tech.operaphilly.com
The Opera Company of Philadelphia
Production
Department Website
Monday, October 7, 1996
Opera company is setting the stage for its continued success
Opera Company of Philadelphia work crews spent much of last week setting
up scenery for Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor at the Academy of
Music. The company will present the opera on four nights this month, starting
a week from tonight.
The massive 17th-century Scottish castle that is the setting for Lucia
was designed and built by OCP production people in space it leases at the
Arsenal Business Center, off Interstate 95 in Frankford.
Stored at the center are carefully crafted bits of scenery for various operas
-- anvils for the chorus in Il Trovatore, trees for The Rake's
Progress, a lion carved in styrofoam for Salome.
The opera company's carpenters and painters are now readying scenery there
for Puccini's Madama Butterfly, which will be presented at the Academy
of Music in November.
The set for one of the opera company's two other productions of the 1996-97
season, Verdi's Falstaff, also will be designed and built at the
Arsenal Business Center.
Boyd Ostroff, director of production heads the work, assisted by Kevin Baratier,
scenic coordinator. James de Blasis is stage director for Lucia di Lammermoor.
The Philadelphians not only construct elaborate sets for their own use;
they also lease them to opera companies throughout the United States nad
Canada.
"Opening our own shop has been a tremendous asset for us," said
John Callahan, OCP's head carpenter and technical director. "We haven't
even gone into marketing, and everybody's calling us."
Callahan pays calls on most of the opera companies that rent scenery built
here to make sure it's installed properly on their stages. In the last couple
of years, he has performed this supervisory chore from Louisville, Ky.,
to Honolulu and from West Palm Beach, Fla., to Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
He was in Montreal in April helping to set up Brazilian rain forest scenery
for The Magic Flute. At the end of this month he'll fly to Tucson,
Ariz., to supervise the same job for the opera company there. And his son,
Timothy, who is Callahan's assistant, leaves today for the opera company
in New Orleans that is leasing scenery for Die Fledermaus from Philadelphia.
Die Fledermaus has already been to Edmonton. And its next stop after
New Orleans will be Indianapolis, which also will lease the Lucia di
Lammermoor sets next spring.
The opera company's scenery is trucked to other cities by J. W. Transportation
Co, Inc., of Stratford. The charge of $2 per mile must be paid by the company
renting the equipment. Joseph Wolk, president of the trucking company, said
the run from Philadelphia to New Orleans, for example, will cost the Louisianans
about $2,880.
Ostroff said most of the sets made here can be transported in a single truck,
thus saving money for the renters and widening the market for the Philadelphians.
An exception to the one-truck pattern was the Hawaii-bound scenery for Carmen.
Wolk said his firm took the equipment to the West Coast in two trailers,
which were then loaded on a ship for Honolulu. The round-trip cost for transportation
was about $20,000.
"Believe it or not, everything went pretty smoothly," sail Wolk.
His firm also trucks equipment for the Philadelphia Orchestra, whose members
are now on strike, and the Pennsylvania Ballet.
Typically, building scenery for an opera takes about eight weeks and costs
about $75,000. Rentals may bring in roughly $15,000 per opera. Two sets
owned by the Opera Company of Philadelphia -- those for Carmen andThe
Magic Flute are close to having paid for themselves in rentals.
Revenues from scenery rentals have helped the local opera company reduce
its operating deficit, which at one time threatened its future. And by making
its own sets, the company can tailor them to the unusual dimensions of the
Academy of Music. It's a magnificent horseshoe-shaped auditorium with limited
stage space.
When the Philadelphia opera company was renting sets that had been built
for larger facilities elsewhere, the job of setting up the scenery in the
Academy of Music and striking it was unusually time-consuming -- hence,
expensive. Thanks in part to its homemade sets, stagehand costs have been
reduced.
Although hourly wages for stagehands have risen by an average of 4 percent
per year in the last three years, the opera company's stage crew expenditures
have actually declined slightly. They totaled $264,962 in 1992-93 and $248,264
in 1995-96.
When Robert B. Driver was named general director of the Opera Company of
Philadelphia, in March 1991, its deficit totaled $733,000. He set about
reducing costs and increasing revenues. In 1993, he hired Boyd Ostroff from
the State University of New York at Oswego, where Ostroff held a tenured
faculty position as technical director for its theater department.
