Orange County Performing Arts Center

With the Orange County Performing Arts Center operating near capacity two years ahead of projections, the Center board has moved ahead with plans to add at least two new theaters at an estimated cost of up to $92 million. The proposal includes a concert hall of 2,300 to 2,500 seats and a drama theater of 650 to 800 seats, possibly to be shared with neighboring South Coast Repertory Theatre.

For its 25th anniversary, the Orange County Performing Arts Center is giving itself a new name: Segerstrom Center for the Arts. The change went into effect Wednesday with a late-afternoon ceremony on the center's plaza in Costa Mesa. The name honors the family that provided a home and support for Orange County's leading arts district by making periodic donations of land and money since 1974 that now total 14 acres and $75 million. "Segerstrom Center for the Arts" has been used since 1998 as a relatively low-profile name for the arts district, but it now also becomes the organizational name of its chief inhabitant.

All aboard! "Starlight Express" will chug into the Orange County Performing Arts Center next season for a two-week run, April 3 to 15, immediately following a run at the Pantages Theatre in Los Angeles. The Andrew Lloyd Webber musical will start a 28-city tour in Cincinnati on Nov. 7 with stops in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, St. Louis and at least a half-dozen other places before reaching Costa Mesa.

Henry Segerstrom, developer of South Coast Plaza, had a scheduling glitch. The real-estate tycoon, whose land and multimillions of dollars fostered the development of Orange County's flourishing arts campus, could not attend the 2006 premiere of "Kings of the Dance. " So he called Sergei Danilian, who packaged the all-male virtuoso ballet showcase in association with the Orange County Performing Arts Center. Danilian, speaking from his Ardani Artists Management office in New York, remembered the moment vividly.

Listeners who have been curious about the Pacific Symphony but haven't been able or willing to buy a ticket now have another option. Beginning Thursday, the orchestra's concerts at the Orange County Performing Arts Center will be broadcast live over KUSC-FM (91.5). The concerts are the first programs to be broadcast on a regular basis from the Costa Mesa facility, although KUSC carried the Los Angeles Philharmonic concert that opened the center in 1986.

Although Thursday night's Pacific Symphony concert featured the West Coast premiere of Toru Takemitsu's "From me flows what you call Time," it was the orchestra's startling performance of an old standby that really rocked the Orange County Performing Arts Center. After intermission, St.

At the end of impressionist Rich Little's most recent visit to Jimmy Stewart's Beverly Hills home, the legendary star was walking Little out to his car when a tour bus pulled up. An excited tourist yelled out of the bus window, "Rich Little! What are you doing coming out of Jimmy Stewart's?" Before Little could answer, Stewart grinned and, in his trademark slow delivery, drawled, "Rich just came over to get his batteries charged."

The Orange County Performing Arts Center, which celebrated its second anniversary Thursday, has made extraordinary inroads in attracting a regional audience that characterizes itself as largely lukewarm to performing arts and culture events, The Times Orange County Poll has found.

Twelve months after taking over the top job at Orange County's largest arts institution, Tom Tomlinson looks no worse for wear. Movie-star tan and not a blond hair out of place, he gives the outward appearance of operating on cruise control. In fact, he works off stress by running 50 miles a week. And his style of leadership draws nothing but raves from the people who work with him. One local arts executive calls him "a problem-solver." Another lauds him as "a consensus-builder."

The San Francisco Ballet has been generous in casting its 12 performances of "The Nutcracker" at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. No fewer than eight different Sugar Plum Fairies are scheduled to be partnered by seven different Cavaliers by the time the nine-day engagement ends Sunday, unless injuries intervene. Some of the variety results, of course, from rotation of roles. A soloist in the Arabian Dance one night becomes a Butterfly in the Waltz of the Flowers another.

