O.C. Theater Gets $1.3 Million for Expansion

The billionaire co-founder of one of Orange County’s leading high-tech firms has given $1.3 million to South Coast Repertory, the largest single gift in the theater company’s 35-year history, SCR officials announced Friday.

Henry T. Nicholas III, president of Irvine-based Broadcom Corp., the nation’s leading maker of cable-modem computer chips, and his wife, Stacey, earmarked their gift for the Costa Mesa theater’s proposed expansion. They said they hope their donation will pave the way for others in the county’s booming high-tech industry to have a major impact on its arts scene.

“We’re trying to set an example for what we think other people who have achieved a level of affluence can do for the community,” Nicholas said Friday. The price of Broadcom’s stock increased more than that of any other Orange County company last year--going from $24 per share when it went public in April to $120.75 a share at the year’s end. Broadcom is now worth an estimated $6 billion. The South County couple’s donation is their largest philanthropic gift to date, and the first contribution toward SCR’s multimillion-dollar expansion.

The Tony Award-winning troupe’s plans call for a new 300-seat theater to replace its 161-seat Second Stage. Just last month, SCR was promised a gift of land for the expansion by C.J. Segerstrom & Sons, the real-estate development family that donated the property on which SCR and the adjacent Orange County Performing Arts Center were built.

SCR officials don’t expect to launch a capital campaign for the expansion for about a year, but the gift gives the effort a tremendous boost, said David Emmes, theater co-founder and producing artistic director.

“It will truly be a catalyst for moving this project forward,” Emmes said Friday.

The largest single gift SCR had received before the donation from the Nicholases, who describe themselves as longtime theater-lovers, was a little under $1 million in 1995 from the Laguna Beach-based Gillespie Foundation. In November, the theater company received $550,000 from the James Irvine Foundation, which, like the Segerstrom family, has donated millions to the arts from profits generated by real-estate development.

Such developers led the way in helping to finance Orange County cultural facilities such as the $73-million Performing Arts Center and organizations including SCR, the Pacific Symphony, Opera Pacific, the Orange County Museum of Art and others.

Lately, however, arts, educational, social and other nonprofit institutions have been aggressively cultivating support from the local high-tech industry, which has been the fastest-growing industry in the county for the last four years.

Newly minted high-tech millionaires and billionaires have given several gifts of $100,000 to the Orange County Performing Arts Center and have joined its board. In addition, center Chairman Mark Chapin Johnson said Friday that a much larger gift to the center--an amount similar to the Nicholases’ to SCR and also from a high-tech contributor--will be announced shortly.

“That whole area of business is becoming very sensitive to quality-of-life” issues, Johnson said, “and is very enthusiastically starting to support the arts. People realize [how a vibrant arts community] is going to benefit them and their children.”

The Ohio-born Nicholas, 39, praised the acting, directing and playwriting at SCR. He chose to support its physical expansion, he said, after asking the troupe what it most needed.

“I felt [the donation] would be giving something back to the community, which has helped us so much in building Broadcom,” said Nicholas, who has three young children. He and his wife began attending SCR after moving to the county about three years ago from Los Angeles, where he started Broadcom with Henry Samueli in 1991.

Nicholas noted that a new generation of philanthropists are developing charitable habits far earlier than their predecessors because so much wealth can be amassed so quickly in the exploding high-tech field.

He’s hoping to send a signal to other newly affluent high-tech moguls that “you don’t need to retire to think about philanthropy--you can think about it when your kids are still small and [may] benefit from it while they’re growing up.”

Although the Nicholases’ gift was not announced until Friday, it was given, in Broadcom stock, last month. Likewise, a $500,000 gift to help revamp UC Irvine’s aging Village Theatre was given in December, but not announced until Thursday, by actress and philanthropist Claire Trevor Bren, stepmother of Newport Beach developer Donald Bren.

SCR’s recent gift of land was announced at the same time that the Segerstrom family donated six acres for a major expansion of the performing arts center. The troupe, which operates on a $7.8-million annual budget, has not made any formal expansion plans, but company officials have been consulting with internationally renowned architect Cesar Pelli, who has been hired to design a new concert hall for the center.

SCR won a 1988 Tony Award for excellence in regional theater production. Four plays it commissioned in the ‘90s were named as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.

“The growth of the arts in Orange County is critically dependent on new people like the Nicholases coming in to replace donors who may move on and won’t be available in the future,” Emmes said.