Blazing the Frontier : Long Beach's adventuresome opera company, which 'challenges everyone else around here to think,' is more concerned with pushing its own limits than putting on big productions.

By Chris Pasles

April 30, 1995 12 AM PT

<i> Chris Pasles is a staff writer for The Times' Orange County edition</i>

Opera isn’t supposed to be this way.

In a city the size of Long Beach, sitting in the shadow of a major metropolis, the local opera company is expected to do by-the-book productions of “Carmen,” “La Boheme” and “Madama Butterfly.”

If the city has an opera company at all, it should be renting conventional costumes and conventional sets and importing conventional singers. If the budget’s fat enough, the company might even beef up the marquee value by hiring a name singer or two--probably in the golden years of their careers--for the starring roles.

And all of this normally would be geared toward so-called conventional subscribers, who want to dress up and see and be seen three or four times a year.

Clearly, something’s out of whack in Long Beach.

In recent seasons alone, the Long Beach Opera has mounted adventuresome productions of such operatic non -warhorses as Rossini’s “The Turk in Italy,” Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” and Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Riders to the Sea.” The company’s next presentation will be staged song cycles by Leos Janacek, Benjamin Britten and George Crumb next Sunday and May 10.

Like the others, the song cycles will be presented in the Long Beach Convention Center’s 800-seat Center Theater, known affectionately as the “little theater” (occasionally the company also presents a production in the larger, adjacent Terrace Theater).

Not all these efforts have worked wondrously well, but even so, the company is generally acknowledged as the most adventuresome opera company in the Southland.

“They’re the one who challenges everyone else around here to think, to have a fresh vision,” said Los Angeles Philharmonic Managing Director Ernest Fleischmann. “They’re doing an amazing job. I don’t know how they do it with their budget.”

Long Beach Opera’s annual budget is about $750,000-$1 million for three--sometimes four--productions. In contrast, Los Angeles Music Center Opera spent about $16 million for eight operas in 1994-95 and Opera Pacific, based in Costa Mesa, presented four operas in the same season with a budget of $5.7 million.

Yet Long Beach Opera general director Michael Milenski wrote to subscribers this spring pleading for help in erasing a $14,000 deficit.

In a recent interview, Milenski downplayed the letter. “We’re on our feet--at the moment,” he said. “We do that every spring, after every opera. It’s standard fund-raising procedure. What one attempts to do in a fund-raising letter is create a sense of urgency.”

Three weeks before “Turk” went on in March, however, Long Beach experienced “the biggest crisis we ever had,” Milenski said just after the production closed. “It just looked like for the first time in 17 years, I thought, ‘I don’t know how we can go on. I can’t think of a way to make this happen.’ ”

Donors and board members came to the rescue, but while that crisis is over, a perennial problem remains. “What we don’t have,” said Milenski, “is enough people that are willing to come no matter what happens.” The company’s subscriber base is currently about 800, down from the 1,200 in pre-L.A. Opera and Opera Pacific days.

Los Angeles Music Center Opera General Director Peter Hemmings ventures a theory why audiences are short: “My own experience when running a company in London that specialized in doing contemporary operas is that there is a finite audience for such pieces, and it’s almost impossible to increase it beyond those few hundreds.”

E ven if he could increase the audience, Milenski said he would not change his tactics.

He’d like to have financial footing a little surer than it’s been for most of his years with the company, but he said he’s not looking for unlimited funds.

“Minimalism here is a philosophy. It is not dictated by budget,” he said. “If we had a budget three times as large for the same work that we do now, if we were sensible, we would save most of it because we simply don’t need that, and, in fact, it might even be detrimental to what we do. If you tell somebody not to worry about a budget, then all of a sudden, you don’t have to think nearly as hard, do you, as a creator?”

Controversial director Christopher Alden, who has worked on 15 productions for Milenski in Long Beach, including “Turk,” agrees.

“The financial austerity of a company like Long Beach Opera is quite attractive to me,” he said. “It forces one to use imagination, which is what I try to do.”

Alden often updates operas, emphasizing the political and social implications of the plots.

“I’ve never been a director who’s had a need to spend a ton of money to create an interesting opera production. I feel the more operas are about ideas and strong feelings, the more interesting they are. They’re not about creating a lavish succession of visual pictures, but about stripping that down so that the focus is on the singing actors.

“There are not really that many opera companies in America that are basically devoted to doing unconventional productions of opera and musical theater. Michael’s been interested in producing the kind of work I do.”

If he had more money, Milenski said he isn’t sure what he would do. “I think we’d probably give everybody a raise. Yes, we pay poorly. But in some ways we pay enough.”

Milenski rejects the idea of doing more productions. “If you do more productions,” he said, “pretty soon they’re not handmade anymore, pretty soon you’re cranking out a season. For our philosophy, a three-opera season is about what can be handled.

