Arts Center Narrows Director Search to Four

The Orange County Performing Arts Center has narrowed the field for its top executive post to four finalists, including the head of the major performing arts center in Boston and a leading arts administrator in Santa Ana, according to sources in the arts community. A decision is expected next week.

The sources report that the finalists include Josiah A. Spaulding, Jr., president and chief executive officer of Boston’s Wang Center for the Performing Arts, one of the country’s major venues; and Louis G. Spisto, executive director of the Pacific Symphony orchestra, which plays regularly at the center here.

The others are an executive in Los Angeles and an insider on the center’s own board of directors, but the sources would identify neither by name.

The center, which is the leading arts institution in Orange County and is among the state’s largest, has been without a permanent executive director for nine months, since president and chief operating officer Tom Tomlinson resigned abruptly. The reasons for his departure have never been clarified by the center, but an insider has said he was ousted over managerial and personal conflicts with key board members.

Spaulding, 45, acknowledged Friday that he has been “in touch” with center officials and that he had been to the center within the past two weeks when the search committee was interviewing candidates. But he denied that he had been interviewed for the job.

“I have been back and forth many times,” Spaulding said, “and I have been talking with the people out there since Tommy left. I know them.” But, he added, “I have not been offered the job.”

The multimillion-dollar Wang center’s two-theater complex operates on an annual budget of roughly $28 million, about 40% more than the Orange County center’s.

Spisto, 41, is highly regarded for sparking the Pacific Symphony’s financial growth with his fund-raising and marketing talents. He has been with the orchestra since 1987. The orchestra reported revenues of $7.8 million to the IRS in 1995, the latest year for which figures are available.

Reached at his office in Santa Ana Friday, Spisto declined comment.

His name has been mentioned for months in county arts circles in connection with the center job, not just because of his financial track record but also because he is known to get along well with center Chairman Mark Johnson, who heads the executive search committee.

Johnson, speaking from a conference in Santa Barbara, declined comment Friday. In December, he told The Times that he hoped to fill the post by February. He has noted repeatedly that he faces “no single

Josiah A. Spaulding, Jr.

more important” task than finding a new arts executive to lead the center into its second decade.

The center hired Korn/Ferry International, a widely respected head-hunting firm based in Los Angeles, to conduct what Johnson said would be “literally a worldwide search” for someone capable of magnetic arts leadership.

He characterized the ideal center top executive as “a dynamic, upfront, out-there, gregarious, social person who will be an inspirational and charismatic leader, not a person who is going to micro-manage and be submerged in daily operations. There are probably few [people like that] in the world.”

If the incoming executive were to earn what his predecessor earned, it would make the new appointee the highest-paid arts executive in Orange County. Tomlinson’s total annual compensation for fiscal 1995 came to $183,000, according to financial documents. His salary was $162,000.

The paramount issue facing the new executive will be fund-raising. More money than ever must be raised, not only to cover the annual operating gap between expenditures and revenue--which has hovered at roughly $5 million a year--but also to build a second hall called for in the center’s long-term “strategic plan.”

According to a center-commissioned study, the 3,000-seat center must expand or face a decline, both in its ability to survive financially and in its regional significance as measured by market share of the audience for the performing arts. A second hall would cost about $100 million, according to the most recent preliminary estimate.

The center cost $73.3 million to build and was financed entirely by private contributions. Opened in 1986, it was the only performing arts center built and operated without government funding of any kind, and so it remains.

A major drain on the center’s financial resources in recent years has been the sharp decline in attendance for its dance presentations, even though they have included several of the most highly acclaimed ballet and modern dance companies in the world.