Helping to Foment a Sea Change

Though he’d be the first to say it’s been a team effort, conductor John DeMain is clearly emerging as the main force driving Orange County’s reborn Opera Pacific.

Staging Mark Adamo’s “Little Women” this week at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, for instance, represents his vision for a new American opera series.

Presenting Strauss’ demanding “Der Rosenkavalier” last month signaled his claim that the company has come of age and is ready for the big time.

With recent innovative productions of Verdi’s “Macbeth,” Offenbach’s “Tales of Hoffmann” and Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman,” he’s said goodbye to the company’s once-standard cautious stagings.

Times music critic Mark Swed took note: “As if struck by electricity, [the company has] jolted spectacularly to life.”

The public has responded favorably too. Box office receipts have risen to about $3.2 million this season over $2.8 million last season and $2.5 million the year before.

Season subscriptions have risen as well, from 5,800 in 1999-2000 to 6,220 in 2000-01. Predictions are that the figure will hit at least 6,700 for 2001-02.

Yet few people knew how precarious a state Opera Pacific was in when DeMain began his tenure as artistic director in 1998.

“The company was in such bad shape, it came very close to closing its doors,” DeMain said in a recent interview from Madison, Wis., where he also directs the Madison Symphony and serves as artistic director of the Madison Opera.

After nine years of running in the black, Opera Pacific finished its 1995-96 season with a $1.1-million deficit. (Its budget was $5.5 million.) Founding general director David DiChiera stepped down that year to concentrate full time on his other job, running the Michigan Opera Theatre.

Patrick L. Veitch, former head of Pennsylvania Ballet and the Australian Opera, took over, and to cut costs, halved the staff, reduced the number of performances for each production from six to four and instituted other changes that alienated staff and many donors. Despite the cost-cutting, when Veitch left abruptly in December 1997, the deficit was approaching $2 million.

In stepped Martin Hubbard, a retired Irvine investment banker and founding Opera Pacific donor who took over as executive director for the nominal salary of $1 a year.

Hubbard was a money man without artistic pretensions. He elevated DeMain--then the music director of the company--to artistic director and principal conductor in 1998.

“I always believed there was tremendous potential in Orange County, and that with a different set of priorities, the ingredients were here to make a great company,” DeMain said.

“But to do that we had to find a way not to cheat. I felt that--without knowing the details of the past in the decision-making process--that artistic quality was not always driving the company.”

The first consideration was preparation.

“Too often, the orchestra was under-rehearsed, the chorus was under-rehearsed, the staging was under-rehearsed and the lighting was under-rehearsed.

“I told the board, ‘I’m sorry it’s so expensive, folks, but everything has to be rehearsed, all of it, not one area.’ That’s what we set out to do.”Moving opening nights from Saturdays to Tuesdays--a change Veitch initiated--proved a start in improving quality.

“It bought us three more precious days in the theater and made all the difference in the world,” DeMain said.

And DeMain has looked at setting the bar higher in all other aspects of the opera as well.

“We needed to develop a profile in the kind of physical productions we put on stage,” he says. “That meant much more consistent first-class stage directors, first-class lighting designers, first-class set designs.

“We needed not to be afraid to be progressive, to keep up with what was going on in the opera world. But, also, we needed not to be afraid to be traditional.”

DeMain knew both styles. He had spent 18 years--four as principal conductor and 12 as music director--at Houston Grand Opera, where he led almost all the new operas premiered there between 1976 and 1994, including John Adams’ “Nixon in China” and Philip Glass’ “Akhnaten.”

Out of his experience in Houston and as guest conductor and then music director at Opera Pacific, DeMain also knew that he didn’t want to be both artistic and administrative manager of a company.

“I’m not interested in being a general director,” he said. “The general-director model--artistic and business manager at the same time--we’re breaking that model down.

“Martin has proved to be a wonderful fund-raiser, a wonderful cheerleader and a smart businessman. He also understood that we needed to recapture the imagination of the public and the press, and to do that we would have to spend some money to make some money.”

Completing the leadership team is Mitchell Krieger, formerly artistic administrator at Michigan Opera Theatre, who was brought in as director of operations in 1998.

“We’ve become a kind of a triumvirate,” DeMain said. “We have our own team now and have had the chance to plan our own seasons.”DeMain’s general strategy is to present two operas from the standard bread-and-butter repertory and two works Opera Pacific has not done yet.

“Not everything we do has to be market-driven, but we do have to be market-sensitive,” he said.

“‘Rosenkavalier’ and ‘Macbeth’ did well [this season], but did not compare to the box-office receipts of ‘Carmen’ and ‘Magic Flute,’ which both exceeded our predictions. But that helped us balance our tickets for the season.”

With the new American opera series, DeMain acknowledges he’s gambling.

“First of all, I have to get the audience to come. I hope a title like ‘Little Women,’ which has a huge literary recognition, will attract enough people, which will substantiate our efforts to go ahead with this project.

“I don’t want to say we’re going to do one American opera every year or every five years. Let’s see if we can’t capitalize on the moment of this successful new piece, then do one every few years.”

Newness is part of the key, that and a work’s accessibility, which DeMain insists isn’t synonymous with simplicity.

“The interest for me was not only to do American opera,” he added. “That would have been easy. We haven’t done [Carlisle Floyd’s] ‘Susanna’ [1955], [Douglas Moore’s] ‘Ballad of Baby Doe’ [1956] or [Floyd’s] ‘Of Mice and Men’ [1970]. But every one around us has.

“I thought, ‘Why not take a look at what’s being written right now by a generation of composers who happen to have a relationship with the audience?’ I saw people at [San Francisco’s October] premiere of [Jake Heggie’s] ‘Dead Man Walking’ being incredibly moved by the music and also thinking of the moral questions the work posed.” (Opera Pacific will present the work in April 2002.)

“So I’m looking at pieces that communicate to the audience. Not necessarily that they’re are all in C major. ‘Little Women’ has its spicy moments. But if you make it through the end, you’re crying.”

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“LITTLE WOMEN,” Opera Pacific, Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. Dates: Today and next Sunday, 2 p.m.; Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, 7:30 p.m. Prices: $12-$60. Phone: (949) 854-4646.