The Lyric Opera’s new partnership with the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago is, at its core, an acknowledgment that it is no longer viable for even a world-class institution like the Lyric to sustain, maintain, operate and program a huge opera house entirely with productions of the repertory for which it was built.
Thus has the cultural world — in Chicago and far beyond — so drastically changed.
I ran that interpretation of the fascinating news the other day that the Joffrey Ballet intended to decamp for the Lyric in 2020 from the Auditorium Theatre — a devastating decision for the blindsided competing venue — past Anthony Freud, the Lyric’s general director (and president and CEO). He said that the financial factor was “not the starting point,” that he preferred to think of the new partnership as an exciting opportunity for Lyric to “take its place among the great opera houses of the world,” and that the addition to the building of the Joffrey, which, if you include “The Nutcracker,” produces 60 to 70 performances a year, did not, in and of itself, mean the difference between viability and nonviability.
Indeed, the great opera houses in London, Paris, Vienna, San Francisco, Milan and Sydney, among others, already offer their audiences opera and ballet under various shared arrangements (more on that in a moment). And if the Lyric were going to hell in an handbasket (it’s not), the addition of the Joffrey would not be its savior on pointe. So stipulated.
But Freud, a straight shooter, also did not deny some financial realities.
“The days in which we were scheduling and selling out 90 opera performances a season are over,” he said, bluntly. “We now do 60. And there is now more unpredictability and volatility than anyone can remember. We can’t just do what we did 20 years ago and get back to those old cycles and expect the world to catch up. We have to find new ways of being viable and financially strong.”
The Joffrey, of course, is being buffeted by those same forces. Ashley Wheater, the artistic director of the Joffrey, a company long familiar with the near-death experience, told me that its side of the decision revolved around a simple but existential question: “How do we get ourselves to financial stability and remain a creative force in Chicago within a budget that will sustain us into the future?”
Or, to put it another way, how do Wheater and his colleagues deliver the highest caliber of artistic excellence in a world where the cost of everything is going up?
That would imply the Lyric, the landlord here, since it is one of the very few opera companies in the world to own its own theater, made the Joffrey, the tenant, an offer it couldn’t refuse. No one denies that. But it’s not so simple as to be all about rent.
All those years at the Auditorium, its home since 1998, the Joffrey was stuck in the arts equivalence of a turn-key operation. At the beginning of its designated slots of weeks, the ballet would bring in pretty much everything it needed, one production at a time. At the end of those weeks, not only the dancers but the physical production would have to leave to make way for the other renters.
But the Lyric has a massive stagehouse and, since the new arrangement is a true and exclusive partnership across the yearly calendar, the Joffrey will be able to store at least some of its shows at the Lyric, which can fly several productions at once in its massive tower, or even rest them behind what the audience currently is seeing. There can be shared efficiencies among the technical staff. There is a lot of room. Not everything will need to keep moving in and out. That will save a lot of money. Plus the Lyric has a classy in-house bar and restaurant, better proximity to train stations and various other pluses in the prestige and comfort departments.
So what took so long?
There are lot of reasons, but a key concession that Freud made to the Joffrey was allowing the company, in essence, to keep its current performance schedule, meaning that Freud was willing to blow up his own hugely complicated schedule to alternate ballet and opera.
The Joffrey got December (not a prime time for opera) for the crucial “The Nutcracker.” Just as importantly, the Joffrey was not forced into an arrangement that Wheater says he detested when he worked at the San Francisco Ballet — an obligation to stuff the main season into a tight block of consecutive weeks.
That deal means that you have to ask your subscribers to commit to coming, say, every other Tuesday night in March and April, when even the most loyal ballet fans have other things in their lives and prefer to spread their tickets over more of the year. Just like opera fans get to do.
It’s hard to imagine Lyric would have made such a deal in previous eras — wrestling over the scarce commodity known as prime weeks has killed many a plan for shared arts space. But Freud, who is generally regarded as more naturally collaborative than his predecessors, clearly understood Wheater’s central issue (the two men are friends) and he seems to have made it work.
Aside from sharing space and matters of rent, the new deal also offers some interesting new opportunities for cross-polination of audience. Ballet and opera may share the bill at many opera houses and both be rooted in classical music, but their audiences actually are more distinct than you might think. A good portion of the Joffrey audience, especially at “The Nutcracker,” will never have walked through the door of the Lyric in their lives. Freud will get the chance to see if they come back for more than ballet. The Joffrey will get the same.
