Charnow

By: Paul Joseph Walkowski
OperaOnline.us

The offices of Opera Boston, formerly the Boston Academy of Music, are situated on the 3rd floor of 25 Kingston Street, right next to Peking Tom’s Chinese Restaurant, behind Macy’s, a short walk from the Downtown Crossing section of Boston. The offices are out of public view: no signage outside, no banners heralding this as the operation center of one of Boston’s two active opera companies, no fancy nameplate on the door. Modest comes to mind – very modest. Indeed, the company doesn’t even rent the space it occupies but rather sub-lets it. Inside, there are three or four small offices, two or three common work areas, a conference room, and lots of paper and boxes. It’s not a ‘work in progress’ so much as an office with plenty telltale signs of the progress of its work.

Carole Charnow, General Director, comes out to greet me, limping slightly, with cane in hand and a broad smile on her face. She is recovering from a hip replacement operation -- and she’s a young woman. I ask her about her hip and complain about my bad knees. We both dread any more surgery. Friendly and gregarious she immediately puts one at ease with her relaxed, self-confident manner. “Would you like a tour?” she asks before leading me to her office, adding parenthetically that it probably isn’t what I expected. I smile.

Home to three full-time and two part-time employees, Opera Boston is a typical small business operation, a fact that Charnow both laments and applauds. “We have such a small staff,” she says “that’s one of our biggest problems. We have no ‘person power’. On the good side,” she adds quickly, “we have very low overhead, so the people who contribute to the company can feel satisfied that what they’re looking at on stage is where their funds are going.”

When you see the quality of work Opera Boston produces, you realize two things immediately: first, that the small staff must be well-coordinated, because its productions in the Cutler Majestic Theater on Tremont Street have the look and feel of big time opera; and secondly, that its General Director must be one heck of an organizer to put it all together on a $1.3 million yearly budget. And that is the story we have to tell here. Carole Charnow says she didn’t plan a career in opera by design, but rather came upon it: the fact is, she’s a natural, and when you get to know her story, you sense early on that she was born for the role she now plays.

“From the earliest days,” she says of her childhood, “I can remember I was producing shows in my back yard. I think the earliest shows I put together,” she recalls, “were with my sister. We were seven and five.” You can’t do much at that age, but one thing Charnow recalls vividly is that the shows she and her sister produced were always big productions. “I would be organizing the scenic design and lighting and everything and, of course, at the time I had no idea what I was doing. I just seem to have had this compulsion to put on little shows for the very large audience of two – my mother and dad.”

Her interest in performing and producing theater remained through her high school years at Southfield High School in Michigan. “I started working and auditioning for school plays and found myself getting involved back stage, figuring out how this all gets planned.” She clearly didn’t realize then that her interest in organizing would one day be identified as her greatest strength. And this indecision was reflected in the path her life followed. After high school she attended Michigan State to study drama for a year, but dropped out to “find myself”. It was 1971.

The mid-seventies saw Charnow working various jobs; she even became a chef for a while, but inside, she says, she never gave up on the idea that one day she’d be involved with theater again. By 1976 she decided to head back to school, complete her degree program and begin to pursue that illusive career. She moved to Boston, attended Emerson College where she received her degree in drama in 1979, and for a while taught and put her talents to use working with ‘at risk’ youth in the Newton school system. “I used to meet them after school,” she recalls, “and we would devise plays around some of the issues that they were dealing with, and then we’d tour to various community and school groups.”

But even this left her empty. By 1981 she says she knew she was at a crossroads in her life. She had formed a small company, was awarded a couple contracts from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Department of Mental Health to continue her programs and experimental theater with youth, but still wasn’t sure how she wanted to make her living. “I felt there was one obstacle in the way of me really knowing and that was kind of the underlying ambition to perform, which had sort of been a thread throughout my entire early years.” She realized, she says, that it was not teaching but performing that interested her most. “I always flirted with the idea of being on stage, but I lacked the confidence. So I thought maybe what I’ll do is bite the bullet and really make a go at being a performer and see where it takes me.”

It turned out to be the right decision, ironically, not because it steered her onto a lifetime path of acting, although she did achieve a moderately successful career in this regard, but rather because it opened her eyes and made her realize that her heart was really on the other end of the business – producing. But her acting experience was a necessary first step on the road to that end. And it was an interesting career. She went to London in 1981, applied for and was accepted into Weber-Douglas Academy where she studied Shakespeare and loved the experience so much she says that, “I ended up living there for fifteen years.” It was there that she met her husband, a young assistant stage director by the name of Clive Grainger, and had her two children. During this period, she says, she “did everything from arts administration to being an arts consultant. I was an Equity member and performer for many years.” Indeed, the early eighties were good years -- and becoming a member of Equity turned out to be a turning point. “I right away got several films, which I probably shouldn’t mention. But they paid substantial amounts of money and enabled me to get myself an apartment and agent and photographs to build up my resume.”

She worked in the mediums of television (got a major role in a BBC production, a drama-documentary on the daughter of American painter Thomas Roscoe), movies (worked in a number of Pinewood Studio films because the trend in those days was to cast American actors in American roles – “and there was a lot of work”) and she was singing, even went on to study classical singing, music theory, piano, Italian, German and French at the Royal Academy of Music, gaining enough experience to teach classical singing privately. ”I was working quite a lot and earning a pretty good whack of money as an actress.”