BethMacleod - Page: 1 of 1

By Paul Joseph Walkowski
OperaOnline.us

Beth MacLeod is an optimist; she has to be.

When you’re the artistic director of a small opera company with little cash reserve, a limited seasonal audience and high production costs associated with staging full scale opera -- and full scale opera is the very thing you want to stage most -- about the only thing you have left to draw on to keep you going and the company afloat in austere times is sheer determination to move forward, regardless of hardships. “He who dares nothing,” the old saying goes, “need hope for nothing.”

Fortunately for Cape opera lovers, Beth MacLeod, a lyric mezzo and director of the South Shore Conservatory Campus in Duxbury, Massachusetts, and founder/artistic director of the South Shore’s “Opera by the Bay,” is one of those people whose personal inventory is rich in determination: determination to keep Cape Cod Opera (CCO) going, to grow its audience and secure enough yearly financing to see to it that the company’s future is financially sound enough to produce quality opera year after year, not just occasionally.

Singing since she was twenty-one when she began her operatic career with Santa Fe Opera, MacLeod is a graduate of the New England Conservatory, the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and the Juilliard Opera Center in New York. She brings to her new position as artistic director of Cape Cod Opera a lengthy history of performance and awards, as well as a successful three year European stint (1996-1999) consisting of over 980 performances of “Phantom of the Opera” in Berlin, Bochum and Hamburg. Of the latter she muses that she was chosen for the cast after the producers decided to stage the show with actual opera singers singing the roles of, well, opera singers. It strikes one as amusing now, but then, it was, if not revolutionary, at least novel – and, as it turns out, a turning point in MacLeod’s career.

After Germany she planned on continuing her operatic career in the United States and even auditioned for a part in the 2003 Cape Cod production of “Die Fledermaus,” an opportunity that had to be put off due to pregnancy. While she lost the opportunity to sing for the company, another opportunity would arise soon thereafter when George Arthur, CCOs former director, decided to leave at the end of the 2005-06 season. MacLeod contacted him and asked if she could meet with the board.

Financially strapped and reeling from high costs of past productions, Cape Cod Opera needed new artistic direction, needed someone with experience to fill the vacancy left by Arthur, and looked for someone with an idea about how to move the company forward. MacLeod saw a company with plenty of promise, but one that suffered a number of shortfalls. “In coming to talk with them [the Board] I said: ‘Why are we doing productions in February on Cape Cod when the only people that are here are the locals?’” Locals are an important part of the audience, she told the Board, but performing only to them is to miss the larger audience that comes during the summer months. When all was said and done the Board must have agreed with what she said because she got the job.

By the time she took over, the company had already planned on staging Gilbert & Sullivan’s “The Mikado,” and the selection couldn’t have worked out better. “I was actually doing Mikado with my other company,” she said, where she “had resources like Richard Conrad,” with whom she credits much of the success of that show. She also had access to a long-time friend Maestro Steven Karidoyanes, Conductor of the Plymouth Philharmonic whom she persuaded to sign on and work with Cape Cod Opera as well.

MacLeod’s first production in August of 2006 was the critically acclaimed and award-winning production of “The Mikado.” Cape Cod Opera had funds already committed to that production; all she had to do was bring it along. “We could pay for the production before it started, which is a wonderful place to be in. We spent what we needed to on the production,” and it went off without a hitch, she said, with an orchestra, albeit a small one.

Now, however, the company is short on cash and she acknowledges that the new season won’t have the glitter of her first effort. “The season is going forward,” she told OperaOnline.us in a phone interview mid-September, “but it is not nearly as ambitious [as last] because when I was hired my job was to make sure that Cape Cod Opera did the best quality they could do and make money to the best of our ability and widen our audience base.”

Fundraising is her first priority now that “The Miklado” is completed. It has to be. The company’s 2004 production of Cavalleria Rusticana/I Pagliacci with an orchestra of twelve, not only took a lot out of the company, according to MacLeod, but set a standard that, while everyone wanted to duplicate it, came up dry when it was unable to meet its goals. “Cav/Pag was a very, very ambitious project,” she said, “but then it wasn’t followed up by anything. They [the company] wanted to do “La Boheme,” but that didn’t happen because they didn’t have the funding.”

When in August of 2005 the company staged Puccini’s “Gianni Schicchi” and Bernstein’s lesser known “Trouble in Tahiti,” the audience had dwindled somewhat, the orchestra was gone [the show went forward with piano accompaniment], and the company was saddled with bills, not the least of which was a $3,000 bill for stage rental. Something had to give. The spirit was willing, MacLeod said, but the company “was unable to take the next step,” even though “Richard Conrad’s production was wonderful.” MacLeod says the problem was planning and vision. “They needed to sell tickets after Cav/Pag. They needed to continue the trajectory they had and they didn’t do that, and the majority of that, I believe, was programming.” She feels the audience wasn’t familiar enough with the two operas chosen to perform.

There’ll be none of that under her watch, she says. Mindful of costs, she’s a realist in her approach to staging opera, very much aware that as much as it costs to produce opera, the company can’t “afford to not produce for a year – and that’s what it looked like was going to happen,” she said, when she took over.

To get costs under control MacLeod decided to go forward with a piano accompaniment for the next two productions: “Hansel & Gretel,” which she says is part of her effort to make opera more audience friendly, scheduling it over three afternoons leading into Thanksgiving, and “The Marriage of Figaro,” which she says is for the pure pleasure of the music. While she wishes she could afford an orchestra, even a small one, that dream will have to wait. “I was hopeful,” she said, “that if I could get three productions in the can, then we could expand, so I’m asking for one year’s time. The laid out plan that we have done is hopeful that we’ll get to the point where next year we can do two out of three productions with an orchestra, but again this increases the production costs by two-hundredfold.”

“It’s a little bit of an uphill battle right now with Cape Cod Opera,” she said, noting that her first year with the company is about reorganization, planning, holding on to what it has and moving forward with a plan based less on hope than money in the bank. “This year is a transition year,” she said, “and I feel in my heart that this is the best course of action for Cape Cod Opera. We have people knocking on doors and they are people who live on the Cape, who have businesses on the Cape, who fit the bill of what Cape Cod Opera is.” Because of this, she said, she feels confident the company will pick up its necessary corporate sponsorships. She sees that as her mission and goal. “In hiring me it was – this is what we have to do. We need to figure how we can bring in more people and guarantee we can go forward. The compromise this year was to put on the highest quality of opera we can do, with the resources we had. The hope is with these three performances, we’ll end up with money in the bank, so that going forward we can produce these high level operas.”

It’s an uphill battle right now, she admits outright, but not a losing battle – not by any means. It’s the difference between being a defeatist and a realist, a disposition, the latter of which, Macleod believes, as being where her feet are firmly planted.