Costa Mesa-based Rutan & Tucker LLP was just one of the law firms in several California markets recruiting Bill Meehan 10 years ago.
It wasn’t an early favorite.
The Boston University School of Law grad and his wife liked Orange County, he recalls, but thought they would have to sacrifice some activities they enjoyed—nights at the theater, for example—if they chose to live here.
The couple wondered what Orange County had to offer besides the beach and Disneyland.
Then Meehan discovered the Segerstrom Center for the Arts.
“It was amazing,” he says. “Even better on the inside than it was on the outside.”
Meehan says the center was a major reason he decided to move his young family here. He’s been with Rutan & Tucker ever since and now serves as executive committee chairman of the Segerstrom Center’s Rising Leaders Council.
He also brings to the arts campus young lawyers he wants to recruit to show them all of the aspects that impressed him a decade ago.
“Our recruits sometimes feel that Orange County is too suburban,” he says. “They are really surprised—in a good way—when we take them to the center and they see how incredible it is.”
The cosmopolitan atmosphere extends beyond the various performance venues. The Center Club is a place for executives to rub shoulders over lunch. The place also offers meeting and banquet facilities available for events, with a recent makeover that added new ways for Millennials to plug in and meet up.
“Thirty or 40 years ago, a lot of business relationships were formed on the golf course. Today, I think more and more of them are formed over a meal and coming to the center here to enjoy a show together,” says Larry Higby, who compiled a resume that stretched from the White House to the upper ranks of a number of Fortune 500 companies before serving a recent three-year term as chairman of the center’s board of directors.
Higby puts the center in the same company as the best in U.S.
“By any measure,” he says, “the Segerstrom Center for the Arts is among the best in the country.”
The current operating budget is around $60 million, and the lineup of shows ranges from symphonies to dance. Performances by cool jazz artists and rockabilly bands give way to orchestra sessions and visits by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Bread-and-butter Broadway road shows punctuate the lineup, accounting for much of the box office.
They take stages at the iconic Henry & Renee Segerstrom Hall, the next-door Samueli Theater, the opera-house inspired Segerstrom Hall, the Judy Morr Theater, the Lawrence and Katrina Dodge Education Center, and the Arts plaza, which serves as the site of outdoor movies, concerts, and last summer a public showing of World Cup soccer that drew 1,300 people.
The Segerstrom Center also is home to the American Ballet Theater Company William J. Gillespie School, a groundbreaking partnership announced in November.
The Pacific Symphony, the Pacific Chorale, and the Philharmonic Society of Orange County have been interwoven with the center since it opened in 1986.
The operations are now overseen by John Ginger, president of J. Ginger Masonry in Riverside and a longtime center supporter (see related story, this page).The recently appointed chair of the center’s board has set out to lead the organization as it heads toward its fifth decade.
Artistic Vision
It was the late 1960s when Orange County business and community leaders decided the time was right to create a world-class performing arts venue. OC’s population ballooned from 216,224 in 1950 to 703,925 just 10 years later, according to the Orange County Local Agency Formation Commission.
Major businesses established headquarters here during that period, among them Allergan Inc. and Edwards Lifesciences Corp. The Irvine Company developed its first planned-community neighborhood in 1963. And major educational institutions were founded: California State University-Fullerton in 1957 and the University of California-Irvine in 1965.
Establishing the center also took visionary leaders.
“The original board of directors, led by Henry (Segerstrom), were real pioneers,” Higby said. “This group of business leaders drove the project forward. They wanted to make the arts an important part of the fabric of the community and have a real impact.”
The late Henry Segerstrom, who died in February at age 91, was a founding member of the board of what was then known as the Orange County Performing Arts Center.
His family donated the first 5 acres of land for the campus in the mid-1970s and deeded an additional 6-acre parcel in 1998 worth $16 million. In 2000, he provided the lead gift of $40 million toward the center’s $200 million campaign in the largest charitable cash donation in the history of Orange County, according to the center and news reports at the time. He and his second wife, Renee, in 2006 commissioned “Connector,” a 65-foot-high steel sculpture created by minimalist artist Richard Serra and installed on the new community plaza.Â
Center leaders in 2011 named the campus the Segerstrom Center for the Arts to honor the family’s contributions.
Ground broke on the center in 1986, and today it covers 14 acres. It has an annual operating budget of $50 million.
Education
The center is well regarded for its educational efforts aimed at the wider OC community. Terry Dwyer, the veteran president of the center, estimates that it has touched the lives of 300,000 over the past year through programs such as Art Teach, Summer at the Center program, related field trips and outings, and collaborations with local high schools and middle schools.
The center’s relationship with the American Ballet Theater Co. has grown to include an upcoming year-round presence on campus in the form of the Gillespie School.
The company has performed there regularly since the center’s inaugural season and now plans to start classes there in September.
American Ballet students will have the chance to audition for performances at the center while they study.
The school—named after ballet theater company board member and Segerstrom Center donor William Gillespie—is unusual because most ballet schools are associated with dance companies that audition dancers only after graduation.
“If you look at the totality of what we’ve created here, it’s really astounding,” Higby says. “All performing arts are represented—the best in the world.”
Business Factor
The relationship between the center and the Orange County business community has been one of mutual support from the beginning, and that continues today, say center leaders.
“Almost all the members of our board are prominent business leaders and have supported the center through both their businesses and on their own for a number of years,” Higby says.
Among the companies represented by members of the board and volunteers are Kia Motors America, United Airlines, Rutan & Tucker, Macy’s, Versace, Union Bank, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.
Big donors to the center over the past year include South Coast Plaza and Bank of America, though the center doesn’t release donation figures.
The bonds with the business community have been bolstered by a genuine appreciation for a shared aspect of the arts and commerce, according to Dwyer.
“It was the center’s journey of continual exploration and creativity that really drew the business community into everything we were doing,” says Dwyer. “It wasn’t so much the buildings—although the buildings are first-class—but what we were doing inside the buildings that mattered, as well as our outreach programs.”
The center has partnered with Camp Pendleton, Children’s Hospital of Orange County, and other organizations and businesses throughout Orange County to be, as Dwyer puts it, “a true catalyst for change.”
The business community, Dwyer says, invests in the center partly because leaders feel it helps them achieve their corporate social-responsibility objectives by giving them a way to invest in the arts through financial contributions, volunteer hours or in-kind donations.
“One of the nice things for the business community is that we have many levels to get involved,” he says. “The business community feels this is an organization that meets their needs. They help us out—it’s a mutually beneficial relationship.”
Dwyer says the center’s board is a careful steward of its annual budget.
“We have a facility worth over $400 million, with virtually no debt. … The business community responds to this. They are confident that this organization will take good care.”
And, as Rutan & Tucker’s Meehan learned a decade ago, the Segerstrom Center stands ready as a valuable asset when it comes to recruiting the next generation of business leaders.
“You want them to see the amazing things Orange County offers, the whole package,” Dwyer says. “The center provides that.”
