating privately far outweigh the limitations; indeed, they were hard-pressed to cite any limitations.

Tim Van Leer, the former president of the Assn. of Performing Arts Presenters, who now heads the El Camino Performing Arts Center in Torrance, explained: “When you don’t have to go to the public trough, you have more flexibility in your programming and you can be more responsive to the community than to bureaucrats and politicians.”

At the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, which operates on an annual budget of $9 million ($3.5 million subsidized by the city), executive director Victor Gottesman concurred.

“In dealing with the bureaucracy, I have to do a lot of education from my desk to the City Council and so forth,” he said. “There may be more of an understanding and an appreciation for programmatic directions in a private organization.”

Robert Freedman, who heads the California Center for the Performing Arts in Escondido, added: “The box office tells you whether you’re being responsive to the community.”

Attendance has averaged 80% of capacity for all performances at the Orange County center over its first 10 years, according to center figures. That is considerably higher than the generally accepted industry average of about 65%.

Still, a privately run arts center lays itself open to a charge of elitism. The Orange County center has been painted with that brush due to the insularity of its board and its overwhelming reliance on a relatively small circle of multimillion-dollar donors for the majority of its contributions.

The center consistently has denied the contention--pointing to high attendance, large educational outreach programs in cooperation with the county’s public schools and statistical surveys.

For example, within the county, the center has by far the highest recognition of all the performing arts centers in the region. A market survey conducted by Mark Baldassare & Associates, a research firm in Irvine, indicates that 40% of the county’s population has an “unaided awareness level” of the center.

That compares with about 12% for South Coast Repertory, its closest competition; about 7% for the Cerritos Center; 3% for the Los Angeles Music Center; and less than 1% for the California Center in Escondido.

“I have taken the Orange County center as a bit of a role model,” Judith A. Shepherd, chief executive officer of the arts center in West Palm Beach, Fla., said during a recent telephone interview. “We really admire what they’ve done. We look to them as an example of how to do it right.”