Curtain Rises on Domingo’s Act II

Los Angeles Opera began its 2001-02 season with a ticket revenue crisis caused by Sept. 11 and the abrupt resignation of its unhappy executive director, Ian White-Thomson. It ended the season with the temperamental Gian-Carlo del Monaco, director of “Turandot,” hurling an object--by most reports a soda bottle--at a stage manager.

It was also the season the company announced the postponement of a wildly ambitious project--a production of Wagner’s “Ring” with special effects from George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic--from 2003 to 2006. Cost estimates for that extravaganza range as high as $60 million. And the season that the company’s much-vaunted Young Artists program failed to materialize, again for lack of money.

Despite such tribulations, the company’s first schedule created by artistic director Placido Domingo, at the helm since July 2000, ended in the black, with brisk late-season ticket sales resulting in a $150,000 surplus.

Now it’s time for the 2002-03 season--it opens tonight at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion with Puccini’s “The Girl of the Golden West”--and in terms of offstage drama it is shaping up to be no less operatic.

In a holdover from last season’s game of toss-the-bottle, Del Monaco, originally scheduled to direct “Girl of the Golden West,” was not invited back. He was replaced by a team of directors: Vera Calabria, who served as associate director for last season’s “Queen of Spades,” and Elena Kalabakos, a longtime Del Monaco associate.

And less than two weeks ago, a lack of ready cash led the opera to cancel October’s much-anticipated $3-million production of Prokofiev’s “War and Peace,” imported from the Kirov Opera in St. Petersburg, Russia. The company has replaced it with a less expensive Kirov production, Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.”

Ticket-holders can see “Lady Macbeth,” exchange their tickets for a different L.A. Opera production or get a refund. So far, $5,000 worth of tickets, in an advance sale of $1.5 million, have been canceled.

High-tech investment mogul Alberto Vilar, acknowledged as the leading donor for opera worldwide, had pledged $1 million to “War and Peace,” which he also supported at its Kirov premiere and subsequent productions in London and New York, investing a total of $4 million, by his calculation.

But Vilar put his foot down when he was asked to cough up not just the promised $1 million in L.A. but also another $600,000 to pay for adapting the massive production to the Pavilion stage. He also declined when asked to move up the payment on his $1-million pledge to cover advance costs of bringing some 400 Kirov soloists, chorus and orchestra members to L.A.

Opera observers look at the company’s ups and downs and point to the fact that L.A. Opera, a young company with a relatively small endowment, is attempting exponential growth. Its annual operating budget increased from $20 million to $30 million in the 2001-02 season and hovers at about the same level for 2002-2003. Looking forward to when the Los Angeles Philharmonic decamps for Walt Disney Concert Hall and L.A. Opera can make more use of the Pavilion, Domingo has plans that would require doubling that figure within six years.

Marc Scorca, president of the Washington-based service organization Opera America, says many American opera companies have experienced similar rapid expansion--and strained budgets--in recent years as they attempt to keep up with the art form’s resurgent popularity.

But Scorca acknowledges that, when it comes to “the stratosphere” occupied by L.A. Opera, even the most common problem becomes larger than life. “With Mr. Domingo and the size of the opera, it creates a factor of two. It’s the result of scale, and celebrity,” he says. All in all, since the appointment of Domingo, the offstage scene at L.A. Opera, now in its 17th season, continues to have an uncommonly dramatic, er, tenor.

Domingo declined to be interviewed for this story; Marc I. Stern, L.A. Opera’s board president, acknowledged that life with the globe-hopping superstar is anything but dull. “I’m so excited about what we can do here in L.A. if we can pull everything together,” he said. “The worst thing that we could do is be boring. The price of that is, you have to take chances. It’s a wonderfully dynamic situation, but not one where we can always totally chart our course.”

Los Angeles Opera has an endowment of about $8 million. Ideally, Scorca says, an opera company’s endowment should be 200% of the budget. But he adds, most have not achieved that goal. New York’s 119-year-old Metropolitan Opera has an endowment of $275 million against an operating budget of $200 million. Seventy-nine-year-old San Francisco Opera has an endowment of $36 million, just more than half of its $62-million annual budget.

He also notes that opera observers should not assume opera companies can borrow from their endowments to pay their bills; those funds are restricted to generate interest income. But a larger endowment produces higher interest income that can be used to cover shortfalls. It’s the type of money that might have been used to cover the extra $600,000 needed to cover the cost of adapting the stage for “War and Peace.”

