The Music Center Opera Looks Up : The Money : Managing the fiscal strains is the ledger domain of MCO’s Patricia Mitchell

When Patricia Mitchell joined the Music Center Opera as deputy general manager at the beginning of last season, her hiring was announced at the same time as the company’s burgeoning deficit. Easing the financial constraints--or finding ways to circumvent them--has occupied much of her time since the day that she arrived last October.

Or as she describes her job: “I nag and worry--usually about money. I’m not a bean counter, particularly, by training. I think what I am doing . . . is helping build the thing that is going to support the artistic product, because it takes development systems, and marketing systems, and staff, and budgets, and reports and union relations.

“All that has to be in place--that’s what I do. I believe it’s called the infrastructure --not a word of which I am particularly fond,” Mitchell says, drawing it out rhetorically. “I’m not even sure I know what it means. I hope that I spend more time trying to find ways for us to do the things that we want to do, than popping bubbles, although ‘It’s not in the budget’ is one of my most frequently used phrases.”

The fiscal stress is easing. Although the reported cumulative deficit has crested at $3 million, the company projects its first balanced budget for the coming season, which has been down-sized from early plans.

Music Center Opera is in the development stage of a major capital fund-raising campaign. As previously reported, the company has commitments for individual gifts totaling more than $6 million over five years, from which it expects to devote $1.2 million to deficit reduction this season. Mitchell says that this is less than halfway to the goal of the campaign, which will be formally announced after more major commitments have been made.

“The first day I came to work here, the first thing that I did,” Mitchell says, “was go to a meeting with the president of our board and our bankers, to whom we then owed $2 million--and to whom we now owe $650,000. Now that is, in my view, very considerable progress.

“Starting this opera company was a venture capital endeavor that was all venture and no capital. Really, what we are doing now is paying for the development phase after the fact instead of before the fact. If they had waited around to have X million dollars in the bank, we would still be waiting around.

“I think to start this company on the scale that it was begun was the only way to give it a chance. Plenty of other approaches to the problem of starting an opera company in this town have gone down in flames.”

Mitchell is part of a governing troika with general director Peter Hemmings (see adjoining interview) and artistic consultant Placido Domingo. “Placido is much more actively involved in the company than I would have thought,” Mitchell says, “and in a very useful, important way. I mean, the guy pitches up to board members when he’s in town--I mean, in the morning. I think he has a real commitment to it. He and Peter also communicate a lot about who is going to do X and Y.”

She attributes much of the fiscal improvement to the efforts of company board members. “The board support, not only financially, is really simply astonishing. There’s a real level of determination among those guys that this opera company prevail at the level of quality at which it has begun.”

Mitchell came to Music Center Opera with a high reputation as an arts adminstrator and budgetary watchdog. She had been with San Francisco Opera in a similar position for eight years and also worked as an independent consultant. She was a co-author of “Autopsy of an Orchestra,” the seminal analysis of the Oakland Symphony bankruptcy--a situation which she ada mantly denies has any parallels to the MCO deficit parade.

“When I first came to San Francisco Opera, and all the years I was there--I mean, that’s a hoary institution, 70 years or whatever--whenever I would say, ‘Why are we doing it this way?,’ somebody would say, ‘Because we’ve always done it that way.’ This is very frustrating over time.

“Here, nobody says that, because there isn’t any always. Usually it is, ‘Well, we’ve never done it before or if we did, we didn’t have time to think about how we were doing it.’ “So, that’s invigorating, but it’s time-consuming to deal in that kind of context, where basically it’s nail, sail and bail--with a lot less bailing now then when I first came.”

Mitchell was born and raised in Los Angeles. Her first job out of school was on the administrative staff of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and from there she joined a consulting firm.

So far, she has no regrets about her return to Los Angeles, although she did have some second thoughts at times. “There were plenty of days in the beginning, when I thought, ‘Well now, did we read this wrong?’ because certainly the financial situation was much more tense when I first came than it is now.”

When asked if she sees herself here for a long term, Mitchell laughs and repeats her remark about a new job every eight years. “I believe in long-range planning for institutions--I’m not into it myself on a personal level,” Mitchell says, adding though “it’s not boring.”

The new MCO season begins this week, with five performances of “Tosca” starting Wednesday interwoven in repertory with five performances of “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” starting next Sunday--both are new productions. There are four performances each of the next three operas of the season--”Le Nozze di Figaro,” “Falstaff” and “Queen of Spades”--and not in repertory alternations.

