Impotent Blind Man Kills Hundreds of Pagans.
Father Seeks Revenge After Daughter Loses Virginity.
Young Woman Headed for Convent Gets Steamy
With Two Jealous Lovers.
Headlines from your favorite supermarket tabloid? Try promotional descriptions of productions by the Baltimore Opera Company.
Thanks to clever marketing, the use of English translations and the rapid growth in regional opera companies, opera is thriving locally and nationally as never before. Baby boomers who grew up with the Beatles are embracing "La Boheme." Even twentysomethings from Glen Burnie are becoming opera subscribers.
Since 1980, opera audiences have grown by 30 percent to nearly 6 million Americans. And during the recent recession, opera held onto its audience while other performing arts organizations struggled to keep their subscribers.
In Baltimore, where the opera company was on the verge of bankruptcy in 1990, the company has increased its subscribers by 40 percent during the past three years. There are now nearly 8,000 subscribers -- part of an estimated audience of 25,000, according to opera officials.
The company's financial troubles forced it to trim its season from four to three productions in 1991. This year, however, popular demand added an extra performance to each production. Baltimoreans also enjoy operas produced by the Peabody Conservatory and the Municipal Opera Company of Baltimore, a predominantly African-American performing group founded in 1991.
Much of the credit for the Baltimore Opera Company's resurgence belongs to its humorous effort to reach beyond opera's traditional, classically cultured audiences by promising, as one brochure says, "Decadence and Immorality the Whole Family Can Enjoy."
"When one's advertising budget is as limited as ours, you don't want to spend a lot preaching to the choir," says Michael Harrison, director of the company. "We want to make opera more appealing to greater numbers of people, especially to those who may think it is a foreign kind of thing or elitist."
Gray Kirk VanSant, the Baltimore advertising firm that developed the irreverent pitch, suggested targeting such non-traditional audiences as the listeners of alternative rock station WHFS.
"We went for the comedy, we went for the jokes," says Jeff Millman. Gray Kirk Van Sant's senior vice president and creative director. "I figured those ads were talking to me: early 40s, ex-hippie, someone who grew up and continues to live with rock music. I figured I would never consider opera unless someone did something to change my mind that it wasn't the stodgy, old boring experience I assumed it was."
Sophisticated marketers
Opera companies across the country have become more sophisticated about marketing, says Danny Abreu, director of marketing for the New York City Opera.
"There used to be an impresario approach to marketing opera, the idea that all you have to do is say 'We're doing Puccini' and the people will come," says Mr. Abreu. "There's a lot of room to use humor to create a personality for a company."
One promotional brochure for the Baltimore Opera Company describes the current season as: "Verdi's 'Rigoletto' (love, lust, a body in a sack), 'Samson et Dalila' by Saint-Saens (sexy, biblical, the temple falls down) and Puccini's 'Manon Lescaut' (more love, more lust, lots of catchy tunes). The campaign slogan is "The Baltimore Opera: It's better than you think. It has to be."
The cheeky tone has captivated many, including new opera subscribers Laura and Michael Lane of Glen Burnie. She's a lawyer, he's an engineer. Both are 27. Neither had seen an opera before they subscribed this season. In fact, neither had subscribed to any performing arts season because they couldn't afford the time.
Why the opera?
"It had a great advertising campaign. We were both laughing so hard after we read the folder that we decided to try it," Mrs. Lane recalls. "Basically, we liked the fact that the opera didn't take itself too seriously."
And their impressions of the recent production of "Rigoletto" or "Love, lust, a body in a sack"?
"It was great," says Mrs. Lane, though she was distracted at first by the opera surtitles.
What are they saying?
During the past decade, most American opera companies have begun projecting surtitles, or English translations of the words the performers are singing, above the stage. More than anything else, observers say, this innovation has persuaded newcomers that opera is worth trying.
The San Francisco Opera introduced surtitles to U.S. audiences in 1983. Now, the Metropolitan Opera and Santa Fe Opera are the only large companies not to use them.