Instead, if the show were to go on, the company would have had to come up with another donor, and fast. Company artistic administrator Edgar Baitzel called such a task difficult in tight economic times and added that since the opera had committed to bill the production as “underwritten by Alberto Vilar,” it would be awkward to acknowledge an additional donor.

Opera America’s Scorca scoffs at the notion that there is something shocking in Los Angeles Opera’s decision to cancel “War and Peace” in favor of a production that will cost $1 million less. “Arts organizations are accused of not being run in a businesslike fashion, but the minute someone makes a businesslike decision, people start wringing their hands about it,” Scorca complained.

Baitzel said that L.A. Opera began exchanging information with Metropolitan Opera about possible additional staging costs as early as last January. Still, there are those who wonder how L.A. Opera could have been caught by surprise by added costs for such a huge production, since they have occurred everywhere the Kirov production has traveled. “The major technical stumbling block is an enormous domed floor which suggests the top of the world, and has a number of hydraulic elements,” said Joe Clark, technical director for the Metropolitan Opera, which presented “War and Peace.” “It’s a big piece of scenery that has to fit together quite precisely, and do tricks.”

Clark said the Met, a co-producer of “War and Peace,” realized it would have to create its own version of the floor that could be moved on- and offstage quickly, since unlike the Kirov Opera it performs several operas in repertory. Plus, with its bigger stage and house, the Met wanted to create an even more spectacular production than the original in St. Petersburg, adding extra cast members and even animals. While animals themselves don’t add much expense, the new domed floor had to be strong enough to accommodate a galloping horse.

“It’s not the kind of production that you can move easily from theater to theater,” Clark said. “We sent [set] drawings back and forth to colleagues in Los Angeles, and I said: ‘I’m not sure you don’t have more or less the same problems we have.’ ”

Finger-pointing about whether the opera company should have known better, however, would be rendered moot if the company had better cash flow--and did not rely so heavily on one donor, Vilar, a close friend of Domingo, to fund its most ambitious endeavors.

Said board president Stern: “The first thing I need to do is raise money. The second thing I have to do is go after a series of new donors. One of the things we need to do, and will do, is diversify our support base; we are spending a lot of time and effort on that.”

In 2000, Vilar promised $10 million to L.A. Opera for new productions--the largest single donation in the opera’s history. The $1 million for “War and Peace” was to have been part of that long-term gift. Vilar also committed to paying $1 million to start up the Young Artists program. In the past two years, he has funded similar institutes at Washington Opera--where Domingo also serves as artistic director--and at London’s Royal Opera.

Vilar says that when L.A. Opera starts up its program, he will fund it. L.A. Opera says it can’t start the program without having the money in advance. “It’s a chicken-and-egg situation,” says the opera company’s Baitzel.

Vilar’s company, Amerindo Investments Inc., has nose-dived from managing assets of $5.5 billion at the beginning of 2000 to a current $1.1 billion. But Vilar said his decision to invest no further in “War and Peace” had nothing to do with inability to pay. Rumors persist that Vilar has not met all of his commitments to arts organizations worldwide, even though those organizations report that he has paid according to schedule.

And Vilar expressed disappointment that so far Los Angeles Opera has not used his promised funds for new productions, but has asked permission to use the money for rented productions, such as last season’s “Lohengrin”--and “War and Peace.” L.A. Opera expects $1.5 million of the $2-million cost of bringing in “Lady Macbeth” to be covered by ticket sales, and is raising funds for the rest. “Our problem is we need the money while the Kirov is here, and we know Mr. Vilar cannot commit himself to our payment schedule. We are not counting on his money at this point,” Baitzel said.

“Someday I’d like to go back to my original intention, which was to have them build up their repertoire,” Vilar said. “The Met has six operas in its warehouse that I paid for. I definitely remain committed to Los Angeles; I’d love to see opera flourish in the West. But I will be disappointed at the end of five or 10 years if I can’t go into their warehouse and say: ‘See that one and that one and that one--they’re mine, and I gave them to you.’ ”

Several L.A. Opera board members say the board remains solidly in favor of his risk-taking moves. “It is a happy board,” said Nick Ciriello, who has been on the board since the company began.

Alicia Garcia Clark, a board member who heads up the opera support group Hispanics for Los Angeles Opera, adds that the board endorsed the decision to replace “War and Peace” with an unusual and still-expensive Kirov production instead of the tried-and-true.

“I think it’s exciting to have the Kirov,” Clark said. “We could have presented a ‘Madama Butterfly’ or one of the standard operas that we know and love, but it would not have been anything new, it wouldn’t have attracted new people. In order to expand the opera, we have to have more and more people coming to see it.”