The scheduling differences are due to a variety of reasons. “Sometimes that’s because all we can get in is four (performances), and sometimes that’s because all we think we can sell is four,” Mitchell says. “We all would have killed to have two more ‘Otellos’ and two more ‘Salomes,’ and, you know, six fewer ‘Orpheuses’ (last season).”

The season ends with 10 performances each of an Oliver Knussen/Maurice Sendak double bill--”Where the Wild Things Are” and “Higglety Pigglety Pop!” (June 7-17)--and “Oklahoma!” (June 22-July 1). “One of the aspects of this project that is new,” Mitchell says, “is that we don’t have yet an established performing pattern. We’re still tweaking that.”

Part of the tweaking involves calculating the audience for each production. The company has decided to devote June, a month when it does not vie with the Philharmonic for dates in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, to longer runs of light opera and musicals. Following the success of the Jonathan Miller “Mikado” in 1987-88, the company overestimated the local appetite for operetta by booking 17 performances of the Gerald Scarfe-designed “Orpheus in the Underworld” for last season.

“It was very optimistic for us to have scheduled 17 performances--52,000 seats, only 1,000 more seats than the entire first season,” Mitchell acknowledges. “And that is not something we are planning to do again, that number of performances. ‘Oklahoma!’ is 10.”

So, “Orpheus” was a little too much? “It was a lot too much. If we had done 12 performances instead of 17, it wouldn’t have been a bad showing.”

Miscalculations such as “Orpheus” aside, Music Center Opera seems to be reaching--and keeping--its audience.

“The first burst of newness is, in a way, off,” Mitchell says of the company’s attraction. “Four years, and still the new kid on the block? Not really. I think we are developing a real audience core. Obviously, it needs always to be bigger, and so far, it is being bigger. All audience indications are powerfully good.”

Among those indicators are subscriptions--roughly 7,500 for the full season, with another 1,000 subscribers to three-production packages called Trios--and renewals.

“One of the things that is really encouraging to me around here is that the renewal rate is so high,” Mitchell says. “The renewal rate is 80%.

“We have not done any kind of sensible market or demographic research, which we need to do,” she says. “My eyeballing says that this is a younger audience than the San Francisco Opera audience, or any other opera audience that I have had much experience with. I think opera here has started its appeal, in a way, at a broader spectrum of the potential audience.”

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When Mitchell arrived here, she found herself joining a hard-working and very dedicated, but very small, staff. “Peter said it’s lean, I said it’s anorexic,” she recalls.

Now, the full-time staff is 18 people. “That is not enough,” Mitchell says. “That doesn’t mean it needs to be 68 people, but our current planning shows that over the next five years the staff will be more like 30 rather than its current level.”

The growth in staff will enable the company to bring more operations in-house. For example, Mitchell says, “Now we have an education coordinator (Llewellyn Crain), so that it (educational outreach) is a formalized part of the operation, and a little less ad hoc.

“For this next year, because we’re doing the Knussen (“Where the Wild Things Are” and “Higglety, Pigglety Pop!”), we’re able to bring the school kids to the theater to see the same show that’s part of our regular season. To the degree that that is possible, I think everybody thinks that is desirable.”

Those educational shows will be morning performances of the same production and same cast, in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, as the regular subscription performances. The company will also be presenting to 4th-graders in 10 L.A. public schools a new opera by local composer Edward Barnes, which will feature the company resident artists, as well as some of the schoolchildren themselves. The program is supported by a $20,000 grant from the Milken Family Foundation.

Many other things may change over the next five years, for which the company has pro forma budgets prepared. “We’re now working on what it’s going to look like,” Mitchell says, “ADH--After Disney Hall. You pick whether that’s ‘94, or choose a date. Obviously that is going to change the method by which we deliver opera in the community.”

Among the things that Music Center Opera has to consider are its orchestra and chorus, and whether those operations will have to be brought in-house if the company is able to expand its seasons when the Los Angeles Philharmonic leaves the Pavilion.

“What will we do about an orchestra? Will we still be able to work with the (Los Angeles) Chamber Orchestra, which at the moment works greatly to our advantage and theirs? That takes us planning and them planning,” Mitchell says, “if we are going to continue that relationship. Those are not the sorts of things that you sit down on Monday and talk about doing next Friday.

Meanwhile, chipping away at the deficit provides steady work.

“There is never any such thing as a quick fix. Changing the financial situation here is a step-by-step, non-mysterious but time-consuming process--you know, it takes time to accomplish.”