A Bigger Slice of O.C. Goes to the Arts

Unless you count the Block--which throngs of movie-hounds might--late news about a one-time lima bean field eclipsed all other developments on the Orange County arts and entertainment scene this year.

The Segerstrom family announced Dec. 15 that it would donate another six acres of erstwhile farmland beside the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa for the center’s long-planned expansion.

“There is a need for more cultural institutions” in Orange County, proclaimed founding center chairman Henry T. Segerstrom, only a month after the Mills Corp., which plainly believes there’s a need for more cinema screens, gave the county its biggest multiplex.

Built for $165 million, the Block brings 30 AMC movie screens and 100-plus shops and restaurants to Orange. Some 12,000 people packed opening day (free movies were shown), and more than 10,000 people have bought a $50 annual membership to the skateboard park.

But, back to high art.

The proposed Segerstrom Center for the Art’s initial phase, to be designed by renowned architect Cesar Pelli, is envisioned as an 1,800- to 2,000-seat concert hall that primarily would be a home to the Pacific Symphony. The new venue is to be built across the street from the existing center and next to a planned 500-seat multipurpose hall, said planners, who estimate costs at $100 million or more. Ribbon-cutting on the project is expected in about five years.

Later phases of the proposed expansion could include a visual-arts complex abutting the new concert hall and a pedestrian plaza linking all the new elements. Segerstrom, whose family gave the land on which the current center and South Coast Repertory stand, earmarked part of the newly donated land for an SCR expansion.

The promised acreage wasn’t a bad capper for SCR’s 35th anniversary year, during which it also won its largest operating grant, $550,000 from the James Irvine Foundation.

The three-year grant, part of a broader initiative to strengthen exemplary California arts institutions, will fund new-play commissions by SCR, whose board expects next month to advance tentative plans for a 300-seat proscenium-stage theater.

Pacific Symphony’s honchos also must answer a passel of critical questions raised by the promise of new quarters. Chief among them: whether to become a full-time operation. Guiding the orchestra through the strategic process will be one of new executive director John Forsyte’s greatest challenges.

Forsyte, who joined PSO in May on a 13-month contract, was executive director of the Kalamazoo Symphony in Michigan. He succeeds Louis G. Spisto, who left in March after a 10-year tenure to become president of the Detroit Symphony.

One thing is certain: PSO must build its $3.5-million endowment if it wants to grow.

Money and management matters also loomed large in 1998 at PSO’s sister organization, Opera Pacific. A deficit of nearly $2 million in April led opera executives to lay off a third of the staff, move to smaller offices and forge an administrative cost-sharing partnership with the performing arts center.

Businessman-arts patron Martin Hubbard took over as interim executive director, filling a leadership gap that had existed after general director Patrick L. Veitch abruptly left the company late last year after 15 contentious months.

Hubbard quickly fired six full-time staff members in the finance, data processing and ticketing departments, among other cost-cutting moves, and subsequently elevated music director John DeMain to artistic director and hired Mitchell Krieger from the Detroit Opera House as production chief.

Earlier this month, Hubbard--who has launched an aggressive fund-raising campaign--ruled out the possibility that the company would fold. It has the money to present its four-opera season (which opened last month) in its entirety, and its cumulative deficit is about $965,000.

By contrast, the Orange County Museum of Art was flush when it celebrated the organization’s first anniversary in January.

Created through the bitterly disputed merger of the defunct Newport Harbor Art Museum and the Laguna Art Museum (which later split off on its own), OCMA found itself with a $2.7-million annual budget--more than double Newport Harbor’s--and an endowment that soared from almost nothing to $5.5 million.

Laguna museum officials, meanwhile, cheered what they called an unprecedented level of community support as they observed a year’s independence from OCMA in April.

Earlier, when merger proponents left open the possibility of closing the museum, fear of losing the city landmark altogether prompted a 10% increase in membership and led the city of Laguna Beach to give a $75,000 grant in 1996, museum officials said. (The city previously gave no more than $2,000 a year.) In June, it awarded the museum another $100,000.

Shortly thereafter, in a symbol of cooperation between the two museums, LAM displayed two works bought for the LAM-OCMA Collections Trust (one surviving result of the merger) with proceeds from the controversial 1996 sale of photographs by Modernist Paul Outerbridge Jr., which had been bequeathed to LAM.

Still, merger-related problems lingered. In November, the Laguna Art Museum filed for arbitration with OCMA over a dispute tied to a $2-million endowment that the Laguna venue had amassed before the merger. No hearing date has yet been set, but one Laguna official expects the issue, involving endowment interest, to be settled by March 1.

