Community Comes to Aid of Stranded Opera Troupe

Most of the Armenian opera singers and ballet dancers who were stranded in Glendale for a week have returned to their homeland, said the head of the local Armenian church on Tuesday.

Glendale’s tightly-knit community of Armenian Americans and immigrants, the largest concentration of people of Armenian descent outside Armenia, cobbled together about $80,000 in donations to fly many of the 172-member troupe back home, said Archbishop Vaeche Hovsepian, head of the West Coast branch of the Armenian Apostolic Church of America.

The community rallied to the rescue after the trip’s promoter revealed to performers last week that he had brought them to California with one-way airline tickets and had not made enough money from opera and ballet performances to buy return tickets. Many of the performers, some of them the most famous artists in Armenia, were marooned without money for several days at a Days Inn in Glendale.

Glendale police investigated Greg Petrosian, a Van Nuys translator turned promoter, and concluded that though Petrosian had mismanaged the tour’s finances, he had not committed any crime, said police spokesman Chahe Keuroghelian. The State Department said that officials are also looking into a report that Petrosian may have smuggled nonperformers into the United States, an allegation Petrosian denies.

Petrosian acknowledged in an interview last week that he planned the trip poorly and is now $70,000 in debt.

Of the 172 members of Armenia’s National Opera and Ballet, around 140 have been flown back to Yerevan, Armenia’s capital, Hovsepian said. The other performers are scheduled to leave this week.

‘In my 40 years in America, I have never seen anything this bad happen,” Hovsepian said. ‘I’m just relieved the community came together to solve this.”