There are lots of ways in the theatre to stick your neck out, and James Wright has tried many of them. Last season, Vancouver Opera's general director bet on Lillian Alling, a brand-new opera by John Estacio and John Murrell, and the year before that, VO built a new production of John Adams's Nixon in China. This weekend, Wright's taking a chance on West Side Story.
Yes, West Side Story, the perennial hit musical, the one that did boffo business at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival two years ago and closed on Broadway earlier this year after 748 performances. Where, you ask, is the risk in doing that show?
The answer's in the numbers. Wright has booked the Queen Elizabeth Theatre for eight performance of WSS, and four of those are completely off subscription. He needs to sell $850,000 in single tickets before the last show on Oct. 29, and he's got to do it in a town that didn't buy enough seats for any of last year's offerings (not even La Traviata) to keep VO in the black. Earlier this month, the company ended a decade of mostly balanced budgets with a $1.4-million operating deficit.
"This [show]is not a slam dunk," says Wright. "It's a reasoned, thought-through risk."
Four is the usual baseline for a VO opera run – it's the number of times next month the company will do the French grand-opera version of WSS, Gounod's Roméo et Juliette. Wright is doubling down this time in part because much of the large singin'-and-dancin' cast for WSS is signed to weekly, Broadway-style contracts.
It doesn't cost more to throw in extra performances – until you get to the 30-piece orchestra and a few of the principals, who are on the per-service contracts typical of opera. But even with a break in performance costs, a week of WSS (which was in the works long before the deficit numbers came up) doesn't come cheap.
"We're spending as much on this as we spend on anything," says Wright, hours after hearing the good news that, as of the beginning of this week, single ticket sales for the run had reached 60 per cent of his target. Some of those are for the two weekend matinees – a new beachhead for VO, which doesn't otherwise play in the afternoon.
"We wanted to see if we could develop a matinee audience," Wright says. They've primed the pump by offering family packs: Buy two tickets at full price, get two more for $35 for children under 18 – though a parental advisory on the company's website warns that the show may not suit kids under 12.
This is a rougher, grittier WSS than the one that opened on Broadway in 1957. Director Ken Cazan wants to reintroduce a level of menace and alienation that suits a show about violent New York gangs, but that wasn't deemed appropriate for audiences in the late fifties, or for the wildly successful 1961 film.
Cazan says the set, based on a 2008 design by Cameron Anderson for Colorado's Central City Opera, evokes the look of the Upper West Side during the urban-renewal heyday of Robert Moses (the bête-noire of urbanist thinker Jane Jacobs), who displaced thousands of people from their homes and neighbourhoods in the name of progress. (Some of the ground Moses cleared became Lincoln Center, home of the New York Philharmonic, which WSS composer Leonard Bernstein took over as music director in 1958).
"The whole look of the show is very different from most West Side Storys," Cazan says. "It's more representational than literal. And [Alice Bristow's]costumes are not pristine and clean, they're dirty. They have sweat stains."
The physical setting had to be expanded to look right on the Queen Elizabeth's stage, which is twice the size of the tiny opera house in Colorado, Cazan says. But the extra room gave him more scope to display the look of a ravaged community, and made it easier to accommodate Jerome Robbins's explosive original choreography (re-created in Vancouver by Tracey Flye, who did similar duty for the Stratford production).
It's still worth asking whether WSS belongs with an opera company. Bernstein didn't think so initially, but in the eighties recorded the piece with opera singers. Wright says that WSS is a strongly written piece of music theatre, is challenging in its own way for opera voices (including, this time, soprano Lucia Cesaroni as Maria and tenor Colin Ainsworth as Tony), and couldn't be done on this scale by any other professional company in Vancouver. For him, that's reason enough to take it on and go big.
The financial disappointment of last year took all season to accumulate, reflected softer donations and sponsorships as well as ticket sales, and doesn't prompt Wright to shy from taking risks on lesser-known works in the future. A production of Tan Dun's 2002 opera Tea: A Mirror of Soul is firmly on the schedule for the spring of 2013, John Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versailles is confirmed but not yet fixed on the calendar, and another recent work is in play for a future season.
Wright was also involved, last weekend, in a six-way conference call with other heads of Canadian companies about the feasibility of remounting Louis Riel, the landmark 1967 opera by Harry Somers, with a target date of 2017. "I think there's a realization that this needs to happen," Wright says.
First, however, he's got to interest a big audience in the Jets – the New York kind, not the ones in Winnipeg.
Vancouver Opera's production of West Side Story opens Saturday at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre (vancouveropera.ca).