THE ARTS ARE BLOOMING

The time: A Friday evening five years from now.

The place: Orange County.

The scene: A night on the town in America’s leading suburban hub of the arts.

In Costa Mesa, the strains of a Beethoven symphony resound through the Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, the new jewel of the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

Across the street in the “old” hall, 3,000 fans erupt as Elton John pounds out a rollicking tune.

When the concerts let out, the two crowds mingle in a new, park-like plaza. On this night, the expanded, four-hall performing arts center also has hosted a cabaret singer and the premiere of a multimedia opera by Steve Reich.

Across the plaza, three audiences sit riveted while South Coast Repertory makes national headlines with a rare theatrical coup: world premieres on three stages, all commissioned by the acclaimed theater company.

A few miles north in Santa Ana, bohemian boulevardiers sit in crowded sidewalk cafes and hip restaurants in the downtown Artists Village, the fast-beating urban heart that O.C. suburbia long had lacked. Knowing they are in Southern California’s new center of cutting-edge art makes the smell of their espressos all the more heady.

The neighborhood is flush with half a dozen theater companies known for championing emerging playwrights--especially local ones--and for staging adventurous, unorthodox takes on standard repertory works. All have shows going on this night. A big jazz concert is the draw at the Santa Ana Performing Arts and Event Center, the village’s largest venue.

Coastal Orange County also has some shining spots. In Laguna Beach, the Laguna Playhouse’s addition of a second stage next door to its older Moulton Theatre has helped propel the company toward more adventurous programming. Some observers predict the venerable playhouse might soon be able to challenge South Coast Repertory for the title of the county’s most accomplished theater.

In Newport Beach, the Balboa Performing Arts Center, the revived incarnation of an old seaside vaudeville house, hosts an eclectic mix of performance groups, as well as the county’s most adventurous classic film series.

A dream scenario? Certainly--and one subject to a harsh wake-up call should the regional economy turn bad in the next few years. But in 2000, all of the seeds of the teeming arts scene of 2005 imagined here have been planted. Orange County already has proved itself as fertile soil for surprising and rapid growth in the arts. Perhaps what was sown in the last quarter of the 20th century can come to full bloom in the first half-decade of the 21st.

Twenty-five years ago, enjoying the arts in Orange County typically meant a freeway excursion to Los Angeles. As a new century dawns, the shadows over local culture have greatly receded.

The Orange County Performing Arts center is booked with opera, dance and symphonic music, as well as touring Broadway shows and a smattering of jazz and pop. South Coast Repertory is one of the country’s most acclaimed regional theaters, the incubator of four recent plays that have won or been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. The center has raised the profile of local performing arts groups; SCR’s example has helped inspire a local grass-roots movement of theaters in storefronts and warehouse blocks.

But the transformation is not complete. The new century finds an array of arts institutions feeling cramped and limited and mulling expansion.

* The Performing Arts Center’s leaders are driving hard to turn their single building into a multiple-venue complex. The estimated cost of $200 million would buy a 2,000-seat concert hall and 500-seat music theater to complement the existing auditorium. The expansion also would include a connecting plaza between the two buildings, big enough to host large outdoor events.

* If the dreams of South Coast Repertory come true, a third stage of about 300 seats will be built behind the existing theater complex.

* The Orange County Museum of Art, which has outgrown its Newport Beach site, could end up in a new building next to the Orange County Performing Arts Center. Planning remains in its early stages, with no firm strategy yet adopted, says the art museum’s director, Naomi Vine.

Although Orange County Performing Arts Center leaders almost always let the term “world class” slip when talking up their visions of bigger and better things, Santa Ana’s hoped-for revolution comes from the local grass roots and relies on a jolt of youthfulness.

Downtown, with venues housed in grand old buildings dating back to the 1920s and 1930s, aspires to become a humming, diversified hive for the arts, an enticing cutting-edge alternative to the county’s dominant mall culture.

This month marks two developments that could become turning points toward Santa Ana’s vision.

Last week, the Orange County High School of the Arts opened its new campus, housed primarily in a seven-story converted bank building. Now more than 900 students, most from elsewhere in Orange County, will converge daily on downtown. The attraction is a competitive, independent, “Fame”-like arts school acclaimed for its work since its founding in 1987 as a satellite program at Los Alamitos High School.

City and school officials envision the arts high school not just as a self-contained ivory tower, but as an engine for arts education throughout Santa Ana. Plans call for faculty and students to serve as teachers and mentors, fanning out through the city for after-school programs to identify and train talented kids in the predominantly Latino school district, so that when they reach the seventh grade they will be ready to win spots at the elite arts high school.

Santa Ana students now account for about 10% of the student body; the eventual goal is to triple that, says Ralph Opacic, the school’s executive director.

The school will be an arts center in its own right, offering about 150 public performances a year at two venues--a 400-seat concert hall in a converted church and a planned, 650-seat theater for dance and plays that is part of a $17.5-million expansion project for which fund-raising has begun.

Next week, another potential new arts hub opens as the Santa Ana Performing Arts and Event Center hosts its inaugural program, an art exhibit and jazz concert. Private owners say they have spent $6 million renovating the long abandoned but ornately outfitted and well-preserved Gothic-revival structure, a former Masonic Temple. It houses theaters of 700, 250 and 50 seats, as well as a restaurant and catering facility.

