Grounds ready for Performing Arts Center expansion

Lolita Harper

The power of the city’s dynasty family, giant bulldozers and

pyrotechnic explosives will combine this evening for a truly

earth-shattering experience when the Orange County Performing Arts

Center breaks ground on a $200-million expansion.

Thousands of people are expected to attend the groundbreaking for

the Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, which is the first major

expansion of the center since 1986.

Carl St. Clair, the acclaimed music director of the Pacific

Symphony, will conduct giant bulldozers in artistic and organized

destruction, while a backdrop of fireworks accentuates the

celebration.

The new 2,000-seat concert hall and 500-seat music theater will

cover 260,000 square feet and feature a multilevel grand lobby space,

a private donor lounge, rehearsal rooms, dressing rooms, a music

library, a restaurant, an adjustable acoustical canopy and adjustable

reverberation chambers, all enclosed within a glass-curtain exterior.

Center officials have described the renovated arts area as a

meeting of the Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Museum

of Art and Broadway, all just across the street from each other. City

leaders have been anticipating the project and the arts district it

would create.

Councilwoman Libby Cowan said that she will be unable to event the

ground breaking, but that she is excited at the prospect of the new

center.

“I walked the area the other day... and it just fits so well with

the whole effort there to create a pedestrian-friendly, cohesive arts

plaza,” Cowan said.