No opera at Cinnabar in 2018 for only second time since 1973

This June, Petaluma’s venerable Cinnabar Theater will stage Ruggero Leoncavallo’s legendary 1892 opera “Pagliacci” - a tragedy about a jealous clown and his unfaithful actress wife - marking the first time the company has performed the piece since 2006.

It will also mark the final opera at Cinnabar for the foreseeable future.

In announcing the company’s 2017/2018 season (see sidebar), Artistic Director Elly Lichenstein explained the conspicuous absence of an opera - for only the second time since the company’s founding in 1973 - as being a sad economic necessity.

It’s a necessity, she hopes, which will only last a season or two.

The last time Cinnabar was forced to cancel its annual opera was in 2011, when post-9/11 jitters were keeping audiences at home, a problem that exacerbated a serious financial crisis following the loss of tens of thousands of Petaluma TOT funds (Transient Occupancy Taxes).

“We came very close to losing everything that year,” Lichenstein recalled. “So we reorganized our schedule and left out the opera we’d been planning to do.”

This time, the reason for not scheduling an opera is once again financial.

“Opera is very expensive to produce,” Lichenstein said. “For our space, you need a crack orchestra of no fewer than 11 players. You need to hire singers from all over the Bay Area and beyond.”

Cinnabar, founded in the early ’70s by the late Marvin Klebe and his wife Jan, produced its first opera in 1973, and quickly established a stellar artistic reputation, firmly grounded in the company’s mission of staging intimate chamber-productions of the world’s greatest operas, always performed in English to make them as accessible as possible. Klebe, an acclaimed opera singer from San Francisco, always envisioned Cinnabar as a place where opera would thrive alongside new works, classic plays and musicals, and world premieres of all kinds. Over the years, the little company has produced more than fifty operas, everything from classics such as last year’s “Carmen” and favorites like “The Marriage of Figaro,” “Falstaff,” and “La Traviata” to newer works like Conrad Susa’s 1973 “Transformations” and Tobias Picker’s 1996 “Emmeline.”

Of course, theater of any kind is expensive to produce, Lichenstein points out.

For its upcoming season, the company expects to spend between $22,000 (to produce the play “Good People”) to $53,000 (for the musical “Man of La Mancha”).

Producing an opera can often cost much, much more.

Professional opera singers being in high demand around the country, Cinnabar routinely has to fly performers in from Idaho, Maryland, Boston, New Jersey, New York City, and Detroit. For this year’s “Pagliacci,” the company will bring in a singer from Portland, Oregon.

“When they come from out of state,” Lichenstein explained, “you have to put them up somewhere, and find transportation for them. When they come from the Bay Area, they have increasingly problematic issues with travel. These days, it can take them up to three hours just to get to a rehearsal from the Sunset District in San Francisco. This means it’s become increasingly difficult to lure the right voices up from an area we’ve always relied on, compensation aside.“

In addition to the rising costs of presenting opera, Cinnabar is once again facing a sharp drop in anticipated contributed income.

“We are always affected by changes in the social and political climate, an ever-aging population of theater-goers and opera-goers, and serious decreases in foundation funding,” said Lichenstein. “We lost our only foundation that supports opera specifically, when the Getty Foundation decided to put its assets into the hands of a national agency that has budget requirements we can’t even touch. And of course, the fact that we’ve never recovered from the total loss of City funding and deep County funding cuts.”

All of this has led Lichenstein and company to make a decision they’d thought would never have to be made again.

“Opera has never paid for itself,” she admitted, calling Cinnabar’s commitment to Opera more of a labor of love, and of legacy, than a financial imperative. “That’s not to say we’ve completely abandoned opera, but only that we’ll take the coming year off to recoup. It would be just the thing if a few patrons who could afford it would step up to the plate. We hope there will be those who feel the need to back Cinnabar’s opera program.”

Lichenstein added that, should such a thing happen, should some individual patron or organization agree to underwrite the costs of another production like “Paggliaci,” then perhaps opera will return to Cinnabar sooner than later. Till then, Lichenstein says she’s just focusing on making “Paggliaci” as truly memorable as it can be.

“We really thought we would never again abandon the opera program, even for one season,” she said. “Sometimes though, reality intervenes.”

(Contact David at david.templeton@argus-courier.com)