What Regional Opera Houses Can Do To Compete with the Met Movies

This article in the New York Times has had me thinking recently about what regional opera companies can do to capitalize on the Met's HD performances. It is, needless to say, a struggle for regional opera companies to compete with the opera movies; as one regional manager put it in the article, "They're invading our space." I sympathize with their plight and have never had personal experience running an opera house, but I do think there are a number of innovative tools local theathers can use to keep their neighbors coming to live performances.

My ideas gravitate around Utah Opera in Salt Lake City, Utah. This is because Salt Lake is the "regional" city I am most familiar with, and I am somewhat acquainted with their advertising, programming, and audience demographic. Utah Opera has the unusual distinction of being folded into the same organization as the Utah Symphony. This cooperation started about five years ago in an effort to maximize budget and resources, and it's had mixed results. For my purposes, I will stick with ideas for the opera even though all of these would have repercussions for the symphony as well.

1. Localize the live performance experience. In short, know your audience. The thing the Met can't do is understand a community and know exactly their tastes and interests. In Utah, this could mean introducing "theme nights" that take advantage of local populations. An "Apres Ski" night could invite tourists from down the mountain to dress casually and enjoy hot chocolate during the intermission. A "Family Night" could take place on a Monday, to capitalize on the LDS Family Home Evening, and use apprentices or University of Utah singers in a more intimate, child-friendly environment. Targetting the legions of young dating students in the area seems like a wise move: "Date Night" or "Romance at the Opera" or something like that could feature a particularly romantic opera, invite formal dress or sell roses at intermission... The point is that these are local groups unique to the Salt Lake region. Advertising for these nights could be done in a targetted market to reduce costs: just at the ski resorts, just at family hangouts or just at the universities. Opera can no longer be considered a sacred experience to be untouched by gimmick marketing. Audiences must be targetted and the product attractively packaged.

2. Insist on cinematic productions. Yes, that means casting for looks as well as voice. It's no longer acceptable to cast a physically unattractive woman as Turandot, the princess men die for, even if her voice is glorious. From what I've seen over the past couple of years, Utah Opera still has an opportunity to improve on this front.

3. Work to sync interesting programming across performing arts and academic organizations. If the University of Utah is producing Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, put the Gounod opera on the program and then work with the University to cross market the contrasting works. This cross programming and cross marketing could be done with a number of different works and genres: work with the local art house to show the 1936 movie of Camille while La Traviata, featuring the same story, is playing at the opera. Do an exploration of Faustian characters across genres. (A similar idea was carried out with some success by Pamela Rosenberg at the San Francisco Opera.) Don Juan could be another theme: the Symphony could program Strauss' Don Juan tone poem while Mozart's Don Giovanni is playing across the street. This idea takes coordination and strong relationships with the other arts organizations, as well as additional funds for specialized marketing materials, but all the organizations benefit from this kind of cooperation.

4. Build alliances with other regional opera houses to share sets and costumes. This is already done frequently among houses, but I'm suggesting a more formalized union. I don't know much about the logistics of how this is done, but it seems to me that regional houses in the Rocky Mountain Region would benefit from working together to maximize resourses.

5. Abandon visits to schools and redistribute resources to getting students into the theater. I think there's very little benefit in bringing singers to school assemblies, etc. Opera music is so entirely different from what most young people are accustomed to today that one visit by a singer isn't going to make them immediately prefer a vertical melodic line over horizonal rhythmic music. Plus, they'll always associate it with school and who wants that. A more powerful introduction is the experience of actually going to the theater: seeing the otherworldliness of the curtain going up, people singing without microphones into a huge hall, learning to sit quietly out of respect for the performers, and most importantly, giving the students a sense of pride in their local organizations. This can be achieved by opening dress rehearsals, or using apprentices or vocal students in tailored programs.

6. Let donors decide where their money goes. To the extent possible, let donors decide if their money is going into the production costs, the singers' salaries or the young artist program. Maybe even let them pick the specific opera they want to put their money towards. Give donors a sense of ownership so that when they attend a performance, they can say, "My money helped create those costumes!" This kind of pride of ownership can only exist on the local level. Going to a Met movie doesn't give this type of satisfaction.

7. Promote the movies. As a regional opera house, do not let the community see that you fear the Met. Within a regional company there needs to be a healthy sense of the Met as competition, but I strongly believe that any audience interest in opera is good interest. It is too early to tell what the long term effects of the Met movies really will be on regional theaters, but my gut tells me that opera as an industry will benefit in the long term.

Some of these ideas take too much money; others are being carried out already. I'm sure there is a host of other creative ideas being tried across the country. I hope for the best for regional opera houses and applaude those who are doing their best to run them.

Introducing the Really Terrible Orchestra

A friend of mine who lives in London just introduced me to the Really Terrible Orchestra (RTO), a group of amateur musicians from Edinburgh, Scotland, who somehow attract a paying audience. It seems that their founder is Alexander McCall Smith, the author of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series and an amateur musician himself. I'm not quite sure what to make of this ragtag group, but since I've never heard them perform, perhaps I'll defer to my friend's own description:

"None of [the musicians] have any real talent and they play songs like "Yellow Submarine" between jokes and readings by the author Alexander McCall Smith.... And if any of them progress to "good" status, they have to leave the group. Admittedly, it is bizarre fare but also delightful."

The RTO will be performing in New York on April 1st. (Is it a coincidence this is April Fools Day?) I would love to see what the appeal is: Is it a feel-good experience where the audience cheers on dedicated but inept souls for pursuing their dream, or is there an element of mockery that delivers an evening of perversely satisfying schadenfreude?

Two Violinists Take to Subway Busking

I loved this profile in the New York Times' online edition. Henrique Prince is a self-taught violinist who jams in the Times Square subway station with his own bluegrass band. This is so New York to me: the chaos of the streets punctuated by the unexpected person making human connections. It may be what I love most about this city. As I've returned here after years of being away, I've been struck with what a prominent role music plays in the lives of people here, in a much more professional, academic way than the rest of the country enjoys it. This photo essay demonstrates this perfectly. In an effort to acknowledge this fact, I always let my children give money to subway buskers. They love this tradition and I know it helps them acknowledge how many people give their lives to their art form.

The profile also reminded me of the fabulous experiment conducted by Joshua Bell in April, 2007, reported in the Washington Post. Bell, a world-reknown solo violinist, dressed in jeans and a cap and annonymously played during rush hour in the L'Enfant Plaza station of the D.C. metro. The experiment was to see how many commuters would stop to hear the professional's music, or at least how many would pause in some subconsious recognition of exceptional skill. The official video of the experiment has been watched on YouTube by over a million viewers. That half a dozen people stopped out of the hundreds that passed by shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with this country's abysmal recognition of classical skill, but I was amused recently to see that portions of the Post's article have shown up in a email chain. The "isn't this terrible this happened?" tone of the email underscores the irony of the whole experiment: in theory, we believe classical traditions and skills are important to our culture but when those skills are put right under our noses, we still don't recognize them. It is terrible, but without the trappings of the concert hall and pricey tickets most of us would have probably walked right by Joshua Bell ourselves, although I like to think my kids would have given him a few bucks.