SUCCESS IN EXCESS

By Martha Duffy

In wan times for the performing arts, last year's jolt of good news was spectacular. The National Endowment for the Arts released figures indicating that the number of 18-to-24-year-olds attending opera performances increased 18% in the decade 1982 to 1992 (although this population group decreased 16% during that period). That age range--the students and young wage earners--is the group that all the arts covet, the audience that can be counted on for decades to come. The country's symphony orchestras are trying hard for the kids too, but so far have come up short. How has opera done it?

The time has long since passed to joke about fat sopranos and plush sets. Most singers, especially younger ones, are shapely; they move gracefully and can communicate emotion more artfully than the old clutch-heart-wave-arms school. But a strong reason for opera's youthful revival lies in those things that made the art form a late-night TV joke: its extravagant, overblown quality; its casts of hundreds; its love of magic. "It's the right time for spectacle," says Harvey Lichtenstein, president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. "There are times when people want minimal and spare, but this isn't one of them." Says Marc Scorca, president of Opera America, a nonprofit trade association: "There is a natural resonance between our multimedia art form and the multimedia world."

Accustomed to taking in a lot of sensory input at once, young audiences can process the elements of music, words, design, theater and dance that grand opera calls for. "Most videos have story lines, no matter how primitive," says Lotfi Mansouri, general director of the San Francisco Opera, "and it is carried through song and dance. Opera has become very sensitive to the fact that it is music theater." His company proved that resoundingly with a three-week run last June of Mark Lamos' presentation of La Boheme--eight shows a week, with four casts, in an all-out Broadway-style staging. Puccini was SRO.

La Boheme, an almost perfect chamber-theater piece about young, penniless Parisians during the scourge of tuberculosis, is a symbol of the new enthusiasm for opera. Broadway's megahit Rent is a rock version of it. Indeed, the '90s have seen several updatings, with the artists' district of SoHo a favorite setting.

Another boon has been the use of supertitles, which is almost universal. The wonder is that they took so long to get established. (One factor may have been the aversion of the Metropolitan Opera, the country's dominant house. Last year the Met finally installed dialogue translations, and now sings the process's praises.) Speight Jenkins, general director of the Seattle Opera, is emphatic on the subject: "Opera has been a battle between text and music. People who say they knew librettos and didn't need titles are just whistling Dixie. Until the words and the music are synonymous, the words do not have the meaning."

Managers still consider the old standbys like Boheme, Madama Butterfly and Carmen their main box-office props, but they are learning that taking chances pays off. For one thing, companies are looking further back than the 19th century, to the Baroque period. Young people flock to see works by Lully and Rameau. The BAM's Lichtenstein believes there is a real similarity between those earlier rhythms and the rock beat.

But mostly the shift is away from traditional swashbuckle and toward more contemporary themes. Metropolitan Opera general manager Joseph Volpe notes that last year's stagings of Philip Glass's minimalist opera The Voyage didn't sell out, but he saw a whole new crowd in his theater. Increasingly, composers are turning to emotionally charged contemporary subjects. Stewart Wallace's Harvey Milk is considered a forerunner of a new creative order. On the drawing boards are works about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis by Michael Daugherty, and John Duffy's Black Water, about Chappaquiddick.

Operas like these may give the art form new relevance to young audiences, but there are less weighty ways to attract them. Almost every house has a group or club aimed at the under-30 crowd. When Robert B. Driver took over as general director of the Opera Company of Philadelphia five years ago, he began to woo young professionals. Presto!--a brand new event called the Puccini-tini, a martini-tasting bash. A Junior Guild, for people under 35, offers a package of dinners and discounts plus a chance to try out as a spear carrier in Aida. It may sound corny, but it works: in the 1990-91 season the Philadelphia had 3,099 subscribers; today the number is 7,190. The Seattle Opera takes a more radical approach, giving its young group members a discount on tickets--but the percentage of discount goes down every year. Seattle is not afraid to ask for a commitment.

Incentives can get a young audience into an opera house, but what will keep it there? American opera director Francesca Zambello, who has worked in innovative houses like Houston, Seattle and Los Angeles, agrees that spectacle has boosted opera's pulling power, but she rejects the TV comparison. "Young people are craving something beyond television sensibility," she says. "We need myth and large-scale emotions--dramas that present magnetic qualities. I think we want something we can't get in our own lives. The three tenors succeed because they are larger than our world."

It might appear that the great symphonic works would lift the spirit profoundly as well, but symphonic organizations have not been as successful in refreshing their audiences. Deborah Borda, executive director of the New York Philharmonic, is lucky to have as maestro Kurt Masur, who works tirelessly to pull in kids and young people. He is backed up by flexible formats, moderate prices and gimmicks like rush-hour concerts. But, Borda says, sighing: "we don't have wigs and makeup onstage, nor the emergence of such megastars as Pavarotti. People of that nature really broke down barriers and created accessibility."

Increasingly, orchestra lovers stay home listening to the perfections of their audio systems--without hearing coughs, Dick Tracy watches, the bungled notes. Says Mark Lamos: "The home-entertainment experience is replacing the live-music experience in a concert hall. In opera you are operating on many more levels than pure sound. You need to be there. It is like a contact sport."

Or, to borrow the three tenors' war cry, "Vinceeeeeero!"

--Reported by Margaret Feldstein and Daniel S. Levy/New York

With reporting by MARGARET FELDSTEIN AND DANIEL S. LEVY/NEW YORK