Long Beach Opera Aims to Make Voice Heard

It’s hard to be the little guy facing a giant. But Michael Milenski, director of the Long Beach Opera, is not cowed by the Music Center Opera. If anything, the size/budget disadvantage--his $900,000 season against MCO’s $12.6 million--merely strengthens his resolve.

“I don’t want to be a poor second cousin not worth visiting,” says the irrepressible impresario, who’s been staging opera for more than a decade in Long Beach. “That’s why we avoid recycling the standard masterpieces and look instead for new challenges.”

Milenski’s current offering is a Beaumarchais trilogy, which follows the socially revolutionary matrimonial adventures of the 18th-Century playwright’s Count and Countess Almaviva, and Figaro and Susanna. Two opera adaptations of Beaumarchais works--Paisiello’s setting of “The Barber of Seville” and Mozart’s classic account of “The Marriage of Figaro”--and the play “The Guilty Mother” are in repertory at the Center Theater through May 28.

Most companies are content to stage Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” and Rossini’s “Il Barbiere di Siviglia” and be done with Beaumarchais. But Milenski decided that audiences should hear the trilogy in English and together in a cycle. “Nor has anyone besides the Lisbon Opera tackled the threesome,” says Milenski, noting that his 11-performance project has been designated as an official celebratory event in the bicentennial of the French Revolution.

Because he had already presented Rossini’s popular “Barbiere,” Milenski said he wanted to add to the festival-like project by exhuming Paisiello’s antique opera based on the same play and written three decades earlier.

The trilogy opened May 6 with “Barber of Seville,” and the production, reviewed by Martin Bernheimer in The Times, was “politely mild by Long Beach standards, didn’t make waves . . . nice, but wasn’t exciting.” Of “Marriage of Figaro,” which opened last Saturday, Bernheimer wrote: “It was fascinating. It was inventive It was perverse. It was business as usual at the Long Beach Opera.”

It could be argued that no one has composed a successful setting for “La mere coupable,” Beaumarchais’ final play. The one Darius Milhaud wrote was not to Milenski’s liking, he says, so he commissioned a local composer, Mark McGurty, to set some of the speeches to music and include some singing. This effort is entitled “The Guilty Mother” and opens Saturday.

Answering a report that Boosey and Hawkes, the music publishers, would not rent Milenski the Milhaud orchestra parts because of his financial problems, Milenski says: “We rented the Paisiello parts from them, so obviously our credit is good. As for the Milhaud, I saw a video of the Geneva production and didn’t care for the music. That’s why I passed on it.” (A representative from Boosey and Hawkes stated: “His credit was fine.”)

No rentals were required for “Figaro,” since LBO owns its set of parts. But these are minuscule concerns compared to what Milenski’s company regularly grapples with.

Severely undercutting his efforts right now is Opera Pacific, which has lured some of his backers. Asked about his company’s financial health, he says--despite noticeably low attendance--next season is not in any jeopardy. Meanwhile, borrowing the Music Center Opera’s mailing list brought him no response at all. But the U.S. postal service’s loss of 12,000 brochures just before his season opened last October was the worst disaster, he says.

Not big enough, though, to distract Milenski from artistic issues.

“In a standard opera,” he says, “we know the pitfalls. In something like the Paisiello there are no advance warnings. Comedy, especially, can be very touchy in an unfamiliar piece.

“Add to that how much technical stretching we had to do--without benefit of a hydraulic lift or a fly system--and you see what a nightmare production can be.”

But Milenski doesn’t want to hamstring his stage directors, so when Hans Neuwenhuis wanted to serve a hot dinner, a real one, on Limoges china, the company actually catered it. As for the sight gags, again, he exercises discretion.

“If I see something too dubious in rehearsal I might ask the director to look carefully at that particular bit of business. To say more is to take away his authority.”

For the “Figaro,” stage director Robert Carsen has updated the action to the 1950s. Milenski is of the thought that opera must not be relegated to museum status.

“To represent characters as people like you and me gives us a head start. All the other problems aside--low attendance not least of them--we want to be viable and engaging. Isn’t that the whole purpose of reaching for something new?”