Music

New Jersey has built a new performing arts center for its largest city.

By Southern California standards, this may hardly sound like headline material. If Escondido can do it, if Long Beach can do it, if Cerritos can do it, why can’t Newark also do it? But it is likely that a great many in the black-tie audience that filled the New Jersey Performing Arts Center at its opening-night gala Saturday hadn’t set foot after dark in this troubled town for decades, if ever.

Around the time, 30 years ago, when the last performing arts center was built in the Northeast (the Kennedy Center in Washington), Newark rioted, and it has never recovered from the devastation. Its reputation now is so scary that I know New Yorkers who break out in a cold sweat whenever they drive the confusing expressways skirting the city, in fear of taking a wrong turn.

But suddenly the car-theft capital of the country has demonstrated a remarkable civic-mindedness. Unwilling to subscribe to the anti-arts attitude taking hold elsewhere in America, New Jersey has recognized the arts as an essential civilizing force, always good for the economy. It expects the center to be the single most significant factor in Newark’s urban renewal.

The state was actually confident enough in this belief to supply $100 million of the $180 million budget for the center, with the remainder of the pie divided among city, individual, corporate and foundation moneys. And the 10-year project was built pretty much on schedule and on budget. All of which should give Angelenos embarrassing pause, considering the continuing trials and tribulations of erecting Disney Hall.

Still, Newark does need all the help it can get, and so will the center, which houses the 2,750-seat multipurpose Prudential Hall, the 517-seat Victoria Theatre (which will open next week) and a large rehearsal hall that can double as a black-box theater.

Designed by Barton Myers, whose architectural firm is based in Beverly Hills, the center is built to celebrate Newark, with only a backward glance to the nearby Manhattan skyline across the Hudson. Made to fit in, it appears as another of Newark’s hulking brick buildings if approached from behind. From the front it looms and twinkles like a cineplex or maybe a dolled-up Rodeo Drive shopping center, which seems to be the idea.

Myers has made a point that he wanted no off-putting temple of art, no Lincoln Center. The New Jersey Performing Arts Center is determined to serve its community. It will be home for the New Jersey Symphony but also a place for the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. It will play host to visiting artists, ranging from the likes of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra to a road-show run of “Annie.”

The interior of Prudential Hall is a handsome, traditional horseshoe. Mahogany-stained cherrywood creates a richness, and presumably good acoustics. Russell Johnson, the acoustical consultant, was responsible for much-admired recent symphony halls in Dallas and in Birmingham, England.

From a fifth-row-center seat, however, the hall proved a perfect disaster Saturday. The New Jersey Symphony, which played Wagner’s “Meistersinger” Overture under Zdenek Macal, sounded distant and muffled. Individual instruments were indistinct; upper frequencies were unannounced.

For dance--Irina Dvorenko and Maxim Belotserkovsky danced the “White Swan” Pas de Deux from “Swan Lake,” Savion Glover performed a tap solo, Gachi Fernandez and Sergio Cortazzo offered tango, and there were excerpts from Ailey’s “Revelations”--ticket-holders in at least the front third of the orchestra seats can forget about watching feet.

Chita Rivera, the original Anita in “West Side Story” and now a queen of camp, and Wynton Marsalis’ classy Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra tested the amplification system, and the results were loud, harsh and unmusical with sizzling sibilants.

Nothing but an unaccompanied spiritual, “Over My Head” from Kathleen Battle, had any sense of authentic presence.

Does this mean that the hall itself is a disaster? I doubt it. For unamplified concerts, the center’s high-tech acoustical shell (deemed too unwieldy for all the stage business on this occasion) could well make all the difference in the world, as will placing the orchestra more forward on the stage (room was needed for dancers and for endless speechifying). Dance might be just fine from other seats. And let’s assume the amplification horrors were the fault of knob twisters, not knobs.

What this gala did show, however, is that on its first night the center cared far less about how it presented the art that the building is meant to contain than it cared about the container itself. It cared less about its audience than television, giving a camera crew from the Public Broadcasting Service free reign, their squeaky booms and all.

PBS’ dirty work will surely be cleaned up for the broadcast in February. And there is every reason to believe that the center will go on to represent a shining beacon for a burned-out city, and exactly the pro-arts, can-do example the rest of the nation sorely needs. But it is too soon for congratulations.