Which brings us to the Auditorium — the clear loser in this deal.
I talked to Tania Castroverde Moskalenko, who arrived in Chicago just a year ago as the CEO of the venue, which is controlled by Roosevelt University, which has had financial problems of its own. Moskalenko did her best not to sound too miffed that she was given no early word of Joffrey’s intent to depart. She had, she said, heard “some rumors” in the spring, but nothing formal had been said and there had, therefore, been no opportunity to make a counteroffer to prevent the ending of what by then will have been a 22-year partnership.
As you might expect, Moskalenko de-emphasized the centrality of the Joffrey to the Auditorium. “They have been an important part of the Auditorium for 22 years,” she said, “but they are just a part of what we do.”
That’s true. The Auditorium has an international dance series, a speaker series, a rental business for corporate meetings, and other private and public events, and, for example, it now bills itself as the Chicago home of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. But Alvin Ailey has five nights scheduled for 2018. That is a mere fraction of the Joffrey business. The Auditorium will have a big hole from 2020 onward. Its fixed costs, however, will abide.
For much of the 1990s, you might recall, the Auditorium hosted multiyear runs of shows like “Miss Saigon,” “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Les Miserables.” But anything like that it chooses to do now will have to be in partnership with Broadway in Chicago, the dominant, for-profit landlord and Broadway presenter in the Loop. Prior to Moskalenko’s arrival, the Auditorium signed a multiyear noncompete deal with Broadway in Chicago. The venue on Congress Parkway will not be doing deals directly with producers.
That deal resulted in Broadway in Chicago presenting some shows at the Auditorium, but it has the incentive to do so only when its own theaters are full. Why pay rent when you can fill a space you either own or for which you hold the lease?
Moskalenko said that she plans to take a look at that commitment in the light of the new reality, and she also argued that working with Broadway in Chicago might be easier now, since there is more room on the calendar — December, for sure, looks open. Fair enough.
But the tricky thing there is that the Broadway business operates mostly on the principle of space being available for as long as the show can sell tickets. You could imagine, for example, the upcoming “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” selling every seat in the massive Auditorium for months or even years. But Harry Potter won’t vacate for Alvin Ailey, take away its stage set, and then come back. That’s not the way it works. Not usually, anyway. That will all have to be thought out. Rock and pop are other options, but that is a very competitive business in Chicago.
I asked Freud if he felt any responsibility for the health of what is, after all, a fellow Chicago opera house. He replied that it was not as if the Joffrey had bolted without notice. Nothing is changing until 2020. “I think a three-year notice period is more than reasonable,” Freud said.
And it is hard to argue with that.
The Lyric and Joffrey timed their announcement very shrewdly — right before the opening of their magnificent collaboration on “Orphee et Eurydice,” a joint endeavor wherein the Joffrey dancers spectacularly animated the operatic form. The opera chorus sung, of course, but they were off the stage. The audience’s eyes saw the principals, and the corps de ballet.
Working on that piece, which was in gestation for several years, clearly had led Freud and Wheater more closely together. It was impossible to watch it and not visualize future fusions. This particular version of Gluck’s “Orphee et Eurydice” has an unusual amount of instrumental music for an opera, and it was always designed to have dancers front and center. But it’s hardly the only opera with dance, and who’s to say that someone might not write such a piece?
Who’s to say the Joffrey and the Lyric could not co-commision such a work?
Those are tantalizing prospects and, asked to discuss them, Wheater pointed out that the late Robert Joffrey, the co-founder of the company, had always rejected the idea of uniformity of body type, preferring to have a broader spectrum of dancers, whom he asked to dig more deeply into emotional revelation and never rest merely on technique. This is why Joffrey dancers always have seemed to me like better actors than you find in peer companies. Which is ideal for this new partnership.
Freud said that there were no current plans for other artistic collaborations; I had the sense he did not want to imply to his patrons that, after 2020, they’ll constantly be watching some kind of post-modern dance-opera fusion-tinkering, reducing the beloved operatic discipline to experimentation.
But when great artists keep running into each other in the halls, day in and day out, ideas for all kinds of partnerships have a way of gestating. That’s good for the city (except for the Auditorium Theatre, at least).
Going it together is not only cheaper than going it alone, it usually turns out to be more interesting.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
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