Charnow2

With all her success, however, she admits that deep down she didn’t feel either acting or singing was where she wanted to end up. “I didn’t really have an operatic voice, but [thought] I would possibly be able to do operetta and have a strong musical theater voice for some of the older musical theater productions.”

“All this time,” Charnow explains, “I was kind of asking, where is all this leading? I was putting shows together, being an actress, starting to direct myself, performing in all these different kinds of things. I wasn’t quite sure how all this was going to come together.” It was during a performance in 1987 while putting on a show with a group at the “Warehouse” outside London that Charnow says the proverbial bolt of lightening struck. “I was in a show with a young British producer . . . and it just occurred to me that I had some shows that I would like to produce on the London stage, and I wondered whether this woman, Alice Sterling, would help me learn how to do it. And it was around this time that I found out what, in fact, I had been preparing for all my life; I was really a producer. It’s what I had been doing all my life, putting on shows, bringing people together, making events happen, making stage performances happen.”

Between the years 1987 and 1995 Carole Charnow, the producer, emerged. “This was a career I could actually pursue,” she says of the decision to move into producing. “I started a company in England called ‘The Moving Target Theater Company’. . . and we produced five or six very important premiers in London.” The company won several awards, performed at the Edinburough Festival and the Old Vic Theater, and even produced a show by Howard Zinn. “His play ‘Emma’ about the life of Emma Goldman” Charnow says, “I produced in London under the title, ‘Rebel in Paradise’. And it was a huge success.”

“I realized that my own personal taste was for new work and for taking risks and uncovering exciting ideas and bringing people together in a new way. . . This is where I really learned to do my craft. I would say they were the most useful preparation years. I would say I really became a producer during that time”, 1987-1995.

Not satisfied that she had achieved all she wanted, Charnow decided to go back to school once again and pursue her Masters in Directing at the University of London. She completed her study in 1995 when a family illness changed her career course, yet again. “I had my second child and my husband was just leaving the BBC as producer/director, when my mother was very ill. And I just thought, you know, this would be a good time, if ever, to come back to the United States and be near my family . . . and we moved to Boston.”

Her first year back she took on a half dozen stage directing jobs in the city, “and realized that, I had made a total of only about four thousand dollars, and that I had to help support my family.” The year was 1996 and a friend who was with the Boston Academy of Music suggested she send her resume over. ‘And lo and behold,” she says, flashing that infectious, broad smile again, “I am still a theater producer, but I produce opera. Now, I think I have figured out who I am. Everything I did up to this point has kind of brought me to this point. I [was] the perfect candidate to be the General Director of an opera company.”

Teamed up with Gil Rose who brings with him the power and depth of the nationally acclaimed Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and a performance hall, the renovated Cutler Majestic, a theater referred to by businessman Ted Cutler, “as a perfect gem, like the inside of a Faberge Egg”, Charnow says she is eager to move Opera Boston into a field not often explored by others, producing new and challenging works. “People said they wanted [a] company that did cutting edge work. So what we decided to do was move forward. We’re not going to be doing Gilbert & Sullivan, and probably not Bel Canto opera, not to say we won’t be doing some of it, but we will be doing more fully staged contemporary work and we will be doing unusual work and some challenging work too. I think,” she says, “that audiences have an appetite for the new, and that one can lead the audience rather than react.”

Charnow says on a personal level should would like to leave a legacy that validates her belief that “one can run a company in a way that is humane and where people have some semblance of say in their involvement in the company. How we work together is very much a part of what I think about – it’s a big part of what I think about. It’s not only what we’re producing on stage [that is important] but how we function together as administrators, artists, technicians.”

“Arts” she says in conclusion, “are the great leveler. They civilize us; they make us whole and give us something to believe in that is somehow greater than ourselves. If I can somehow leave Opera Boston as the embodiment of that, I feel I will have made a small drop in the ocean.”