“By the time you get bigger than that, you’re going to have to have a bigger staff, you’re going to be much more organized in the sense of being sure that the sets are designed six months in advance so that they can get to the shop.

“You see what I mean? What it does is that it takes away a lot of the hands-on thing.”

M ilenski surely didn’t get his maverick attitude from his rather conventional, small-town background. He grew up in Cortez in southeastern Colorado, the only person in his family interested in music. (An older sister would grow up to be a lawyer, a younger sister an accountant and a still younger brother a contractor.)

He listened to opera on the radio but didn’t see his first opera (a touring production of “Madama Butterfly”) until he was an adolescent attending boarding school in Canon City. “I still remember the performance vividly,” he said.

Milenski studied music history and literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder, but it was a junior year in Florence that gave him a real sense of what opera could be. “I came back more Italian than American,” he said.

He pursued Italian letters in a graduate program at UC Berkeley, but left before finishing his doctorate. “I thought, ‘Life’s too short.’ So I went to San Francisco Opera and asked for a job. And that’s how I started in opera.”

After working at SFO in “various capacities,” from rehearsal coordinator to assistant stage manager, for about six years, Milenski “realized there was no place for me to go in that house.” So he moved to the south end of the bay to produce fully staged operas for the San Jose Symphony. It was there that he began his 18-year professional association with Alden.

When Milenski arrived in Long Beach to found the opera company in 1978, he said, “I saw the little theater and I thought, ‘Here’s my heart. Here’s this theater. Let’s see what you can do.’ ”

Even now, Long Beach Opera is the primary user--and only resident company--at the little theater.

But the size and configuration of the theater presents problems. “You have no wing space,” Milenski said. “There is no orchestra pit. There is no obvious place to put an orchestra. It really requires the participation of everybody involved to make it work. You have to know the theater and understand the theater before you can work in the theater.”

Not everyone can work happily in Milenski’s company. Librettist Philip Littell, for instance, asked that his name be taken off the text of “The Guilty Mother,” produced by Long Beach in 1989, because of changes made to it by stage director Brian Kulick.

And last year, one week before the opening of Verdi’s “Falstaff,” Milenski fired soprano Angelina Reaux, who was to sing Alice Ford, after problems arose between her and Moshe Leiser, one of the project’s two directors. Reaux departed, claiming she’d been mistreated, which Milenski still disputes. She also took with her her husband, Michael Sokol, who was to sing the title role. Milenski salvaged the situation as best he could at such a late date, presenting the opera in concert version with different singers.

“Turk” had its own glitches. It was originally planned for the new 1,100-seat Carpenter Performing Arts Center at Cal State Long Beach. “But it was just not meant to be,” Milenski said. “They were not administratively prepared to handle Long Beach Opera.”

Carpenter director Sharon Weissman strongly disagreed but left a door open for other possibilities. “We just never came to an agreement on a price,” she said. “We would love to work together in the future.”

A last-minute move to the Center Theater required some last-minute design changes. But if it had played at the larger Carpenter theater, Milenski might have avoided a financial shortfall. The production cost approximately $150,000. Ticket sales at the 800-seat Center Theater brought in only about $62,000.

“We had to turn a couple hundred people away,” Milenski recalled of the two sold-out performances. “It was really frustrating. Here is a production that is as realized a theatrical event as can occur really on the face of the Earth. It is world-class and I say that with no modesty whatsoever, it’s a world-class event. Maybe if we had had another performance, we would have sold it. But that was only once the word was out. And the reason we do two (performances) is, you know, it’s not ‘Traviata,’ and just really how big an audience is there for this kind of thing?

“So where does the rest of the money come from?” Milenski asked. “And that’s not taking in administrative expenses.”

Administrative expenses, however, are not that large. Currently, the staff consists of about four people, down from seven in the late ‘80s, with Milenski even serving as company press representative.

Advertising wouldn’t have helped much, Milenski feels, but even so “it’s a moot point, because where on Earth are we going to get the kind of money that can give us the visibility that Music Center Opera or Opera Pacific can have?”

Not that he’s jealous of those companies. “There’s obviously a more limited audience for what we do than what those companies do,” he said. “They’re both the music centers of large metropolitan areas that look to those theaters as their cultural centers. So regardless of the kind of opera that’s going to be done in those places, there’s going to be a much larger audience than we will have here in Long Beach.

“After this last crisis, my wife said to me, ‘Well, you know, it’s your choice. This is what you want.’ I suppose we have an audience crisis because we ask for one.”

* The Long Beach Opera will stage Janacek’s song-cycle “The Diary of One Who Disappeared,” George Crumb’s “Night of the Four Moons” and Britten’s “Les Illuminations” next Sunday at 2 p.m. and May 10 at 8 p.m. at the Center Theater, 300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach. $22-$60. (310) 596-5556.