A Center to be most proud of

This month, the spotlight turned ever more away from Los Angeles and

onto Costa Mesa with the groundbreaking of the Renee and Henry

Segerstrom Concert Hall, the top-billed part of the $200-million

expansion of the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

For years, the Center has slowly worked hard to go from Southern

California understudy (to Los Angeles) to a star in its own right.

Its breakthrough certainly seems to be here.

When the expansion is completed in 2006, 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.

It all will be enclosed within a glass-curtain exterior.

With the Center, as well as South Coast Repertory, Costa Mesa now

is home to a dazzling mixture of performance space that regularly

brings in top-tier shows and, perhaps most famously, was the location

for the premiere of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Wit.”

It is a mixture that offers a rich artistic wellspring that is

rare outside of urban centers such as New York and London.

But the importance of this artistic convergence goes beyond

catering to theatergoers. Some 500,000 children are expected to pass

through the Center’s doors each year for an education in the arts

that now, sadly, is missing from most schools. Because of the Center,

those students will learn how art enriches our lives and helps us

expand our understanding of who we are.

Costa Mesa, and Orange County, as well, are most fortunate to be

home to such a surprisingly grand center for the arts.