Coronavirus: Opera Australia hoping the show goes on
Changes to airconditioning to alter aerosols that escape singers’ mouths among measures being weighed, as Opera Australia races for a solution that will save it.
No one would seriously think of opera as being hazardous to one’s health, but in the new normal even sopranos are a potential threat — and not of the Tony Soprano kind.
Opera singers produce their glorious sound by generating a column of air, shaped into song by mouth, nose and throat. And it’s their open mouths — expelling fine droplets of saliva, or “aerosols” — that makes them deadly dangerous in a pandemic. The risk of community transmission from singing in public places is why authorities such as NSW Health strongly advise against it.
The awful possibility of creating a COVID hotspot is just one of the manifold problems confronting the national opera company, Opera Australia. Even if it emerges from hibernation and presents a summer season at the Sydney Opera House next year — as it hopes to do — it will be with a vastly reduced audience in line with social distancing. Auditorium, front of house and backstage will need regular deep cleaning. Separate crews may be needed to manage performances on alternate nights, all adding to the cost.
Opera Australia is, in many ways, the canary in the cultural coal mine. As Australia’s largest not-for-profit performing arts company, with turnover of $130m last year, it is also one of the most vulnerable. By far the largest part of its income is self-generated; half of its revenue comes from ticket sales. Just 20 per cent comes from government subsidy, tiny by the standards of some European opera houses.
The high reliance on earned income now has OA staring into a financial hole. When the lockdown came in March, the company had given just two performances of a new production, of Verdi’s Attila, that was a highlight of the summer season. Every other performance since then has been cancelled or postponed, including the Melbourne season of the Broadway musical The Secret Garden, and a new “digital” production of Wagner’s Ring cycle in Brisbane. The cancellations represent ticket sales of about $75m. About a third of ticketholders have donated the price of their tickets back to the company or have deferred refunds, but the outlook is grim.
Rory Jeffes, OA’s chief executive, is bracing for a “multi, multimillion-dollar loss” this year.
At other performing arts companies the situation is similarly dire, but at OA it’s magnified by several degrees. (The next-biggest company, the Australian Ballet, is half the size in terms of turnover.) In an ordinary year, OA would be launching next year’s season about now, the advance ticket sales bringing in about $12m — crucial cash flow to help pay staff and other overheads. With no season to launch, there’s no cash, and costs continue to mount.
OA’s board, led by former TNT boss and investments manager David Mortimer, has given its blessing to a restructure that is intended to streamline the company’s operations and reduce ongoing costs. Inquirer has learned that management will be seeking to save the salaries of about 30 positions, with redundancies possible in areas including administration, musical and technical departments.
Staff have been stood down since March, and OA has been paying up to 80 per cent of people’s regular salaries, backed by the JobKeeper subsidy for about 470 employees. Executive staff also have been on reduced pay. The company already has burned through funds from the sale in 2015 of its Melbourne studios, about $9m, to help pay its wages bill. It is now putting on the market its warehouse in inner-Sydney Alexandria, used for set storage, in the hope of raising millions of dollars more.
Jeffes concedes the restructure will inevitably result in some redundancies — he declines to say how many — as OA desperately tries to rein in costs. The aim, he says, is to introduce a more flexible operating model that is able to respond to rapidly changing conditions that no one could have foreseen. Discussions with the MEAA union are expected to start as soon as next week.
“Our overriding concern is to create an efficient organisation that can have more flexibility and be agile over this coming period — however long that is,” Jeffes tells Inquirer at a meeting with OA’s artistic director, Lyndon Terracini.
“Inevitably there are going to be redundancies. But what we genuinely want to do is consult with all the people involved…and find ways that will mitigate the impact on individuals’ employment. We want everyone to have input on this.”
The company now known as Opera Australia gave its first performances in 1956 with a tour of four Mozart operas. It helped open the Sydney Opera House in 1973 and through the 1970s and 80s was blessed with many performances by the world’s reigning prima donna, Joan Sutherland. It became known for exciting productions such as Baz Luhrmann’s celebrated La Boheme, Bryn Terfel as Falstaff directed by Simon Phillips, and tense dramas by Britten and Janacek directed by Neil Armfield.
