In a Valley theater scene that’s rich in talent and energy but less fortunate in more tangible resources like performance spaces and money, it’s good to see asset-sharing examples of collaboration among folks with complementary goals. Two companies are sharing the Academy of Music stage this weekend, not only performing in semi-repertory but employing a cooperative profit-sharing model.
The shows represent a partnership between a long-established theater troupe and an up-and-coming new opera company. Panopera stages La Bohème Friday and Sunday, sandwiching a Saturday double bill of Eggtooth Productions’ Frankenstein and excerpts from a new opera-in-development, The Masque of the Red Death, for “a weekend of monstrous love.”
Panopera has been developing over the past few years, partly in response to the demise of Commonwealth Opera, which folded under the staggering costs of mounting full-scale grand opera. “We wanted to find a new way of producing opera,” says Alan Schneider, co-founder of the artist-led ensemble.
La Bohème is Puccini’s romantic melodrama of poor-but-exuberant attic-dwelling artists, which also served as the basis for the rock musical Rent. Panopera’s fully staged and costumed production — sung in Italian with abridged English supertitles — features a 40-piece onstage orchestra and, because of that, no set. For Schneider, however, “Trading a set for the full orchestration is a good bargain in my book.”
Frankenstein, Lindel Hart’s original adaptation of Mary Shelley’s metaphysical thriller, was a hit at last summer’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival, following a sold-out premiere in Greenfield the previous year. Linda McInerney, artistic director of Eggtooth (formerly Old Deerfield Productions), says that pairing that show with La Bohème was a practical and fortuitous solution to a scheduling gap. She had offered to help produce Schneider’s show, “and then, when he pointed out that he had a dark night on the Saturday, as a rest for his singers, I jumped on the chance to share Frankenstein.”
Adding The Masque of the Red Death to the Saturday bill was likewise a mixture of practicality and happy coincidence. Frankenstein runs just an hour, not enough to sustain an entire evening; but as it happens, local composer/arranger Jerry Noble is working on an operatic adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s equally gothic tale. Excerpts of the work-in-progress will be performed, with Schneider singing the lead tenor role.
None of the participants in either production are being paid outright, but all are sharing in the profits, if any – an arrangement modeled here in a 2014 production of David Auburn’s Skyscraper at the soon-to-be Northampton Community Arts Trust (full disclosure: I was the director and co-producer). “We are looking at ways to remunerate our wonderful talent without risking the baby, bathwater and bassinet,” McInerney explains. “If we make our nut, everyone wins. And if we don’t, we aren’t in so much danger of closing the doors.”
“Artists pooling their talents and sharing the returns is nothing new,” Schneider adds. “Before the 20th century, it was a very common way of doing show business.” Now, with grants and donations ever-harder to come by, “some other way is needed to get people working together. The big surprise and good news is that there are many established professional artists in our area who are willing, at least for now, to work on that basis for the sake of building something that will help sustain us all.”
La Bohème, Jan. 22 at 7:30, 24 at 2:00, Frankenstein and Masque, Jan. 23 at 7:30, Academy of Music, Northampton. Tickets at aomtheatre.com or (413) 584-9032.
Chris Rohmann is at StageStruck@crocker.com and valleyadvocate.com/author/chris-rohmann
