Chicago Opera Theater has traveled a determined but bumpy road during its 26 seasons as the city’s small-scaled alternative to the mighty Lyric Opera. The company has undergone several shifts of administration and has weathered severe cash crises, including one that nearly killed COT in 1993, when it was forced to cancel its final production of the season, Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” Only the generosity of a couple of opera-loving benefactors allowed the company to pay its creditors and rebuild.
Now, with a new administration headed by Brian Dickie, former general director of England’s prestigious Glyndebourne Festival Opera and the Canadian Opera Company, and a move to the new Chicago Music and Dance Theater at the Frank Gehry-designed Millennium Park planned for 2002, its prospects appear to be looking up again.
But the crystal ball remains clouded. Still uncertain is how much box-office momentum COT can maintain at its present home, the 960-seat Athenaeum Theatre, to carry it securely into its new venue, which isn’t scheduled to open until September 2002. Also, nobody can predict how successfully COT, whose budget stands at $1.6 million, will be able to recoup the added costs (as yet unknown) of performing in the 1,452-seat Music and Dance Theater, which COT, as principal tenant, is sharing with 11 other music (and dance) groups.
Having taken the COT reins only last fall, Dickie can afford to exude confidence, although he does admit that a lot of hard work and clear-headed planning lies ahead. “It’s not going to be easy, but I don’t think it’s impossible,” said the urbane general director recently during a rehearsal for the company’s spring productions, a double bill of Puccini’s “Gianni Schicchi” and Michael Ching’s “Buoso’s Ghost.” Remaining performances are Friday and next Sunday at the Athenaeum Theatre. Philip Glass’ “Akhnaten” will conclude the season July 19-29.
“Obviously we have to do performances to match the superior theater and [downtown] location we will be occupying. Performing-arts institutions here have a phenomenally high standard. It’s a challenge for us to get up to the artistic level Chicago expects, particularly with the slender resources we have at our disposal.”
One concomitant of Lyric’s success has been to whet the public’s appetite for more opera, but at prices more in line for ordinary pockets. The Opera Theater has always based its appeal, for the most part, on affordability and accessibility. The general director points out that subscription packages at COT range from $60 to $132, as opposed to $179 to $1,049 at the Lyric, while students can attend Opera Theater performances for as little as $12.50–“much less than what they’d pay for a rock concert.” Unlike the Lyric, which sells out virtually its entire season months in advance, COT nearly always has good seats available.
To help bring audience members even closer to the operatic action, Dickie is instituting the use of supertitles for COT’s season-opening production of Monteverdi’s “Orfeo” in October, a change from COT’s original practice of performing every show in English. But the company debut of the Monteverdi work–conducted by Jane Glover and directed by Diane Paulus–signals an even more significant shift of artistic focus at COT. The company will emphasize 17th and 18th Century opera, along with the American works that have always been the company’s strong suit.
Welcome to the Brian Dickie era. As the 58-year-old general director said recently, “Opera has a nearly 400-year history. But 80 percent of the repertory presented by American opera companies was written between the premiere of Mozart’s `Marriage of Figaro’ in 1786 and the death of Puccini in 1924. We want to concentrate our efforts on those works which fall on either side of that spectrum.”
To that end, Dickie has engaged Mary Springfels, director of the Newberry Consort, to form an ensemble of period instrumentalists as the core group for its fall performances of “Orfeo” as well as other 17th and 18th Century operas that COT will present. Keyboardist David Schrader also will assume a key role with the new orchestra. This should be a great boon to the city’s early-music scene, which hasn’t heard any original-instruments performances of this repertory since the lamented City Musick staged Mozart’s “Idomeneo” here in 1988.
The 2000-01 COT season also will bring Robert Kurka’s “The Good Soldier Schweik” in March 2001 and Handel’s “Acis and Galatea” in June 2001. “Schweik,” which Chicago director Frank Galati staged for COT in 1981, also will get a new production, directed by Harry Silverstein and conducted by Alexander Platt. Also on the docket for spring 2001 is a family-oriented production of Britten’s “Noah’s Flood,” dates and location to be announced.
The Monteverdi and Handel operas would be business as usual for the blueblood Glyndebourne Festival, where the British-born Dickie spent the bulk of his career in opera administration, from 1962 to 1988. But it remains to be seen whether such fringe repertory can find its public in less sophisticated Chicago, where audience tastes run, for the most part, to bread-and-butter operas like “La Traviata” and “Tosca.”
Again, Dickie brushes aside such speculation with typical sangfroid. It’s not so much a question of risky “esoteric” repertory, he insists, as how well that repertory is performed. “I believe the difficulty of 17th and 18th Century repertory in the U.S. is directly attributable to the [large] size of the theaters in which they are usually performed,” he says. “The Athenaeum’s dimensions make it perfectly suitable for these operas. It’s clear to me that the operatic warhorses are difficult for a company of our kind to do to the highest possible level.” Anyway, he chuckles, “the Lyric has that particular corner of the market very well covered.”
The general director refuses to rule out COT’s investigating 19th Century operas as long as they are suitable for presentation on an intimate scale, he says. He mentions the lesser-known Rossini and Donizetti works and an early Verdi rarity, “Giovanna d’Arco,” as possibilities. Up to now, he points out, COT lacked a theater with an orchestra pit large enough to allow performances of such operas. True enough: The Opera Theater has commandeered five different theaters since Alan Stone founded the troupe in 1974, and none of them could boast an adequate pit.
As far as casting his announced repertory, Dickie does not anticipate any major change from the prevailing company philosophy. “I want to give as many opportunities as possible to the best young singers from this area and Illinois,” he says, adding that his contacts at Indiana University and the Juilliard School are helping him to identify up-and-coming talent. “If I hear of a student who I believe might develop into a really fabulous Mozart tenor in a few years’ time, you can be sure I will keep an eye on him,” adds the general director.
Calling American opera “absolutely central to what we do,” Dickie says he hopes to announce at the end of May the composer COT has picked to write the company’s first commissioned opera, tentatively scheduled for the company’s first year in the new theater. The 2002-03 season also will mark COT’s return to a four-opera mainstage season for the first time since 1992, he adds.
Mounting more performances than ever before, with 492 more seats to sell for each performance once the company has settled into the new downtown venue, means hiring more staff to move more tickets, stump for greater funding and market the Opera Theater as never before. Among Dickie’s staff recruits is Deborah Gilbertson Oberschelp, director of operations, who comes to COT after 13 years as personnel manager and performance coordinator at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The general director says he has been interviewing candidates for COT music director but has yet to settle on a final choice.
After lurching from financial crisis to crisis during the early 1990s, Chicago Opera Theater now enjoys a committed board of directors, a strong administrative team and is fiscally stable, according to board president Dorothy Osborn Walton. She praises the “wealth of knowledge” Dickie brings to the company, a wealth of experience she says can only help the company to become one of the nation’s foremost regional opera troupes.
Dickie is more modest in his assessment of himself. “As long as one doesn’t try to repeat one’s triumphs, one could conceivably do quite nicely in this job,” he says, eyes twinkling. But the general director clearly takes his responsibilities at COT very seriously indeed. And he has witnessed enough triumphs and tragedies in his long career to appreciate how high the stakes are here.
Says the general director: “The company has got to get through the next couple of years–has got to persuade people to come and see our performances before we move into our new home. Chicago audiences recognize quality when they see it, and quality is what we will emphasize.”
