A Big-Screen Test for Opera
Simulcasting Has Put A Song in the Hearts of Met Execs. Others Are Holding Their Applause.

By Anne Midgette
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 24, 2008

When "The Daughter of the Regiment," one of the Metropolitan Opera's most-anticipated premieres this season, comes live to a movie house near you on Saturday, it's a good bet that the theater will be mobbed. Met General Manager Peter Gelb's vision for high-definition cinema transmissions of operas has proved so successful after two seasons that the company is adding more of them every year: 11 have just been announced for 2008-09. And other opera companies are scrambling to catch up.

This spring, productions from the San Francisco Opera, La Scala in Milan and London's Royal Opera House began appearing in North American movie theaters. But the response has not been quite the same. On April 5, 170,000 people around the world saw the Met's "La Bohème." A week later, however, when a taped performance of the San Francisco Opera's "Don Giovanni" played in selected theaters around the country, the Pavilion Park Slope movie house in Brooklyn had all of 13 people in the audience.

David Gockley, the general director of the San Francisco Opera, was despondent at the low turnout. "We have had considerably less success than I had hoped for," he said. "We were, I think, too optimistic in what we could do right out of the box."

You might think that the commercial distributor of the San Francisco Opera's moviecasts, a company called the Bigger Picture, would be even more disappointed. But you would be wrong.

"We feel really good about the results," said Michele Martell, the Bigger Picture's chief operating officer. With each successive San Francisco moviecast, attendance has gone up 20 percent or more at each theater, she said. Compared with the Met, this may be low, but at "underutilized time periods," Martell says, "the theater owners are thrilled if they get 90 people. That's more than they have in all their other theaters combined."

In fact, the Bigger Picture is looking to expand its opera offerings next season. The company is not even sure that San Francisco can keep up with demand. "We're looking at operas from other organizations" as well, Martell says. "I was amazed at how many opera companies there are in Europe."

Few opera company administrators ever dreamed that their art form, so often described as marginalized and old-fashioned, would be poised to play a role on the cutting edge of commercial technology. For what's happening here goes beyond the Met's success. It is about a new model for media distribution in today's fragmented, digital landscape. In the age of myriad cable TV channels and self-produced CDs, the hope of the future appears to lie in niche marketing rather than blockbuster sales. In the movie industry, a new kind of company has sprung up to explore the market for what is called "alternative content" -- anything from indie films to concerts ("U2 in 3D") to live sporting events. And opera is proving to be a sizable niche.

The Bigger Picture, Martell says, looks for "content that comes with a built-in affinity audience, a group of enthusiasts that already like what you're bringing them."

"Opera," she adds, "is something we had targeted even before the Met had started."

For opera lovers, this is a bonanza. Although the La Scala and San Francisco broadcasts have yet to make it to the District, Washington residents can see both 25 miles away at Arundel Mills Mall in Hanover, Md. (where La Scala's "Maria Stuarda" plays on April 30). Closer to home, the E Street Cinema will screen Plácido Domingo's 40th anniversary concert from Los Angeles on May 11. And you can see "The Daughter of the Regiment" this weekend in Arlington, Alexandria, Fairfax, Merrifield or McLean.

For opera companies, the payoff is not so clear. The emerging distribution model involves unusual alliances between not-for-profit organizations and the world of commerce. The most extreme example is London's Royal Opera House, which operates with British government subsidies but last year purchased the commercial production company Opus Arte. "We as an organization are having to rethink our whole way of working," says Christopher Millard of the Royal Opera House, which in its new role as "content provider" is filming productions throughout the season.

It remains to be seen how much opera the market will bear. (Is the opera public really craving three versions of Puccini's "La Rondine," which was screened in a San Francisco production in March, is coming to movie theaters in Baltimore and elsewhere in a production from Venice in June, and is due as a Met high-definition simulcast in January 2009?) So, companies investing heavily to get in on the ground floor -- both the Royal Opera House and San Francisco have installed in-house production facilities -- are reconfiguring their business models while figuring out exactly what it is they hope to accomplish with all the extra work.

Funding is still a major question. Gockley estimates the cost of each San Francisco moviecast at about $250,000. The Met's pricier live transmissions cost around $1 million. Within the field, there are murmurs that Gelb has gone out on a limb financially, relying heavily on his patrons -- such as Mercedes Bass, who gave the company $25 million in 2006 -- to create initiatives that cannot continue if the donations dry up.