"The surtitles give you the translation so that you're no longer in a dilemma about what the performers are saying," Mr. Harrison ** says. "Then you become aware that what the characters are saying isn't so different than how we talk to each other. It's all about basic human emotions. Once people understand that, once they know that opera's not some high-flown, unreachable thing, they feel more comfortable with it."
Of all the performing arts, opera provides the experience probably closest to what people experience with movies and TV, according to Laura Young of Opera America, the industry's national association.
"It provides a multimedia aesthetic -- it has music, dance, it's highly visual, highly auditory, highly theatrical," she says. "And during the recent recession we didn't suffer as much as other performing arts forms."
While audiences for symphony orchestras, dance and theater declined from 1987 to 1992, according to the most recent American Council for the Arts report, opera managed to keep its numbers constant. (To be fair, opera claims a much smaller audience than some other performing arts forms. In 1992, for instance, 24 percent of Americans attended at least one live performance of opera or musical theater while 59 percent went to a play or musical comedy.)
It's new to some towns
Part of opera's current mystique is that this old performing art form is actually a new performing art form for most American communities.
Opera began to spread significantly beyond its big-city bastions only after the National Endowment for the Arts, along with regional and state arts agencies, began funding the arts in the late 1960s and early 1970s. More than half of the country's 103 opera companies were created after 1970. A quarter were created after 1980.
The art form has finally gained the kind of widespread familiarity that makes it a commercial force. As television ad campaigns use opera to sell products ranging from cosmetics to cars, some arias are becoming almost as recognizable as jingles.
"Because of advertising, opera has entered the lexicon of American pop culture," says Gran Wilson, a lyric tenor with an international career who lives in Baltimore. "It's probably impossible to go through one evening of network television advertising without hearing a spot with opera.
"That means that a 28-year-old CPA is more apt to know opera as something that successful grown-up people enjoy rather than as something with big, fat people screaming at the top of their lungs. And it also means people are no longer so reticent to try opera. I believe that if you ever get them there, they're going to come back."
Local subscription renewals confirm it: 83 percent of the people who subscribed to the Baltimore Opera Company last year signed up again. One reason is that the company is presenting another "Greatest Hits" season of some of the best known operas.
Familiar programs
Although opera marketing is becoming more adventuresome, most programming remains conservative. After suffering some financial punches with innovative productions in the 1980s, many regional companies returned to opera's lucrative ABCs -- namely the Aidas, Bohemes and Carmens.
And they increased their subscribers.
"Except for those people who go to the oldest established companies, opera audiences in America aren't really jaded," Mr. Wilson says. "To them, a production of 'Don Giovanni' isn't old hat. They're going for their first, second, maybe third performance, not their 57th."
Many companies, like the Baltimore Opera Company, reserve contemporary and American opera productions for special series off-season programs.
'La Boheme,' one more time
"We have been consciously very conservative in our programming because we felt like we've got to build an audience for opera," says Joseph McClain of the Austin Lyric Opera. "If putting on 'La Boheme' will help get in people who have never been to the opera, let's do it!"
With 5,000 season subscribers -- it claims the largest audience for the performing arts in central Texas -- the 8-year-old Austin Lyric Opera serves as an example of successful planning and management. Its annual budget has grown from an initial $300,000 to $2 million.
The opera company has steadily increased its audiences as well as the individual and corporate donors who provide more than half of its budget. It has created programs to develop audiences within the African-American, Hispanic and gay communities. Like most opera companies, it is working hard to bring the art form to elementary and secondary schoolchildren.
It's always easier to sell opera to people who have grown up listening to it.
Valerie Felder, a 30-year-old customer service representative for Blue Cross & Blue Shield, says she has always loved opera on the radio; she was hooked as a young girl by the romance and poignancy of "Madame Butterfly." During the past few years, she has attended several productions at the Baltimore Opera Company.
This season, however, the Woodlawn resident became a first-time subscriber. So did her husband Eric.
"At first, he went because of my love for the opera and his love for me," Mrs. Felder says. "Now he goes because of his love for the opera."