The two had worked together for five years in the 1970's when Driver, who
was born of American parents in Brazil, was managing an opera company in
Syracuse, N.Y., and Ostroff, a native of St. Louis, was its technical director.
Ostroff holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Virginia and a
master of fine arts degree in scenery and light design from Carnegie Mellon
University.
"We were building scenery and renting it to other companies."
he said of his work with Driver in Syracuse.
Soon, that is what they began to do here. Using donated space in Mount Laurel,
Ostroff and his team completed their first in-house production - The
Magic Flute -- in March 1994.
That summer, they moved to the press floor of the old Bulletin Building
at 30th and Market Streets. Their landlord there was Drexel University.
They constructed five sets there; a year ago this month, they moved to a
14,000-square-foot building at the Arsenal Business Center. They also rent
an adjoining 5,000-square-foot unheated building for storage.
Ostroff reduced production costs by designing sets specifically for the
Academy. Another key element was the change he made in dealing with the
stagehands union, Local 8 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage
Employees.
Before Ostroff arrived, labor-management relations at OCP were said to have
been chilly. According to one published account, it was a case of us-against-them.
The stagehands charged that they were never consulted on ways to reduce
costs.
"Previous management wouldn't ask us our opinion," said John Callahn,
57, who was president of the local for nine years and remains a union member.
(In addition to his work with the opera company, Callahan has been the Forrest
Theater's chief carpenter since 1966. And for three weeks this summer, he
was in Atlantic City heading a crew of 25 carpenters preparing the set and
runway for this year's Miss America pageant.)
"We tried to tell them where they could cut costs and save money,"
Callahan said of his former bosses at the Opera Company of Philadelphia.
"They weren't interested in what we had to say. Boyd [Ostroff] was
the first [management] person I could sit down with. Now, we communicate.
Boyd has done a tremendous job. I can't say enough about him."
Overtime costs had been out of control. Callahan said the stagehands suggested
ways of reducing the OT, even though this meant less money in their pockets.
And they were listened to.
"Everybody understands that the opera's business is our business,"
said Callahan, a North Catholic High School graduate who started as an extra
stagehand at the old Erlanger Theatre in 1957.
"If the opera company goes out of business, we have no work,"
he said, "Nobody is interested in getting more overtime than is necessary.
If we can get the job done quicker and at less cost to the opera company,
that's what everybody wants."
Ostroff credited Callahan with providing the drive and enthusiasm that has
gotten everybody excited about the opera company's own shop and its apparently
bright future.
However the good feeling that marks it labor-mangement relations is absent
in the strike of Philadelphia Orchestra musicians. Ironically, the opera
company has benefited from that stoppage. Under normal conditions it must
fit its stage work between the orchestra's rehearsals and concerts.
But with the musicians on strike, the opera people have the Academy of Music's
stage all to themselves. In preparing for opening night of Lucia di Lammermoor
next Monday, for example, they haven't been obliged to set up the scenery
in haste and then take it down quickly to make way for the musicians. The
orchestra's absence has thus simplified the work of both the artists and
the stagehands.
Meanwhile, Driver's efforts to save the opera company from insolvency have
borne fruit. Last year's financial statement showed an accumulated deficit
of $413,000 as of June 1995. That was a reduction of $320,000 from the deficit
Driver inherited four years earlier.
But the Pew Charitable Trusts' recent announcement that it would no longer
fund deficit operations of arts organizations jeapordized the opera company's
$450,000 annual grant from Pew.
"That really gave us an adrenalin rush," Driver said. "We
had been whittling away at our deficit, but now the pressure was on to clear
it up."
He seems to have done just that. The 21-year-old opera company's special
"Coming of Age" concert last night was expected to raise $122,000,
Driver said. Subscriptions have soared from 3,000 to 7,000 despite an increase
in ticket prices, he said. And on Sept. 25, Advanta Corp. chairman Dennis
Alter and his wife, Gisela, gave the opera their personal check for $300,000.
"Our debt should be completely clear," Driver said. "Now,
we have the challenge of building a reserve."
Copyright 1996, The Philadelphia Inquirer
tech.operaphilly.com
The Opera Company of Philadelphia
Production
Department Website