On the heels of the demise of the nonprofit that was trying to plan for a big celebration in Balboa Park in 2015, San Diego’s cultural community took another blow Wednesday with the news that the San Diego Opera would finish the year and be done forever.

The company will put on the rest of its performances for 2014. The board had only one dissenting vote in the decision to shut down after this year. The general and artistic director, Ian Campbell, would not say who it was.

Campbell told me that he and the board of directors were watching with increasing fear over the last couple of years and that they decided they would not ethically be able to take money for tickets for the 2015 season knowing that they were likely to run out of money.

“It’s not a case of overspending or being profligate. It’s the revenue side, which was the issue,” Campbell said.

Campbell said they were “losing to death many of our strongest supporters.” And he said other cultural institutions in town should also think about what will happen as their donors get older.

“I do have a concern that we’re losing many supporters as they age and if you look at the programs of the opera, symphony, Playhouse, Old Globe, many of the same names are listed. This should be a wake-up call,” Campbell said.

There seemed to be a lot of people wondering why the Opera didn’t alert the community to this and whether there was a donor or several who could have come through.

“All of the people you’re thinking of were asked,” Campbell said.

I asked Bill Stensrud, a former member of the board of the Opera and of Voice of San Diego, what he thought of the news. He was a major donor and is an aficionado of classical music and opera.

“Grand opera costs too much to produce on a regional scale,” Stensrud wrote to me in an email. “The markets will not support it and no entity downsizes well.”

Then he added a vision of the future of opera. He said it’s in offerings like Loft Operain New York, a group of young artists who stage opera-infused performances in lofts and other new spaces.

“Their performances are exciting, low-cost and I have been the oldest person in the place every time I have gone.  This is a sustainable model,” Stensrud wrote.

Campbell really wanted people to know that the shows for this year are going on. He’s most worried, he said, about his staff.

“This whole thing is upsetting and frightening for everyone. If anyone is looking for good not-for-profit staff, we’ve got them,” Campbell said.

The Opera’s most recent financial report is here. Campbell said last year’s budget was $17.4 million and this year would come in under $15 million.

The L train was out-of-order and the night was freezing, but that didn’t stop a crowd from packing into a Bushwick warehouse earlier this month for the last weekend of Puccini’s La Bohème, staged by the Brooklyn-based LoftOpera.

Larisa Martinez as Musetta in LoftOpera’s “La Bohème” (click to enlarge)


Started in 2013 by Daniel Ellis-Ferris and Brianna Maury, the organization is aiming to bring opera to a community that might not ordinarily engage with the art form, which in its usual venues can seem untouchable, distant, and stuffy. LoftOpera also gives young performers a place to perform, and get paid.

“There were interesting shows happening in the Brooklyn loft music space, but opera was noticeably missing,” Ellis-Ferris said in an interview with Grey magazine. “Many of my opera singer friends told me that there were limited opportunities for young people to sing in the city.”

LoftOpera dedicated their first year to Mozart, tackling Don Giovanni last May and staging the Marriage of Figaro in Gowanus in November. La Bohème, the classic drama of artists attempting to survive in 1830s Paris, was transferred to a Brooklyn setting, its libretto slimmed down a bit, and its usually elaborate stagings left behind for benches on three sides of the 1896 warehouse off the Jefferson stop, the subtitles projected onto one of the worn brick walls. It wasn’t a total modernization, though; the music was still the enthralling emotional arias, and a full orchestra filled the broad space with layers of sound that you don’t ordinarily get from the cheap seats in the family circle of Lincoln Center (tickets were an affordable $20, and sold out).

I first heard about LoftOpera when a colleague mentioned that it had been popping up on her Instagram feed. Curious, I looked it up, and it turns out to be exactly what it sounds like: Operas staged in Brooklynloft spaces. The company grew out of a community of music students, and has mounted three productions since May 2013. On Saturday, I went to the closing night of its most recent show, La bohème, held in an Ingraham Street warehouse near the Jefferson L stop. Here's what I learned:  

La bohème belongs in Bushwick
It's perfect. After all, the story—about a group of young, broke artists living and loving in 1830s Paris—inspired the musical Rent. The warehouse location didn't just lend underground cred to the proceedings, it was exactly the right contemporary setting for Puccini's bohemian tale. Other small 2014 updates—including four-letter expletives and a Lower East Side shout-out—helped localize the already relatable theme of trying to make it in the big city.

Opera audiences aren't snooty
Despite the complete outage of the L train, it was a full house, and people had to be turned away at the door. Uptowners arrived via MTA shuttle bus, respectable-looking middle-aged audience members rolled up their coats and sat on the floor, and during intermission, an elderly couple with a cane waited stoically in line for the Porta-Potty without so much as a peep about standing in the cold on an industrial Brooklyn block.

Opera might be getting cool
Currently, LoftOpera has cultural cachet: It's young, it has an underground flavor, it operates outside the highbrow establishment, and it's cheap enough ($20 tickets, $5 drinks) to entice an audience that the Met doesn't. Each production's run is short and increasingly buzzed-about, and we're told more are in the works. So keep an eye on LoftOpera's website—this is the thing you want to go to before your friends have heard about it.