Glitches elsewhere on the county’s visual arts map involved construction snafus that further delayed the opening of Cal State Fullerton’s satellite for graduate art students in Santa Ana’s Artists Village. City officials say about 20 students are scheduled to move into the annex in mid-January, about six months behind schedule.

Meanwhile, Alternative Repertory Theatre plans to launch its inaugural season there Jan. 8. Still, ART producer Gary Christensen said he is bracing to change that date again, because not a single deadline set by city officials overseeing reconstruction of the historic building that will house the art center has been met.

However, the Los Angeles-based Aman International Music and Dance troupe has opened a school and offices in the Artists Village, and the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art received $495,000 from the city to kick-start reconstruction of its planned new village site there. The city money is technically a “rehabilitation loan,” OCCCA officials said, but needn’t be repaid if the Center for Contemporary Art operates the site as a gallery for at least five years. Long stalled for lack of funds, the refurbishment is expected to be completed by June.

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Santa Ana city visionaries saw another cultural dream come into focus when the St. Joseph Ballet broke ground on its $3.8-million facility in October. And the long-awaited $24-million Discovery Science Center opened nearby Dec. 19.

Expansion was the topic this year for South County arts institutions too. Laguna Playhouse closed escrow on a $3.1-million, next-door office complex, where it plans to construct a second, smaller stage.

UC Irvine announced plans to double the size of its art gallery with a $1.5-million donation from Rockwell International Corp., which also will add a high-tech multimedia learning and research wing. The redesigned space will be called the Donald R. and Joan F. Beall Gallery and Center for Multimedia, in honor of the former Rockwell chief executive and his wife. UCI officials last week named Jean-Edith Weiffenbach as its director, effective in March. Weiffenbach for 10 years has been director of exhibitions for the San Francisco Art Institute.

To help build audiences for all of its institutions, the Arts Orange County service group in July launched an initiative to beef up arts education in local schools with help from area organizations. Recommendations on how to do that are expected by May.

In popular music, 1998 didn’t produce any great cymbal crash, but it’s not going out with a whimper.

The highest-profile O.C. rock act of the year was Korn, which has built a large and loyal grass-roots audience with an ominous, head-banging attack and singer Jonathan Davis’ baleful cries from the Teenage Wasteland. “Follow the Leader” debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard albums chart and became Korn’s third consecutive million-seller; Korn’s the first O.C. rock band to claim three platinum albums.

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The Offspring, whose 1994 album, “Smash,” was the first mega-selling alterna-rock release from the county, was showing signs that it might return to the multiple-platinum circle with “Americana,” a November release that quickly settled into the Top 10 on Billboard albums chart.

The eight most successful acts from the county’s alterna-rock scene have sold more than 28 million albums in the United States during the 1990s, according to figures from the SoundScan monitoring service.

The local jazz scene, meanwhile, showed signs of strength and stability that in the past haven’t been a given. Steamers, the county’s only official jazz club, bolstered its offerings with consistently noteworthy acts, including saxophonist Jeff Clayton, drummer Jeff Hamilton, pianist Alan Broadbent, saxophonists Gary Foster and Bud Shank and singer Karrin Allyson.

Two restaurants with years-old jazz policies, Spaghettini in Seal Beach and Restaurant Kikuya in Huntington Beach, continued to attract fine blues and electric jazz musicians from the L.A. area. And the arts center in Costa Mesa added impressive names to the entertainers’ mix with its jazz and cabaret series in its intimate Founders Hall and with such large-scale performances as that of the Count Basie Orchestra in Segerstrom Hall.

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On a bluer note, a bit of county lore bit the dust in the summer when the Port Theatre in Corona del Mar closed after 47 years. The fate of the art house rests with the owner; grass-roots efforts to reopen the landmark as a cinema continue.

Similar community sentiment led to the saving of another vintage movie house, the 71-year-old Balboa Theatre in Newport Beach, which has been closed since 1992.

This fall, the city of Newport Beach bought the theater, leasing it for 25 years to the Balboa Performing Arts Theatre Foundation, which had fought to save the venue for the 3 1/2 years and still needs $750,000 for its renovation.

The foundation’s next fund-raiser will sail supporters to Catalina for a dinner-dance at the island’s Casino Ballroom in April. Its previous benefit, which featured former Righteous Brothers member Bill Medley, brought the total collected to $330,000.

That’s only a chip off the Block, but hope prevails in these local film lovers’ hearts.

Contributing to this report were Times staff writers Mike Boehm, Cathy Curtis and Chris Pasles, and correspondent Bill Kohlhaase.