Marshaling the Allied Art Forces

When Michael Kaiser started work in November at the Royal Opera House of Covent Garden as its fourth chief executive in less than two years, the British press likened his mission to joining the procession of Henry VIII’s wives.

As it turns out, the 44-year-old New Yorker hasn’t lost his head or his heady reputation for turning around ailing arts groups. Four months into the job, Kaiser has stopped the financial bleeding of the organization--or at least changed the public perception that its resident Royal Opera and Royal Ballet were on the brink of ruin. He says he found the books in better shape than they were believed to be.

He has also persuaded the Royal Opera House staff to quit picking over the carcasses of past failures and begin planning for the future. In doing so, he has improved morale among staff and supporters, who had taken to marching on 10 Downing Street to draw attention to their cause.

And he has helped to persuade the Royal Opera House’s acclaimed music director, Bernard Haitink, to withdraw the resignation he tendered in the fall after he was informed by fax of the board’s plans for the company to go dark for a year to save money.

“There is so much to work with here,” Kaiser said the other day at his office across from the Covent Garden complex, which is undergoing renovation. “We are going to have an amazing new building that gives us an opportunity to think in new ways. We have a great artistic infrastructure and staff. The problem is they have felt so cast adrift. It is fun to be in a position to give them support.”

In July 1997, the Covent Garden stage closed for a $300-million-plus make-over. (It is scheduled to reopen Dec. 1.) Meanwhile, the resident companies went on tour or into hiatus--the Royal Opera Orchestra arrived in the Southland this week to begin a U.S. run with two programs at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. By then, the institution had become a running soap opera, a public display of financial mismanagement, cutbacks and high-profile resignations.

Opera House a Target of Tabloids

With lords and ladies on the board, the Royal Opera House was a happy target for the tabloid press, in particular, which portrayed it as an elitist organization on the dole, subsidized by taxpayers’ money through the Arts Council of England while charging $150 to $200 for an opera ticket.

It did not help matters when, shortly after his appointment as chairman of the board in 1998, Sir Colin Southgate made the unfortunate comment that “we mustn’t downgrade the Opera House. I don’t want to sit next to somebody in a . . . pair of shorts and a smelly pair of trainers.”

“The Kaiser,” by contrast, has won some breathing room in the British press, partly because the chain of crises has been broken and partly because, as an American, he is an outsider in London’s prickly arts world.

“Clearly, things are going to change at the Opera House and, he seems to be the person to do it. He is coming from the business side but with a love for the opera. And, because he is an American, he can cut through the class issues,” said Antonia Couling, deputy editor of Opera Now magazine.

Kaiser acknowledges that his accent is an advantage but thinks more important points in his favor are his optimism and experience. The veteran of hard times at Alvin Ailey Dance Theater as well as American Ballet Theatre is “resolutely cheerful.”

“The tendency is to look backward and to cut back on art and marketing. Then people lose interest and you lose donors until you have a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Kaiser said.

“What you have to do is just the opposite: Scrimp and save and put the money into new art and marketing that is more exciting and translates into money,” he said.

Of course, it has helped that much of the scrimping and saving were decided on before Kaiser arrived. The Royal Opera House closed with 850 full-time staff and will reopen with 530.

The government Arts Council agreed in December to increase its annual grant by $3 million to $32 million in 1999, determined to make the Covent Garden redevelopment a success. Increases of $6.4 million annually have been earmarked for 2000 and 2001.

Kaiser says the search to fill one of the vacancies, Royal Opera artistic director, is almost over. American Francesca Zambello and, earlier, Sarah Billinghurst of the Metropolitan Opera turned down offers of the job, but Kaiser said he expects an appointment soon.

His first order of business was to figure out how much Covent Garden could afford to lower ticket prices to draw a broader crowd. The answer was about 30%. Weeknight tickets will remain the costliest; that’s when corporate customers pay, but rates will come down on weekends. Top-price seats will still run about $140 to $165, but about half the auditorium will go for $50 to $65 a seat, with some seats as low as $10.

Besides its main auditorium, the new Covent Garden will have a 420-seat venue that the board had decided would remain dark for the first year for budget reasons.

Nonsense, Kaiser said. Lend the stage to the British Youth Opera and other companies in search of London space. “We get programming and people into the facility. We get a lively house and exposure,” Kaiser said.

Beyond making Covent Garden more accessible, Kaiser’s greater goal is to make it financially sound. He is raising funds to erase a $32-million shortfall in building funds and an operating deficit of about $14 million and to create an endowment of about $57 million to sustain the organization.

Kaiser is attempting this just as Britain is making the shift from mostly public funding of the arts to more private donations.

“Government subsidies can’t keep pace with inflation, and there is pressure to find private subsidies,” he said. “In the United States, people know that if you don’t give, there is no art. Here, there is a different expectation.”

There is already a 16,000-strong list of Friends of Covent Garden who pay 45 pounds a year (about $70) to attend lectures and support the organization. “They have never been asked for the 46th or 47th pound--standard [U.S.-style] fund-raising,” he said.

Whether Kaiser’s techniques will work in Britain remains to be seen. In all likelihood, his honeymoon in the British press won’t last forever. But that doesn’t seem to worry him.

“The hope is that the press will focus more and more on the art and less and less on the management,” he said.

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* Royal Opera Orchestra, tonight and Thursday, 8 p.m., Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, $15-$65. (949) 553-2422.