Amphitheater Designer Hopes to Upstage His Earlier Effort

As a student at Golden West College in 1973, Scott Steidinger was charged with designing an outdoor amphitheater. At the time, he was fulfilling the vision of then-college president Dudley Boyce.

Now, 25 years later, Steidinger is again overseeing designs for a new amphitheater.

Boyce, who presided over a college that was less than 10 years old and still under construction, wanted an amphitheater like the one on the grounds of his alma mater, Stanford University.

Steidinger designed a bowl with 12 concrete-and-grass tiers and three towers on the periphery. But the effort did not extend much further than “advanced landscaping,” he said. The amphitheater, with a tiny stage and no lighting, has sat largely unused.

That is about to change with an ambitious expansion of the outdoor theater that never really was.

“I put a lot of work into it initially, and I would love to see it done so it could be used,” said Steidinger, 45, now a multimedia sound specialist at the college. “That’s why we built it--and that was something that was never really fulfilled.”

Pacific Coast Civic Light Opera, which celebrated its first birthday this month, has sought a larger forum than the school’s performing arts theater.

“There’s no question that it’s a challenge to sustain yourself financially with a 350-seat house,” said David F. Anthony, executive producer of the company and dean of the college’s fine and performing arts department. “This will give us the ability to present larger shows in the summer and help us to balance financially.”

Seating is crucial to the effort, Anthony said, and the renovation of Edison International Field in Anaheim meant that thousands of burnt-orange-colored stadium seats would be on the auction block.

At first officials deemed the seats too expensive. But Howard Mango, a board member of the civic light opera, organized a donation to rescue 1,400 of them.

The architectural renderings of the expanded amphitheater, twice the size of the original, are complete. The seats will rise high in the bowl, and an orchestra pit will front the 30-by-50-foot stage. Once complete, it will be the largest outdoor theater in North County, Steidinger said.

The only thing left to do is raise the money to pay for it, according to officials. They are waiting on estimates from contractors to determine the project cost.

Information: the civic light opera at (714) 895-8150 from noon to 6 p.m.