Author Samuel Johnson defined opera as an exotic and irrational entertainment. But to someone charged with raising money to keep opera alive in a recession economy, it is something else again. As one fundraiser recently put it, “Opera is the most expensive human activity next to war.”
The point was cruelly driven home a little more than a week ago, when, in the midst of a critically successful 20th season, Chicago Opera Theater announced it was suspending operations because of a $360,000 deficit. The company also canceled its June production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and called off plans for the 1994 season.
General manager Joseph De Rugeriis says the opera-in-English company, which has an operating budget of $1.2 million, will use its dark season to regroup and restructure, review management and fundraising procedures and form a more coherent plan for future operations-in addition, of course, to paying off its serious debt.
Apart from De Rugeriis and founder/artistic director Alan Stone, all the other staff members have either resigned or been dismissed.
Last week a letter went out to COT subscribers urging them to convert their “Don Giovanni” tickets into donations. When asked why the COT board decided to put a hold on production and close down the office at this time, rather than waiting until the end of the season, De Rugeriis says, “The board decided that to incur the risk of adding to the existing debt would have been irresponsible to our public.”
He says there was no guarantee that ticket income from “Don Giovanni”-the remaining production of COT’s 1993 season-would have been enough to cover costs.
“There came a point when the money simply ran out,” Stone explains. “The board realized that to throw any more money at the deficit would be like pouring oil into a pipe with a hole in the bottom.
“What we are doing, at this point, is freezing the body before surgery, and that should make it possible for the body to survive. We are demonstrating to our donors how fiscally prudent we are not to incur any more expenses we can’t pay off.”
Downsizing has become the buzzword in the arts as well as in business, where every corporation from IBM on down seems to be scaling its operations to the “new austerity” of the ’90s. For arts groups, drops in subscription and contributed income have forced a serious rethinking of priorities. Gone are the rosy artistic visions of the prosperous ’80s; basic survival scenarios have taken their place.
For groups like Chicago Opera Theater, these scenarios often were put into place too weakly and too late. Add a few disastrous financial missteps and, voila, another company plummets to its death.
City Musick, our much-praised five-year-old early music ensemble, folded in 1990 because of money woes and strife between the board and artistic director. Basically Bach, another good group devoted to period performance, disappeared two years later because of bad debts and management problems.
And the problems are by no means unique to Chicago. Opera attendance may be on the upswing all over the nation, but the companies that produce it all seem to be desperately holding on for fear of being swept away by a rising tide of red ink. Consider:
– Opera America, the service organization for North American opera companies, reports that roughly one-third of the companies in COT’s budget category ($1 million to $2 million) reported deficits in fiscal 1992. And half the companies in Lyric Opera’s budget range (more than $5 million) are running deficits. Lyric is one of the fortunate few that is operating in the black, but no one can say for how long.
– Faced with a $3 million deficit, New York City Opera may be forced to call off its 50th anniversary season this fall. San Francisco Opera has canceled its 1994 summer season of French opera. Other U.S. companies that are either cutting back or postponing productions include Greater Miami Opera, Baltimore Opera, Eugene Opera, Pennsylvania Opera Theater and the Lake George Opera Festival.
– And not even the heavily subsidized European theaters are immune from the malaise: All the opera companies in Italy, the birthplace of opera, are battling severe problems, chief of which is lack of money.
It is particularly ironic that COT called a halt to its season on the same weekend that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra raised $501,400 through its annual radio fundraiser. If that money had gone instead to COT, the company could have wiped the red ink off its ledgers with nearly $142,000 to spare. For the Symphony, the money is a drop in the proverbial bucket; for COT, it is a veritable fortune.
Why is it that the Symphony and Lyric can raise millions of dollars for their projects-especially costly building projects-while Chicago’s small and mid-sized organizations are forced to go begging?
One answer is the strange, top-heavy image we have of ourselves as a cultural community. The CSO and Lyric are considered our blue-chip cultural organizations, along with Ravinia, the Art Institute and Goodman Theatre. And a number of corporations have made it their policy to donate only to these institutions. A few local foundations reserve certain grant monies expressly for smaller organizations, these benefactors are the exception rather than the rule.
