OPERA : Ambition on a Shoestring : With a budget of less than $1 million, Long Beach Opera is committed to bucking trends, staging unfamiliar works using unknowns

The singers inch across the proscenium stage as if they’re wading through peanut butter. Each turn of the head and crook of the wrist takes an eternity, in a stasis maximus that pays homage to spectacle impresario Robert Wilson.

Behind the performers, a huge painted backdrop with two round blobs and something vaguely seascapy serves as the Grimaldi Garden, while a labyrinthine pattern of squares stands for the Doge’s digs.

Welcome to the 14th-Century Genoa of “Simon Boccanegra,” Long Beach Opera style. Don’t mind the eyestrain, or the self- congratulatory avant-gardism of it all. It may not look like Verdi as usual--but usual isn’t the standard at Long Beach.

Actually, this 1992 staging, directed by theater enfant terrible Reza Abdoh, was one of Long Beach’s productions that wasn’t well received by the critics. Yet there’s glory even in failure--because it’s the misses as well as the hits that have drawn attention to this small but adventurous opera company.

The second oldest of Southern California’s four professional opera companies (San Diego Opera is older), Long Beach Opera nonetheless plays David to the Los Angeles Music Center Opera’s Goliath. Its annual budget is less than $1 million--compared to Music Center’s $15 million--but its ambitions are grand.

In the past couple of years, the Music Center Opera and other major companies have turned increasingly to box-office sure-things such as “Carmen” and “Madama Butterfly,” while the number of borrowed and shared productions has also risen. Yet feisty little Long Beach continues to boldly go where no local company has gone before, with original productions of less familiar works and highly theatrical and stylish outings of more traditional works, often guided by relatively untried directors.

This week Long Beach is at it again, with one of its most ambitious efforts to date. Co-produced with Germany’s Bochum Symphony and the Dusseldorf Schauspielhaus, the bill will consist of two staged oratorios, Arnold Schoenberg’s 1917 “Die Jakobsleiter” and the American premiere of Bernd Alois Zimmerman’s “Turning, I Saw Great Injustice,” presented in Long Beach’s Terrace Theater on Thursday, Saturday and next Sunday.

“This is a very different undertaking for Long Beach Opera,” says general director Michael Milenski, who’s now leading the organization into its 15th season. “For the past 10 years, every production has been our own original production. But this is something we could never attempt on our own, given the resources it takes and what is often a limited audience for this kind of work. We couldn’t say ‘count us in’ fast enough.”

To the Germans, LBO seemed a kindred spirit. “We heard Long Beach Opera is a company that does modern, unusual and interesting productions--not only ‘Madama Butterfly,’ ” says the Bochum Symphony music director Eberhard Kloke, who is music director for the joint venture. “Michael Milenski has the courage to do unusual things.”

Support for this project has come from Schoenberg’s family, as well: “I’m enthusiastic about the project,” says Larry Schoenberg of the production of his father’s “Die Jakobsleiter.”

“Early on, I met with the people from Bochum and we’ve been working with the opera. The main thing is to educate the audience, so that they have the right expectations.”

The younger Schoenberg is also upbeat about the treatment being afforded his father’s music these days. “The nature of the performances have been generally good,” he says. “Part of the reason for that is that the people who are performing it appreciate and understand it. That hasn’t always been the case.”

The small sailboats rock gently on calm waters, moored by well-kept white ropes to tidy docks. A double-decked ring of wooden condo balconies surrounds the inlet; a sea gull glides through the sunny sky. The view from Michael Milenski’s office looks like a magazine ad hawking time-shares in a singles’ complex. The sensibility within is decidedly less conventional.

Born in a small town in southwestern Colorado, Milenski worked as an intern at the San Francisco Opera before serving for five years on that company’s production staff. He moved on to the San Jose Symphony for six seasons, splitting the last five years between there and Long Beach, where he founded the Long Beach Opera.

Launched in 1978, the opera company now performs large-scale, generally original-language productions either at the Long Beach Convention and Entertainment Center’s 3,000-seat Terrace Theater or its 800-seat Center Theater. Notable recent outings have included Debussy’s “Pelleas et Melisande,” Mozart’s “Lucio Silla” and Offenbach’s “Bluebeard,” which was restaged at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre last August.