"I'm dubious," says Kenneth Feinberg, president of the board of trustees at the Washington National Opera, who learned the costs of simulcasting firsthand when the company last fall broadcast "La Bohème" not only to the Mall (at a cost of about $350,000) but also to 32 high schools and colleges across the country (an additional $650,000). Washington is not planning to repeat the experiment this season, and Feinberg asks, "Is it sustainable?"

Gelb says it is. Called "a magician" by admiring members of his board, Gelb sat in his office on a recent afternoon, surrounded by contemporary art created around Met productions -- another initiative -- and made questions disappear. One source of speculation has been the cost to the Met of the house's pioneering electronic media agreement with the musicians' union, which is what made the HD transmissions even possible. Gelb said it came to a single six-figure payment -- he declined to be more specific -- for the season; that sum is not included in the $1 million-per-transmission cost estimate.

And while production costs are high, there is no additional cost to get product into the movie theaters once the system is up and running. The standard distribution deal involves a split of the box office gross. The Met's share is 50 percent of each $22 ticket. If 170,000 people saw "La Bohème," and half that number saw "Peter Grimes," "you do the math," Gelb says. Even factoring in the additional payment to the union, the company covered its costs.

The distributors of "alternative content" don't even need numbers as high as Gelb's to see an advantage. The San Francisco and La Scala moviecasts are in fewer theaters and don't have the built-in advertising the Met gets from its weekly radio broadcasts, which reach 2.5 million people. Emerging Pictures, La Scala's distributor, has gotten aggregate audiences of around 15,000 for individual broadcasts. "We're very happy," says Giovanni Cozzi, the president of Emerging Pictures. "We're making money. I'm ecstatic about it."

Another reason for the lower draw is that the La Scala and San Francisco broadcasts are taped rather than live. But distributors actually see this as an advantage, since it offers theater owners the freedom to schedule performances when they want. In fact, that is one of the whole ideas behind the "alternative content" concept.

"It's been a Holy Grail as to what you do with the theater during the five days of the week when it's not peak time," says Patrick Corcoran, director of media and research for the National Association of Theater Owners. "Almost anything you bring in is added value to the movie theater." Ballet is the next frontier: Both Emerging Pictures and the Royal Opera/Opus Arte group (which is already broadcasting to Canada, and is about to add screens in the United States) are focusing heavily on dance as well as opera.

While the goal of the commercial distributors is obvious -- to make money -- the goal of opera houses in this new venture appears less certain. Although the HD cinecasts may appear to be a potential revenue stream for a nonprofit organization -- "Some members of my board think this is a financial answer," Gelb says -- the Met general manager warns against seeing them as more than "a self-sustaining marketing tool."

"The purpose is not so that the Met can diversify," he says. "It is designed to create greater interest in the Met itself."

There is also a vague idea that movie-theater transmissions serve as outreach to new audiences, playing a function similar to live opera transmissions on outdoor screens in Times Square or the National Mall. For its own experiment with simulcasts, the WNO went to schools, free of charge, rather than a paying audience; next season, the Met is expanding its own free pilot program to New York City schools to a national level. But the anecdotal evidence suggests that a majority of the paying audience are already opera fans -- exactly the audience the commercial distributors hope to target, even as the opera companies dream of tilling new ground.

The fusion of opera and commercial enterprise may require a kind of rethinking of the genre that not everyone is qualified to undertake. (Gelb's sound understanding of the media business is perhaps unique.) Not all content is created equal; not every production deserves to be captured for the screen; and the requirements of opera will never exactly coincide with those of film, which can transmit an exciting, up-close perspective, but never, quite, the visceral thrill of live voices singing in the same room as the audience.

Every opera administrator, of course, is watching the simulcast trend with considerable interest -- although not every one is ready to jump on the bandwagon. In Washington, Mark Weinstein, the opera's new executive director, says that while efforts are underway to raise money for another Mall simulcast this season, he is delaying plans for any kind of expanded simulcast.

"I've been a technology follower," he says. "The first people in the market -- the Met, San Francisco -- they're spending a fortune on inventing this stuff. I'm waiting until the price falls to something very inexpensive. Then I will thank Peter Gelb and others for showing me how to do it for less than one-tenth of what it's costing them."