Symphony’s Woes Are the Exception : Performing Arts Humming in L.B.

To theatergoers everywhere, it’s the “Sound of Music,” a stage classic with every ingredient for box-office success--love of family, love of music, love of country, love of honor, love of life, yes, even love of love--all topped off with a happy ending.

To members of the Long Beach Civic Light Opera, however, the show is so sickeningly sweet that director Martin Wiviott contends it “gives my performers diabetes.”

But it also gives them jobs, which is why the old standard is also known in musical theater circles as the “Sound of Money.”

The Civic Light Opera’s production of the “Sound of Music,” starring Anna Maria Alberghetti, will open at the Terrace Theater next month, at a time when the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra is taking its first tentative steps back to financial health.

While the orchestra--which went dark in November because of a $575,000 debt--spent the last five months going through the noisy throes of death and subsequent rebirth, the other major performing arts groups in this city quietly continued the business of performing and fund raising.

Alive and Well

Although they have had varying levels of success--and all are operating with deficits--the groups are alive and healthy.

The Long Beach Civic Light Opera just finished a resoundingly successful run of “Song of Norway” and is starting work on “Sound of Music.” The Long Beach Ballet finished its 1984-85 season with three performances of “Coppelia” last weekend, and the Long Beach Opera is preparing “The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein” for its April 13 season debut.

Why--and how--have these groups managed while the symphony has not? Some say it is pragmatism combined with adrenalin and good management. Others say they have no answers--other than good luck in a high-risk business.

Lindsay Shields, executive director of the Public Corp. for the Arts, contends that the light opera, ballet and opera have succeeded “because of their high quality and the niches they fill.”

“All of these groups have grown and have their own audiences and solid sources of funding,” said Shields, whose organization is the arts advisory group to the Long Beach city government and a promotional group for the visual and performing arts.

“You have people coming to the opera from all over Southern California,” she said. “You have people coming to the CLO from Bakersfield to Arizona. The CLO is the only self-producing group of its kind in this market. That’s why they are all surviving.”

Ominous Events

But exclusivity is not enough to keep an organization performing, and the symphony’s financial problems and near-demise were ominous events for local arts groups.

“As the symphony was going under, our board of directors realized that this could be us in a year,” said Pegge Logefeil, managing director of the Civic Light Opera, which has a $1.6-million annual operating budget. “We haven’t been that far behind the symphony in just hanging on.”

The CLO had operated for 35 years on ticket sales and “Friends of the Arts” donations. When it moved into the Terrace Theater in 1981 and became an Actors Equity performing group in 1982, “a significant deficit” was incurred, said treasurer Calvin Andrews.

An estimated $600,000 deficit was carried over into its 1983-84 season and grew to about $900,000. But the Civic Light Opera has since cut costs and attracted a greatly increased audience, so it should break even on its operating costs this year, Andrews said.

The light opera has a $560,000 trust fund, which it has used as collateral to borrow money and pay off operating expenses. Within three or four years, Andrews said, the deficit should be completely paid off.

The deficit caused the Civic Light Opera management in the 1983-84 season to begin its first full-scale attempt at aggressive outside fund raising, with special benefit events and a car raffle.

Civic Light Opera ticket buyers were offered such blandishments as seats to the sold-out Los Angeles performances of such hits as “Cats” and “La Cage Aux Folles.” The company also ran a membership drive in January that increased subscribers by about 1,000 to 22,000--nearing the Mark Taper Forum’s 28,000 and far exceeding the 2,000 to 3,000 subscribers the other Long Beach arts organizations have.

And on Monday, the group began a telephone fund-raising campaign to upgrade its members’ donations and increase revenues. The light opera has seven categories of memberships--$30, $50, $100, $250, $500, $1,000 and $2,000. The average membership is $50, said board president James Barggren, and the funding campaign is an effort to persuade current members to give even more.

But that’s not all.

“We try to bring our audiences what their preferences are,” Barggren said, so the management polls subscribers every year to see what shows should be offered. The No. 1 choice for the 1984-85 season was the “Sound of Music.”

Marketing Tactics

According to Barggren, the light opera intensified its marketing tactics and it paid off with “Song of Norway,” which ran from March 2 to March 17 in the Terrace Theater.