Another answer is the CSO and Lyric are able to maintain marketing and development departments of a size and sophistication smaller groups cannot match. COT, for example, has long lacked a professional marketing and development effort, and stringent budget controls. Says De Rugeriis: “When troubles arose, we applied Band-aids. To meet our payroll we were forever robbing Peter to pay Paul. Finally Peter said, `Hey, I need to be paid back.”‘
The saddest thing about COT’s shutting down is that, artistically speaking, the company was doing its job. The recent Virgil Thomson-Gertrude Stein “Four Saints in Three Acts” fulfilled COT’s mandate of augmenting our meat-and-potatoes operatic diet with something different and worthwhile. “Four Saints” did not look or sound like the work of a company on the brink of bankruptcy.
Yet the bitter truth is that not enough people knew how good “Four Saints” was, despite favorable reviews and strong word-of-mouth. The show cost about $200,000 to produce, but its seven performances pulled in only $140,000 at the box office and played to mostly half-filled houses at the 900-seat Athenaeum Theatre, according to De Rugeriis. If COT’s shows were underwritten the way Lyric productions routinely are underwritten, such losses would not be so crucial.
Compounding the company’s problems was a critical loss of 400 to 600 subscribers this season, a drop in single ticket sales and the loss of support from certain corporations and foundations that might have been more sympathetic to COT’s situation if they were not feeling the pinch of the recession themselves.
“Last fall, after we told our subscribers we were having only a two-opera season, a lot of them chose not to renew,” De Rugeriis explained. “Some of them told us there weren’t operas worthy of subscribing to. They didn’t trust `Four Saints,’ which meant we had to sell more single tickets than before. And there simply were not enough of those ticket buyers to fill the house.”
COT had been in a precarious financial situation since 1990. A holiday revival of Oliver Knussen’s “Where the Wild Things Are” at the Auditorium drew small crowds, and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Carousel” at the Shubert gave the company its first, and probably last, foray into musical comedy: The show racked up huge costs at the unionized downtown theater. Both shows were undertaken under now-departed general manager Marc Scorca, now executive director of Opera America.
To make matters worse, the company’s accounting procedures were so poor that no one knew how alarmingly the debts were piling up. In January 1991, COT came within one hour of closing down. Faced with a $600,000 deficit, board members fought off the threat of liquidation with a fund-raising effort among themselves. It bought the company time to seek funds in the community.
To no avail, alas: Two years and three months later, the well was dry again. A chaotic office situation, compounded by Stone’s lengthy medical leaves over the past two seasons, left a lot of audience members and funding people wondering who really was running the opera theater.
The immediate question is not just how COT will be able to cope with this most serious crisis of its 20-year history, but if it can even survive. Loyal board members and foundations like the Joyce Foundation and Chicago Community Trust helped to bail the company out several times before. Will they be willing to do so yet again?
Stone is optimistic that the funding pump can be primed from within the company. “We have about 10 to 15 wonderful board members who are desperately trying to hold onto the company,” he says. “How quickly and successfully they eradicate the red ink will determine the involvement of people on the outside. Because nobody else is going to give us money until we have reduced our deficit.”
Says De Rugeriis: “This (crisis) is an opportunity to appeal to the public to assist in the reorganization of the city’s No. 2 opera company. I’d like to see us rise out of the ashes, stronger than ever.”
Chicago deserves to have a cheaper, opera-in-English alternative to Lyric Opera, just as we deserve to have a company whose ticket prices are within reach of more general audiences than the Lyric attracts. The city has produced newer, smaller opera companies-companies that are comparably committed to giving younger artists performance opportunities they would otherwise lack. None of them, however, produces opera at the same artistic level as COT. For that reason alone, the company deserves to survive.
Let’s hope that within a year of earnest fundraising and reorganization Chicago Opera Theater finally will be able to pull itself out of the crisis-management mode and back into the opera-producing mode. If it fails to do so this time around, there won’t be a second chance.
