Fandom of the opera takes the stage

“In my wildest fantasies, I never dreamed I’d be onstage with Placido Domingo,” Paramount chief Sherry Lansing gushed as she stood before hundreds of guests at Los Angeles Opera’s On Stage Gala at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Not only did the lorgnette set share the spotlight with the opera’s general director as he sang romantic Argentine ballads at the April 24 event, but it also dined with him on filet of beef and tiramisu, applauded with him after performances by Opera Babes (two knockout Brits in flame-red gowns), tenors Victor Trent Cook, Rod Dixon and Thomas Young (formerly of Three Mo’ Tenors) and Paul Anka (with whom he sang “My Way”), and listened, rapt, as he spoke about performing.

“This is our life,” Domingo said, raising his arms as if to embrace the Pavilion’s sea of empty seats. “This is the place, what we have to face, when we come onstage, and there is this phenomenal feeling of having thousands of people expecting the best.”

Sweeping along a red carpet to the stage door, arriving guests entered the Pavilion’s rear stage area -- with its racks of colorful costumes and newly constructed set for the coming production of Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” -- to sip cocktails and sample gourmet appetizers such as lobster in a potato cup.

The buzz? Opera, of course. “Every time I see an opera, it changes my life in some small way,” supermodel Beverly Johnson said as she queued up for drinks with pal Nikki Haskell. Observed Haskell: “When she’s not listening to rap in the car, she’s listening to opera in the house!”

Leaning over a cocktail table with Oscar-winning film producer Arnold Kopelson (“Platoon”), comedian Don Rickles deadpanned that it had been his dream to be a “Domingo or a Pavarotti. And now, I sing one song in my act, and when people hear it, I tell you, they’re thrilled,” he said. “Thrilled!” Kopelson said he’d studied piano as a youngster. “I’m very much into classical music,” he said. “But I only sing in the shower.”

Kelly Day, co-chairwoman of the black-tie gala with Lansing and Nancy Daly Riordan, said she’d been introduced to opera by Domingo. “I love opera, but my husband” -- money manager Robert Day, chairman of Trust Company of the West -- “is not a real opera buff,” she confessed. “But I knew he’d love this evening. The Opera Babes are extraordinary, and Paul Anka is a friend.”

Baritone Michael Nouri, fresh from a New York engagement with Patti LuPone in “Can-Can” and hopeful about bringing a musical about Auguste Rodin’s mistress, Camille Claudel, to Broadway with singer Linda Eder, said opera “takes me to a higher place.... I hear Puccini’s ‘Nessun Dorma’ and I’m gone.”

During dinner, opera board Chairman Marc Stern dreamed of the day that the Pavilion, built in the ‘60s, would be refurbished. “The front of the house is terrific, the acoustics great,” he said. “But where it lacks suitability is the backstage, which needs to be significantly renovated and upgraded and increased in size to accommodate the kind of opera company that we want to be.”