Long before tickets went on sale, the CLO decided to contact as many of the Los Angeles area’s 60,000 Scandinavians as possible to get them to come to the show. Special ticket prices were offered to Scandinavians, Scandinavian flags were hung in the lobby, and the Scandinavian consul attended a performance.

It worked. More than 40,000 people saw “Song of Norway.” Four of its 16 performances were sold out, and folding chairs were placed in the aisles for two of the shows to increase the seating capacity.

“So what do you think we’re trying to do now?” Logefeil asked. “Get the Austrians and Germans to the ‘Sound of Music.’ That may be a bit more difficult, though.”

The Long Beach Ballet is the second most aggressive marketer among performing arts groups in the city, contends founder and artistic director David Wilcox, whose fledgling dance company is the only Long Beach ensemble to perform at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles.

3-Year-Old Troupe

The ballet began performing three seasons ago in the Lakewood High School auditorium with taped music, a $50,000 budget and no paid employees. The 1984-85 season--complete with a $600,000 budget and 135 employees on payroll, including a small orchestra--just ended.

“We’ve filled a void here,” said Wilcox, whose company is based at the Terrace Theater on Ocean Boulevard. “We’re the only major ballet company in the area. Our growth has been a combination of events, lucky breaks and being ready to fill the gaps with quality work. When I first started the company, I had a nice detailed five-year plan. But it blew up in the first year, things happened so fast.”

Wilcox credits a strong promotional campaign with keeping the ballet company growing. Of this season’s $600,000 budget, $120,000 was spent on promoting performances; $75,000 of the promotions budget was spent on the “Nutcracker Suite” alone.

“We’re doing OK,” Wilcox said. “We have a little deficit--about $50,000--that came about by doing the ‘Nutcracker’ for the first time (in 1983) without any corporate sponsorship” to underwrite the cost of the sets and costumes.

But Wilcox contends that the deficit will be repaid by the end of the 1985-86 season. The 1984 “Nutcracker” had five corporate sponsors, and the ballet company has scheduled eight performances of the Christmas classic at the Chandler Pavilion for 1985.

Like the Civic Light Opera, the ballet has prospered by presenting the old standards, and Wilcox said the dance company will continue to perform them.

“That’s the way I foresee the Long Beach Ballet becoming a household word--by doing the tried and true,” he said. “Once we become a tradition, we can bring things of diversity to the audience.”

Experimentation Pays Off

The Long Beach Opera, on the other hand, has prospered through experimentation, said Michael Milenski, general director.

“Pragmatism is the name of the game,” Milenski said, “but you can’t be a vital arts organization where the word ‘arts’ is big and be tyrannized by what’s practical.

“We really put ourselves on the line and took major risks, and we came out more or less well,” he said. “What is truly significant is that you cannot be a vital arts organization without taking risks. . . . We are not pandering to a so-called public taste.”

The 1984-85 season has been a particularly risky one for the opera company. In addition to touring with all of its three shows for the first time in its seven-year history, the organization performed challenging productions of “The Coronation of Poppea” and “Eugene Onegin.”

“Poppea” paid off as one of the opera’s biggest hits ever, but “Onegin” did not. “Onegin lost money, but you can’t keep the money in the bank to hedge against those things,” Milenski said.

But before taking those risks, the opera played it safe during its 1983-84 season by mounting two productions instead of three. During the 1982-83 season, the organization incurred a $60,000 deficit--its highest ever--because the recession cut down on donations and ticket buying, Milenski said.

2-Opera Season

“We pulled back in the ‘83-’84 season and did only two operas,” Milenski said. “We took a breathing space to develop financial stability. It paid off for us.”

The opera’s budget this season is $780,000. About $380,000 is to be raised through donations. The opera already has raised $280,000 of its donations goal, and on Monday kicked off a fund drive to raise the other $100,000.

A two-month telephone campaign will begin in mid-April, and Milenski said the group just received $25,000 from an anonymous donor and a $20,000 challenge grant from the Ledler Foundation.

“We are within 25% of having raised the money we need to balance the budget for this year,” Milenski said. “We should end up the season with a balanced budget.”

“We try to be (financially) realistic when we plan our seasons, but this is a risky business,” Milenski said. “There are no answers. There’s a lot of fortune involved.”