New arts center chief has the right attitude

EDITORIALThe list of accomplishments and the resume of the new president and chief operating officer for the Orange County Performing Arts Center are impressive.

Terrence W. Dwyer, who was announced as the new president last week and will begin his job April 20, has spent 25 years in the arts and entertainment business. He pulled the La Jolla Playhouse out of a financial crisis and built up a $44-million capital campaign for the theater.

He has spent a year in Houston at the Alley Theater, and he has a resume dotted with internationally recognized schools and universities.

But that was not what caught our attention or what seemed to suggest best that Dwyer was the right choice to lead the performing arts center into its next great phase. It was what he told the Pilot.

“Artistic excellence and strong relationships with the community will be preeminent.”

The statement will be key to Dwyer’s success in the major challenges facing him, including finishing up the center’s expansion of the 2,000-seat Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall and the 500-seat Samueli Theater and raising the millions of dollars a year the center needs to keep operating. He will have to maintain the arts center’s strong relationship with the Newport-Mesa and Orange County communities that so far have supported its mission generously.

That he knows those relationships are key before he even begins should make his job far easier from when the curtain opens on his tenure. It also should make it easier for him to continue bringing in the mix of popular and critically acclaimed shows and performers that make the arts center such a treasure.

It sounds as though the performing arts center will continue to be under sound leadership.