Fans typically love or hate Long Beacy Opera productions, but they rarely feel lukewarm about either the company or its work. In his 1991 Beckmesser awards, The Times’ Martin Bernheimer hailed Long Beach Opera as “Michael Milenski’s inventive, daring, always stimulating and sometimes kooky Long Beach Opera, which teeters perpetually on the brink of financial disaster.” He wrote of the recent “Bluebeard” that, “It deserves to be savored by audiences far beyond Long Beach.”

“Milenski & Co. did not invent this kind of operatic intimacy, but they have made it work, again and again,” wrote The Times’ Daniel Cariaga in his review of the 1991 “Pelleas et Melisande.” “It accounts for much of the loyalty the Long Beach company has earned from its audience.”

But Long Beach also gets its share of pans. For the Abdoh “Boccanegra,” Bernheimer bestowed a Beckmesser jeer: “Eurotrash-lives-in-Long Beach award: To the Long Beach Opera for presenting Reza Abdoh’s pretentious, high-tech-zombie production of ‘Simon Boccanegra.’ ”

Since 1981, Long Beach has also made its mark with English-language opera-theater stagings--making it one of the few American companies that regularly attempts opera theater. In addition to the well-known Abdoh, the company has also enlisted the talents of a variety of artists--particularly from theater--to enrich their seasons.

One noteworthy opera-theater venture was Long Beach Opera’s 1989 staging of Beaumarchais’ “The Guilty Mother,” directed by Christopher Alden, with only incidental music. “There was an operatic setting but we opted not to do it,” Milenski explains.

Alden’s twin brother, David, whom The Times’ Bernheimer has called “the thinking-man’s director,” has also staged work at Long Beach, including a well-received 1986 “The Tales of Hoffmann” and a 1988 “King Roger” that Bernheimer found “trendy-cliche ridden.”

Milenski is so enamored of the theater that he once floated the idea of transforming the company entirely. “Two years ago, I got as far as announcing to our board that we were going to do all theater and no opera,” he says. “Ultimately, that was one of those ideas that I had that gained little support. But there is a great interest in theater and theory of theater in the company--and in the way we look at things.”

Long Beach Opera also has maintained an interest in non- operatic, non-theatrical musical outings, such as the current pair of oratorios.

The production is staged on a huge matrix of ladders and ramps that surround the orchestra and lead into the audience. It serves as a stark backdrop both for Schoenberg’s treatment of the biblical Jacob and for Zimmerman’s work, which is based on the Grand Inquisitor chapter in “The Brothers Karamazov.” It features an orchestra of 120, 90 of whom are coming over from the Bochum Symphony, and 100 Los Angeles-based singers. The German musicians are playing with the approval of the American Federation of Musicians, the union with which Long Beach has a contract, according to Milenski.

Milenski says “there’s an emotional richness” to the rarely performed 1917 Schoenberg score. “It comes from the period when he’s broken with tonality, but before he’s established the 12-tone system.”

The Schoenberg-Zimmerman project got off the ground initially because Long Beach’s new music director, Steven Sloan, is also a resident conductor at the Frankfurt Opera. The concept of bringing these oratorios together was conceived by music director Kloke and film/opera director Werner Schroeter as part of the “Aufbrechen Amerika” Festival (Break Open for America), inspired by the recent Columbus Quincentennial, which has involved a number of Frankfurt staffers.

The Germans see it as both a cultural and symbolic export. “We have to make it clear that the two continents are coming together,” explains Kloke, speaking by phone from Germany. While Los Angeles resonates as Schoenberg’s residence-in-exile, the theme of a promised land is also germane to the California mythos. “Schoenberg came here escaping Nazi Germany and ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ is taken from the section of Genesis that talks about the promised land,” Milenski says. “I first learned about this feeling when I was studying Italian literature: California was a fantastic, exotic place where anything could happen. It’s still like that.”

It is a mystique that might account for Long Beach Opera’s continued viability, since the company thrives while flying in the face of both monetary and aesthetic trends. Opera, which is the most costly of the performing arts, has had to adjust to a recent decline in donations. Yet, when compared to other mediums, it has weathered the recession better than most.

That resilience partly derives from institutional structures and a long-standing base of support. Long Beach may lack the former but it does have the latter, dating back to its more conservative fledgling years.