After Terracini arrived as artistic director in 2009, the company grew into a production powerhouse. He ventured into ambitious, large-scale projects including the Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour presentations and the company’s first-ever Ring cycle in Melbourne in 2013. In partnership with producer John Frost, OA has staged Broadway classics such as South Pacific, My Fair Lady and Evita featuring Tina Arena, the last breaking box office records.
Alongside popular favourites such as La Boheme and Carmen, often on high rotation, Terracini started to introduce operas seen less often in this country: Szymanowski’s King Roger, and Berg’s Wozzeck directed by William Kentridge. He commissioned new operas such as The Rabbits, featuring Kate Miller-Heidke, and Elena Kats-Chernin’s Whiteley, based on the life of Brett Whiteley.
When regional tours and education programs are factored in, OA can claim to be one of the world’s busiest opera companies, clocking 775 performances last year. It is a remarkable production machine of what may be broadly called the lyric arts, encompassing traditional opera, musical theatre and operatic entertainments. Terracini’s direction has not been without criticism — such as his favouring international artists over local singers, and big-budget musicals edging out traditional opera performances — but under his decade-long leadership the company has almost doubled in size, from just under $70m in turnover to $130m last year.
In 2016, the year of OA’s 60th anniversary, the company underwent an expansive restructure, putting in place three divisions to manage different areas of its operation: the “in theatre” division for main stage opera, major projects including the Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour presentations, and the commercial arm that produces musicals.
In the new model outlined by Jeffes, the company’s various activities will be brought into a single, streamlined corporate structure, while allowing a polite distance between taxpayer-funded and commercial ventures. Artistically, its output will more closely resemble a festival model: an array of different operatic performances, not necessarily marketed as an annual season. The company needs to be able to plan for future productions but also wants to avoid onerous forward commitments if, as has happened this year, shows have to be cancelled.
This explains the need for flexibility and why management will be seeking input and co-operation across the company. Jeffes says a provisional budget for next year has a $17m hole in it, which he hopes will be filled with additional funding support and loans, but also by cutting costs.
“By going to that simple structure, there will be some redundancies, but we genuinely want to minimise those, which is why we haven’t decided on a firm number,” he says. “We have decided on what the structure will be and now we are looking to see how people fit into that.”
Administration staff almost certainly will be affected, but potentially so will the Opera Australia Orchestra, which has 52 permanent musicians, and the Opera Australia Chorus with about 40 voices. Terracini says the company is “committed to having a full-time chorus and orchestra”, but Inquirer understands that management may seek some workplace changes to improve efficiency.
“We want to talk to the orchestra, the chorus, the crews … about how we as an organisation can commit to doing something, but then if we are unable to do it, that we are not having to bear the full cost of it,” Jeffes says. “We’re not trying to pay people less, we’re not trying to undermine the support we give people. But what we need to do is have agility, because things change very quickly. It’s about being able to make last-minute decisions.”
When opera performances finally return to the Sydney Opera House, and to Arts Centre Melbourne, the experience will be very different from previous years. Terracini has drafted a season of four operas — likely to be from the popular end of the repertoire — for a Sydney summer season. He is also considering novel ways of presenting opera, as he has done in recent years with the Sydney Harbour productions, and the made-for-TV “soap opera”, The Divorce. Without giving details — “I haven’t figured them all out” — he hints at opera on film, opera in digital formats, opera outdoors.
It’s clear from the discussion that many ideas, possibilities, problems and solutions are being thought through. One involves those aerosols that escape singers’ mouths, and avoiding community transmission during a performance of, say, La Boheme or La Traviata — operas that end with the heroine’s death from acute respiratory disease. The idea is to somehow change the flow of airconditioning, so the aerosols are directed back towards the stage, and not over the seated audience in the theatre.
Whichever course OA takes, it will be closely watched by other performing arts companies, its audience, and no doubt by those who complain about taxpayer funds being spent on opera.
It begs the question: why do opera at all, especially during a pandemic when there are so many other priorities?
Simple, says Terracini. It’s the unique communicative power of opera — singers, chorus and orchestra in full flight — that makes for some of the most emotionally powerful experiences you can have in the theatre.
“For me, it’s when the entire audience is moved in the same way, and they take that experience with them out of the theatre,” he says. “Then, I think, the world becomes a better place.”
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