Forbidden Broadway

Terry Teachout, our champion blogger, wondered the other day about artistic musicals. Why don't they just bill themselves as operas? Terry quoted something he wrote in The New York Times a while ago about Michael John La Chiusa's musical Marie Christine (which, he says, failed in its Broadway run): "Had ‘Marie Christine’ been billed as ‘a new opera’ and produced by, say, Glimmerglass Opera, it would have drawn a different, more adventurous kind of audience, one better prepared to grapple with its challenging blend of pop-flavored rhythms and prickly harmonies."

Well, maybe. La Chiusa did try out a later piece a year ago in the same New York City Opera showcase that did a piece of mine in May. But as an opera composer myself, I can give some wry and melancholy reasons why I might be better off on Broadway:

1. I'd get produced faster. If a major opera company decided to produce a work of mine, they plan so far ahead that they'd probably be talking about some date in 2007. But if someone were producing me in the musical theater world, on or off Broadway (or outside New York), I'll bet I'd get on stage much sooner.

2. I'd get more performances. Marie Christine (or so I learn from the Internet Theatre Database) had 40 previews and 44 performances. Not much by Broadway standards, maybe, but for an opera composer that would be just breathtaking. Bright Sheng's Madame Mao, a major new opera premiering right about now in Santa Fe, will get performed just four times.

3. I might make more money. Or at least I might not lose as much. Though, to be honest, I don't know a lot about the financial arrangements in musical theater, and poor La Chiusa, Terry says, had to pawn his piano. But the financing for opera composers can be ghastly. One composer I know -- negotiating with two major American opera companies about a premiere -- was asked to raise $100,000 toward the cost of the production. That's right; they were asking him to pay for part of it himself. And one unspeakable expense will always be the cost of copying and printing musical materials (more than 20 vocal scores for the singers and production staff, a hefty full orchestral score for the conductor, and 40 to 80 separate parts for the musicians in the orchestra). Opera composers have been known to face a painful choice. They can do the copying themselves, which even with music notation software can take months of full-time work (I'll show you the scars on my own typing fingers). Or they can use their entire commission fee -- the amount they're paid to write the piece -- to pay a professional copyist. Assuming their fee is large enough, of course. (And one thing I do know about musical theater: Because the orchestras are smaller than an opera orchestra, the copying and printing costs are smaller, too.)

4. I might get a better audience. Terry says, and of course he's right, that "Broadway today is about ‘Beauty and the Beast’ and ‘Footloose,’ not complex scores that demand your full attention at all times." So complex music might get a better hearing in an opera house. (After you've paid for the orchestra parts.) But what about complex theater? Opera audiences are notably conventional. So are Broadway audiences. But maybe the small part of the Broadway audience that bought tickets for those 44 performances of Marie Christine would be more thoughtful than the people who showed up for the five performances this year of Mark Adamo's Little Women at the New York City Opera. (Some of whom wouldn't specially intend to see it; instead, they'd be subscribers, who found themselves at Little Women as part of their subscription package. I could add that if a new piece were produced off-Broadway -- or, like Philip Glass's latest opera, at a regional theater, maybe the audience would be more thoughtful still.)

5. I might get a better production. Opera singers are good at operatic singing, and if that's what I want -- along with the grand surge of an operatic orchestra -- I'd better get my work produced in an opera house. But if what I want is good theater, maybe I'd be better off elsewhere. I used to write a lot of incidental music for plays and was delighted with how quickly actors got to the heart of any music they were involved in. They went straight for what the music meant, something that, in my experience, happens much more slowly in opera, and sometimes might not happen at all. I loved La Bohème on Broadway. I'd never seen all the moments of the drama -- every change of mood, all the shifting of relationships -- so vividly realized (or, most of them, realized in any way at all). When I write an opera, I'm creating theatrical moments. Sure, I love to write surging vocal lines, but what I work hardest on are the shifts in feeling, the precise weight and flow of character and mood. To get those realized, I might happily sacrifice (if I had the choice) the richness of operatic orchestration and singing. Shortly after Bohème premiered on Broadway, I was talking to a well-known composer who'd loved it as much as I had. He'd been commissioned by a big American opera company, and had just been told that the company was backing out -- his project, he says they told him, required costumes that would be too expensive. His reaction was something like, "Who needs them? Maybe I can take my piece to Broadway, and get it produced much better than it would have been."

The other person's half-empty glass can easily seem half full…