As an opera pioneer, Long Beach had to fulfill a different role than it now assumes. “In the beginning, we had a lot of people who were excited about having opera,” Milenski says. “Those were the years that we did (works such as) ‘Madama Butterfly’ and gained our footing.”

Not everyone has stuck with the company through its evolution, though. “A lot of this early support has fallen off because we determined that the kind of entertainment that they want is not what we do,” Milenski says.

The most marked drop off in support came when the Music Center Opera was launched in 1986. “Support decreased once the Los Angeles Opera came,” Milenski says. “We had a loss of subscriber base. But since that time we’ve redefined our niche.

“The Los Angeles Opera has taken the responsibility for the general audience and they’re the ones to do it, not us,” Milenski says. “Once you’ve got a budget and you have to have that kind of money to do what you do, you rely on your box-office income.”

Long Beach Opera’s modest means propels it in other innovative directions. “It’s easy to tie into the standard opera franchise that says there are five or 10 directors who go around and do most of the major productions,” Milenski says. “Long Beach is not able to afford those directors, but why do we want to do the things they do in Berlin and London? The idea was to see if we couldn’t begin to find some people who typify a Southern California attitude.”

And just as Long Beach isn’t bound by the demands of high-ticket directors, neither does it jockey for the mega-star singers. Consequently, its seasons are booked more in a theater than an opera time frame. While Los Angeles has to contract stars and productions years ahead of time, Long Beach typically makes its plans only six months to a year in advance.

Provocative as Long Beach Opera productions are, the greater mystery is that they always seem to “figure out a way to do it.” On this, the gospel according to Milenski is deceptively simple.

“The way we do it is a recipe,” he says. “You push every dollar that you can invest to the fullest, which means that we’re careful with every penny we spend about where it goes and how it is spent.”

Long Beach Opera keeps the overhead low because it can’t bank on too much income at the ticket window. “We simply don’t count on a tremendous amount of box-office receipt,” Milenski says. “We have a subscriber base of around 1,000, which is ordinarily around one-third of the seating available.” The audience that Long Beach does attract is willing to travel. “Our audience is about 30% from Long Beach,” Milenski says. “A large proportion of it comes from West L.A., up and down the 405 corridor.”

Yet when the single-ticket sales are too meager, Long Beach sustains quite a blow. “When we have something that isn’t all that well received, we tend to take pretty awful losses. That makes a financial situation here that’s precarious at best. We go from being more precarious to less precarious.”

Living on the edge doesn’t account for the consistent aesthetic panache. That is largely Milenski’s doing, and a credit to the often brash and sometimes relatively unproven talents he enlists. “We have developed a production style--I don’t want to call it minimal, because in every way it is rich--that is not an expensive style of building scenery. There’s not always much scenery, although we certainly fill the stage.”

Then, too, there are the artists who welcome the opportunity to experiment. “An important part of it is the people who commit themselves to an interesting project for a reward that is artistic,” Milenski says. “You have a lot of people who are working for art rather than money.”

Still, not all artists have had positive experiences at Long Beach Opera. Librettist Philip Littell, who recently completed a commissioned adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” for the San Francisco Opera, had his first brush with the opera world at Long Beach, but it wasn’t a positive experience.

Unhappy with changes made in his text by director Alden on the 1989 “The Guilty Mother,” Littell removed his name from the credits, although he was subsequently listed on an insert distributed to reviewers. He was “put through 11 rewrites in a month,” Littell told The Times last year. “My contract was work for hire, so I had no rights.”

For the future, Milenski’s schemes include branching out geographically as well as artistically. “It would be great to get a touring company going because we get calls all the time from theaters around California asking us to bring opera productions,” he says. “But then we explain what we’re doing, and of course this is not at all what they have in mind, repertory-wise.”

There are also other problems with transferring works. “Our productions don’t lend themselves easily to mounting in other theaters, but the John Anson Ford is almost identical to the Center Theater, so productions can be taken there with few modifications,” Milenski says of the site of the company’s 1992 staging of “Bluebeard.” “We’re looking forward to going there every summer.”

Meanwhile, back home amid the Queen Mary, the harbor and a decimated McDonnell Douglas, Milenski forges ahead. “Every once in a while you sit back and think, how silly is this? There comes a point when you wonder. But the next time a really wonderful idea comes up like the Schoenberg, you get totally caught up in the new piece.”