Opera Is Returning to Long Beach

After months of stasis, Long Beach Opera has resurfaced. Last spring, the company, which first presented opera in the Southland in 1979, suffered a financial crisis and canceled the last two of its three 1996 productions at the Long Beach Convention Center. Then in May, the opera’s general director, Michael Milenski, and Cal State Long Beach announced that the company would become an adjunct of the university. Milenski was added to the faculty as a lecturer in opera, with Cal State providing performance space for the company. However, no further operas were produced in 1996.

For 1997, the company plans to present two operas at two theaters on the Cal State campus. The first is the world premiere of Stewart Wallace’s “Hopper’s Wife,” scheduled for six performances at the 230-seat Martha B. Knoebel Dance Theatre, and two performances of Leos Janacek’s final opera, “From the House of the Dead,” at the 1,162-seat Richard and Karen Carpenter Performing Arts Center. Both operas will run from June 14-22, in what Milenski calls a “festival approach” rather than a full-blown season of productions.

Milenski doesn’t want to consider Long Beach Opera’s return to the stage as a comeback. “We didn’t [disappear] during the course of last season, but we did spot a trend toward indebtedness and we decided to take a break,” he said. The connection with Cal State, he added, had been under discussion “for years.” Because the performance space is rent free, he admits, the collaboration jelled at a good time.

According to Milenski, this year’s two productions will be put on with an estimated budget of $550,000, which is comparable to the cost of his previous seasons, when three productions cost “between $650,000 and $890,000.” Support for the season comes from the same funders as before, according to Milenski, primarily the Public Corp. for the Arts of Long Beach, the county of Los Angeles, the California Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts and private donors.

LBO is also getting a boost from its much larger downtown sibling, the L.A. Opera, which has agreed to include information about the 1997 productions in its subscription mailings, which go out Feb. 18.

“Peter [Hemmings, general director of L.A. Opera] has been a supporter of Long Beach Opera since he first arrived in L.A.,” says Milenski. In informal talks last fall, according to L.A. Opera’s marketing director Joan Cumming, Hemmings offered the idea of a combined mailing as a way to help publicize Long Beach Opera’s newest incarnation.

“This means including an order form for the two operas our subscribers can send directly to Long Beach Opera,” Cumming said. “We’re happy to do it.”

Long Beach has long had a reputation for presenting new operas and novel productions, and its comeback season is no exception.

The Wallace opera--a co-production with the Tisch Center at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, which will present it in New York next fall--is based on a fantasy libretto by Michael Korie that makes a couple out of artist Edward Hopper and Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper. Wallace is the composer of “Harvey Milk,” which was recently premiered at Houston Grand Opera and presented at San Francisco Opera. “Hopper’s Wife” will be designed by Paul Steinberg, conducted by Michael Barrett and staged by Long Beach Opera veteran Christopher Alden.

Janacek’s “From the House of the Dead,” based on Dostoevsky’s novel, will be conducted by Neal Stulberg, who led Long Beach’s last offering, Henze’s “Elegy for Young Lovers,” in March, 1996. Making his U.S. debut will be stage director Dimitri Gotscheff, who has worked for the Bochum and Dusseldorf operas in Germany. Milenski met Gotscheff in the early ‘90s, when he brought two productions to Long Beach.

A number of ancillary events will fill out the Long Beach Opera festival: symposia, conferences and lectures. Milenski says that a full schedule of all events should be available in March.