From the NY Times
For City Opera, the Talk Turns to a Shutdown
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Sarah Joy Miller, center, in
the title role of the New York City Opera production “Anna Nicole” at
the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
By MICHAEL COOPER
Published: September 26, 2013 185 Comments
It may very well be all over for New York City Opera after the buxom lady sings.
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City Opera’s board, facing a season it cannot pay for, voted on Thursday
to start bankruptcy proceedings next week and wind down the company’s
affairs if it fails to raise $7 million by Monday, said Risa B. Heller, a
spokeswoman for the company.
It appears increasingly unlikely that the opera will meet that goal:
officials said that the troupe had raised only about $1.5 million since
it first made an urgent appeal for the $7 million this month.
Bankruptcy would bring the final curtain down on a company that was
called “the people’s opera” by Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia when it was
founded 70 years ago. Since then City Opera has given the premieres of
important works, helped the early careers of major singers including
Beverly Sills, Samuel Ramey and Plácido Domingo, and been affordable
enough to introduce several generations of New Yorkers to opera.
But the company’s fiscal woes have mounted in recent years, and in 2011
it left its longtime home in Lincoln Center to begin a new phase of
performing far fewer operas each year — often to critical acclaim — as an itinerant troupe at theaters across the city.
If no one steps in to save the company, Saturday night’s performance of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s “Anna Nicole” — about Anna Nicole Smith, the Playboy centerfold who died in 2007
— will quite likely be the final opera performed by the troupe. The
company gave its inaugural performance, of Puccini’s “Tosca,” in 1944.
The company’s demise would keep New York City from being among the ranks
of cultural capitals like London and Berlin that are able to support
more than one major opera company.
“If we don’t raise the money we will have run out of options,” George
Steel, the company’s general manager and artistic director, said in a
statement. “It is impossible for the company to produce opera without a
way to fund it.”
The troupe had originally said only that it would cancel the remainder
of the current season if it failed to raise the $7 million by Monday; it
had threatened to cancel next year’s season if it failed to raise $13
million by the end of the year. But the board has decided that if it
cannot raise the money needed to continue the current season, it will
begin the process of filing for bankruptcy protection on Tuesday,
company officials said.
Filing for bankruptcy will allow the company to prioritize its
obligations to creditors as it tries to wind down its affairs. While the
scope of what the troupe owes was unclear on Thursday night, one
official said that its obligations included things like pension and
retirement promises, leases that might have to be broken, and contracts
with vendors. There were also questions about what would happen to its
endowment, which the company borrowed money from several years ago.
In a nod to its populist roots, City Opera tried to get $1 million of its current fund-raising effort through an online Kickstarter
campaign. But the effort failed to attract the widespread support the
company had hoped for: by Thursday it had raised only $156,143 from 968
backers.
City Opera had planned three more productions for this season: Johann
Christian Bach’s “Endimione,” Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” and Mozart’s
“Marriage of Figaro.”
The last decade has been brutal to the troupe. Ten years ago, City Opera
gave 115 performances of 17 different operas; last year, it gave just
16 performances of 4 operas.
But the old model could not pay for itself: the company began running
sizable deficits in 2003, and went dark for the 2008-9 season while its
longtime home, the New York State Theater, was given a major renovation
and renamed for its benefactor, David H. Koch. In doing so, it lost a
year’s worth of ticket sales. Then the company raided its endowment,
withdrawing $24 million to pay off loans and cover expenses.
The endowment, which once provided the company with more than $3 million
a year in investment income, now produces less than $200,000 a year —
which is less than City Opera makes from its Thrift Shop on East 23rd Street in Manhattan.
Then the company made the difficult decision to leave Lincoln Center,
went through bruising labor negotiations — its orchestra players were
once guaranteed a weekly salary for 29 weeks but are now paid by the
performance and the rehearsal — and drastically trimmed its season.
The new City Opera has been able to balance its budget and has produced
critically acclaimed work. But it has performed so little each year that
it has found its audience, and its universe of potential donors, much
smaller than it was in the past. And with the company’s woes coinciding
with a prolonged economic downturn, attracting benefactors to save City
Opera has proved difficult.
A bankruptcy filing would set the stage for the company to lay off its
remaining workers, whose ranks have thinned over the years, officials
said. Then the process of wrapping up the opera company’s affairs would
begin.
For now the company is soldiering on, performing “Anna Nicole” at the
Brooklyn Academy of Music even as the deadline has been looming.
Bridget Hendrix, a soprano who has sung in the company’s chorus for 32
years, said that it was a hard time for a group of musicians who had
become like a family over the years. “It’s difficult,” she said in an
interview before the bankruptcy vote was announced. “Personally, I’ve
always put aside anything to do a performance. Once I get on stage,
that’s who I am, that’s what I’m doing. I don’t think about anything
else.”
A veteran of the orchestra, Nancy McAlhany, a violinist who has been
playing with the orchestra for more than three decades, said that the
company’s troubles had been devastating. “We’re so heartbroken, and
really, I’d have to say, in shock that it appears that this company is
on the brink of nonexistence,” she said in an interview before the board
voted. “This company has been such a glorious experience.”
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