Opera Pacific Tunes Up to Season’s Challenges

After a short summer break, two key players on the Opera Pacific team came back to Costa Mesa last week, rolled up their sleeves and started getting down to work. The clock is ticking. The season starts Nov. 3 with Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly.”

But because they’ve first had to deal with cutbacks that reduced the financially troubled company’s staff to 10, they’ve lost critical time in raising funds, nailing down casting and production details and selling subscriptions.

“There’s an enormous amount of work that needs to be done,” said Mitchell Krieger, newly appointed director of productions, over a recent lunch at a Costa Mesa hotel.

“Fortunately, a lot of it is at least in process already. But there are myriad details yet to take care of.”

Krieger was joined by John DeMain, newly appointed artistic director, up from his previous position as music director.

“We’re turning a corner,” DeMain said. “We have what we need to start up the season.”

Long-term, DeMain said he hopes “to create an ensemble company [so that] you get the feeling of a well-rehearsed, beautifully sung, beautifully played, interestingly directed and conceived production, from top to bottom.”

Said Krieger: “I feel like we’re reinventing the company. There’s a lot of excitement about that. We believe in the future of this company. We believe it’s going to become the major force it really should be.”

In the new structure, DeMain and interim Executive Director Martin Hubbard are at the top management level. Krieger, who is coming from a similar post at Michigan Opera Theatre in Detroit, is at the next level.

“I’m the one who’s got to make the day-to-day functioning work the way it should,” Krieger said. “That’s a gargantuan task. I’m just kind of getting my feet wet right now. I’m doing a transition, but I will be full time here by late September.”

Both men are encouraged that about 80% of Opera Pacific season-ticket holders have renewed their subscriptions. Another hopeful sign is ticket sales for the upcoming Opera Ball, the company’s annual major fund-raising effort, Nov. 14 at the Four Seasons hotel in Newport Beach. Sales have been “incredible,” DeMain said.

That’s welcome news for an organization that at one point had an accumulated deficit of nearly $2 million. The company has “recovered a substantial part of the deficit and looks to be ending next season solidly in the black,” Hubbard said Tuesday. About $400,000 of the deficit remains, he said.

The ball will honor founding General Director David DiChiera, who resigned last year to devote himself fully to Michigan Opera Theatre and the new Detroit Opera House.

The new season, however, will carry the imprint of previous General Director Patrick L. Veitch, who left abruptly in December.

Veitch had arranged to bring the directors who created the productions the company will present of “Butterfly” and Wagner’s “Der fliegende Hollender” (opening Jan. 19) and the original director and choreographer for the double bill of Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci” and Orff’s “Carmina Burana” (opening Feb. 23).

Enlisting the creators of those stagings, DeMain said, “is very important. It’s very exciting for the company.”

The 1997 San Francisco Opera production of “Butterfly” is told from the point of view of Butterfly and Pinkerton’s child, Trouble, grown up.

“He’s watching the story all unfold in front of him,” Krieger said. “It’s really quite fascinating to see that perspective. There’s a poignancy added to the normal poignancy of ‘Butterfly.’ ”

The 1992 Minnesota Opera production of “Hollender” emphasizes “the ghost-story aspects,” DeMain said. “You almost see through people. They almost look transparent. It’s like you really go inside the brain of Senta. But the costumes are absolutely period.”

For the “Pagliacci/Carmina Burana” double bill, “the set is linked visually in that Silvio, Nedda and Beppe [in ‘Pagliacci’] become the three soloists in ‘Carmina Burana,’ ” DeMain said. “Somehow the worlds are connected. And so there is a loose conceptual pairing.”

At one time, there was a rumor that veteran Looney Tunes animator (and longtime opera fan) Chuck Jones would be designing a new production of Donizetti’s “Daughter of the Regiment” for this season. That idea fell through.

Instead, Opera Pacific will use the 1985 Washington Opera production of “Daughter,” opening April 6.

The kind of opera DeMain considers successful is “opera in which the stage and the pit are saying the same thing, and I think there are infinite ways to say it.

“But for years in this business we’d say, ‘Well, let’s hire some guy from the theater because maybe he can really stage it as theater,’ ” he said. “ ‘Or a musical-comedy guy because he brings more movement into the opera world.’

“But if you don’t know how to listen to what’s in the pit, if you don’t know how to listen to the psychological subtext of the music, you can’t stage opera,” said DeMain, who conducted critically acclaimed productions at Houston Grand Opera. “If you do know how, you can. And there are stage directors from the world of theater who do know how to do that, and there are ones who don’t.”

He also wants to expand the repertory. “You’re always challenged in doing that when you only have four operas,” DeMain said. “When you get too fancy on a four-opera season, and you’re trying to fill a 2,800-seat house, it’s not going to happen unless you’re able to take that audience with you gradually into the repertory.

“I certainly have the dream to do that and ideas about how to do that in terms of marketing and the way you develop a relationship with your subscription audience and how you educate them and how you get them involved,” he said.

Getting them involved means getting himself involved with the community.

“I’m not the kind of person who isolates myself,” DeMain said. “It doesn’t work today. We can’t exist without our volunteer basis. We can’t exist without our patrons, who have to make up the difference between that box-office line, and I don’t believe you can take the money and run. You can’t just take people’s money and make fools out of them.”