Also recently launched is the DePietro Performance Center, an 80-capacity hall that is home to the Orange County Crazies comedy troupe. Jazz, classical and gospel music performances are being booked as well in this all-purpose music and theater venue.

The New Voices Playwrights Workshop, a consortium of Orange County grass-roots dramatists, is pushing to open its own theater in the Artists Village--probably in a renovated building, but possibly at a recently vacated stage in Cal State Fullerton’s satellite campus, the Grand Central Art Center. When and where the theater opens depends on the success of a $40,000 fund-raising drive.

One option for the 82-seat Grand Central stage, formerly home to the defunct Alternative Repertory Theatre, is to make it a satellite venue for productions of the Cal State Fullerton theater department, says Mike McGee, Grand Central project administrator.

North of downtown, Santa Ana’s Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, buoyed by this year’s well-attended “Forbidden City” exhibition of Chinese antiquities, hopes to add a wing within five years.

While Costa Mesa and Santa Ana clearly are the magnets for new arts development, coastal Orange County has its dreamers, too.

The Laguna Playhouse, Orange County’s oldest theater company, envisions adding a second, smaller stage that would allow for more--and more daring--programming than in the 420-seat Moulton Theatre. It bought an adjacent office building for $3.1 million and is trying to raise additional millions to renovate it as a theater.

Up the coast in Newport Beach, the renovation of the 1927-vintage Balboa Theater faces obstacles. The private, nonprofit foundation undertaking the project has completed preliminary work to strengthen the structure and prepare the site, but fund-raising remains about $3 million short of the $4.5 million needed to finish turning the ocean-side former vaudeville and movie palace into a 350-seat theater for music, dance, plays, musicals and film screenings.

Also afoot in Newport Beach, although with political obstacles yet to be surmounted, is a plan for a 400-seat arts and education center adjacent to the main library at Fashion Island. Don Gregory, one of the project’s backers, says the estimated $12 million to build it would be raised privately. First the arts center would need a lease of 3.5 city-owned acres, a matter that could be hotly debated.

Bricks-and-mortar growth in the arts brings difficult creative challenges.

Say the Orange County Performing Arts Center succeeds in its expansion. Then what?

Having broken the scheduling logjam at the existing Segerstrom Hall, center officials would have to make good on their predictions that they can fill many newly freed dates with hot-drawing Broadway roadshows, and with an infusion of pop and rock concerts by classy, artistically acclaimed acts.

The three leading independent performing arts groups that use the center--the Pacific Symphony, Opera Pacific and the Philharmonic Society of Orange County--all would be put to the same test they faced when Segerstrom Hall opened in 1986. Can they muster the quality and the financial undergirding to seize the opportunity afforded by more open dates? Can the Pacific Symphony, for which the new concert hall would be tailor-made, meet the expectations that will come with inhabiting a space more ideally suited to classical concerts than the current multipurpose hall?

Will Opera Pacific have the resources and enhanced drawing power to stage five or six annual productions--up from the current four--while booking longer runs for each opera? Will the Philharmonic Society’s Eclectic Orange Festival, having its second run this fall, turn into the internationally renowned, interdisciplinary event its backers imagine?

The downside of dreaming is that it can be thwarted by blunders or bad luck.

If the expansive visions for the county’s artistic heart in Costa Mesa fail, it would be demoralizing for the moneyed establishment that supports the Orange County Performing Arts Center as well as its resident groups and South Coast Repertory. And it would be a frustrating missed opportunity for lovers of the performing arts.

Center officials pushing expansion already have learned to temper their predictions. Announcements in July 1999 that a huge “naming gift” was imminent produced expectations that went unfulfilled for more than a year. Last month, frustrated that progress had stalled, Segerstrom stepped forward with what center officials hailed as the biggest gift in the history of Orange County philanthropy.

The history of Disney Hall, under construction in Los Angeles, also presents a cautionary note: Fund-raising began with a $50-million cornerstone gift in 1987, but the project foundered as cost estimates grew after a 1992 groundbreaking. It took years to set it back on track, with an opening now expected in 2003, at a cost of $274 million--more than 150% higher than the original estimate.

Santa Ana’s dream is even more immense because it envisions the transformation of an entire city. Can an arts scene built on small, grass-roots theaters and galleries and a smattering of chic restaurants draw well enough to turn a still-quiet downtown vibrant night after night?

For now, the visions of Orange County arts leaders are grand, and so are the pronouncements that come with them:

* “It all makes such beautiful sense . . . education, arts, technology, diversity, tolerance, the future.”

--Santa Ana Mayor Miguel A. Pulido, in a speech last spring announcing the Orange County High School of the Arts’ move to his city’s downtown.

* “The concert hall sits on the horizon and leads us to paths of greatness. It will be our Stradivarius.”

--Carl St.Clair, Pacific Symphony conductor, in a speech acclaiming Henry T. Segerstrom’s $40-million gift to build a new hall at the Performing Arts Center.

* “Orange County is fast becoming a cultural heart to the entire state.”

--Gov. Gray Davis, in a letter congratulating Segerstrom on his gift for center expansion.

Will these words prove prophetic five years hence? Or will they ring hollow? The curtain has risen on an optimistic opening scene, the script is being enacted day by day, and Orange Countians are waiting for the denouement, hoping it will command a hearty “Bravo!”

Times staff writers Chris Pasles and Vivian LeTran contributed to this story.