On most days, the wall at 2201 Broadway that overlooks a downtown parking lot on the corner of Grand Avenue and Broadway draws little attention from passersby. But during the last couple of months, people have stopped in their tracks to gaze up at the hundred-foot-tall, cream-colored façade as dancers suspended from thin climbing ropes rappel down its surface in formation, stopping every now and again to execute slow-motion pirouettes, somersaults and jetés in flouncy mesh underskirts.

L.A.'s Festival of New American Musicals closed its third season Aug. 21 with a tuneful fundraiser, billed as a birthday party for Tony Award-winning composer Jason Robert Brown, of "Parade," "13," "Songs for a New World" and "Last Five Years. " "For what it's worth, my birthday was in June," he said, declaring it a gift to be able to play favorites from his own musicals, which he did in the backyard garden of Noelle and Tom Hicks' Brentwood home. Joining him to perform were Adam Pascal of "Rent," Lara Pulver of "True Blood," Nita Whitaker of "Star Search," Graham Phillips of "The Good Wife" and "The Theater Geeks of America," a collection of teenagers who perform gratis for charitable causes.

The going remains tough, but the financial outlook is improving somewhat for Orange County's two leading performing arts presenters. The Orange County Performing Arts Center and the Philharmonic Society of Orange County both have announced modest operating surpluses for their recently concluded 2009-10 seasons. At the Costa Mesa performing arts center, by far the largest arts organization in Orange County, the extra $200,000 allowed it to continue chipping away at a $1-million deficit that accumulated during the recent recession.

In the old days, the ballet company would come to town, the theater would sell tickets, the dancers would dance, the audience would applaud, and everyone (hopefully) went home happy. But in these recessionary, interactive times, those rules don't apply anymore. As the numbers of subscribers and ticket buyers decline, dance groups are looking for enticements, beyond actual performances, to get audiences to queue up at the box office. Which is the driving force behind the Trey McIntyre Project Residency at the Orange County Performing Arts Center today through Saturday.

Florence "Floss" Schumacher, a doyenne of Orange County's social and arts scene for nearly three decades who was instrumental in establishing the Orange County Performing Arts Center and several performing arts organizations, has died. She was 86. Schumacher died July 17 of a stroke at a rehabilitation center in Morro Bay, said her niece, Mary Foster, who had been caring for her.

In a move that Orange County Performing Arts Center hopes will be a first step in drawing O.C. audiences into the process of new theater development, the center is expected to announce today that it will present its first "completely staged developmental production" of the "Broadway-hopeful" musical "The Unauthorized Autobiography of Samantha Brown," by Kait Kerrigan and Brian Lowdermilk. The show, the first of its kind for the center, will run April 21 to May 3 at the Samueli Theater at Segerstrom Center for the Arts.

"Annie," the Charles Strouse-Thomas Meehan-Martin Charnin perennial about the plucky comic strip orphan, arrived Tuesday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center with renewed sparkle and buckets of charm. Yes, the show still flags somewhat in the second act and seems a mite long at a little over 2 1/2 hours, especially for the youngest audience members.

Does it pay these days to perform thrice-familiar masterpieces? At the box office, it usually does. But artistically, when a performer opts for the safety of such music, he only invites comparison with the best performances of the past.

Although Opera Pacific is struggling to stay afloat, the Orange County Performing Arts Center's three remaining resident companies see no imminent signs of disaster. The Pacific Symphony, the county's leading orchestra, hasn't seen any falloff in donations, said president John Forsyte. It expects to make its $8-million fundraising nut for this season, including contributions that will allow it to expand its education programs. Income from subscription sales is down "but not unmanageable," while single-concert purchases are coming in "way above expectations," Forsyte said.

The Orange County Performing ArtsCenter suffered an unprecedented $13-million deficit during the recently ended 2007-08 fiscal year, officials reported Thursday -- not because ticket sales or donations went sour, but because of a blowback effect from the subprime mortgage crisis that vastly increased interest and other costs of the bonds the Costa Mesa center had issued to build the Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall. The bulk of the deficit came from $8.