Arts and Entertainment

Opera for all

Anchorage Opera general manager Torrie Allen wants you -- yes, you! -- to love going to the opera.

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Chris Arend Photography/Anchorage Opera

Torrie Allen has a lot on his mind.

Allen, who is in his third season as the Anchorage Opera's general manager and artistic director, would like to make opera more affordable and accessible to the average Alaskan. It's easier said than done.

"I want to do something different," Allen said. "It's hard."

One rainy afternoon in October, Allen took a break from preparing for the Opera's season premiere -- a double bill of Leoncavallo's "Pagliacci" and Puccini's "Sister Angelica" -- to give me a whirlwind tour of the Anchorage Opera shop in the Ship Creek industrial district. I'd spent a lot of time in the building as a child (my mother worked for the Opera), and Allen was excited to show me what had changed.

"Let me show you up here," Allen said as we walked up a rickety staircase leading from the scene shop to the properties loft, where my brother and I used to rummage for fencing foils. "This should give you an idea of some of the things we're trying to do."

Allen led me past shelves packed with dusty dishes, weapons and plaster food to a small, clean room lined with racks of costumes.

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"This room had been just like a dumping station for all of our costumes, and it turns out we have some incredible costumes," Allen said. When he arrived, he said, he found the room filled with period gowns, many of them inherited from the now-defunct Alaska Repertory Theatre, stuffed into black garbage bags.

"This is a big asset," Allen said. "Everything in here is photographed now, and labeled, and placed by period. And this is where we're going to go. We're a small company. This is the level of organization that we should have."

Organization -- or rather, reorganization -- is at the top of Allen's list these days. He inherited a company that, despite a reputation for artistic excellence, has its share of problems -- organizational, physical and, like so many nonprofits, financial. Part of the problem, Allen said, is that the same people were buying tickets season after season, but new patrons weren't being pulled in. When Allen landed in Anchorage three years ago, he started doing some asking around about the Opera. He wasn't thrilled with what he heard.

"The message I picked up on the street was that ... people think of the Opera as just a country club parading as a performing arts company," Allen said. "You just can't afford to operate that way."

Allen has spent his first seasons with the Opera trying to combat the image, both onstage and through public outreach -- like the "Opera Tolerators" program, which helps first-time patrons ease into the opera experience. In addition to cheap tickets, dinner and drinks, Opera Tolerators attend "a very casual opera chat" before the show. Allen said he tries to incorporate popular music to help illustrate universal themes in the opera; for example, later this season he'll be using Randy Travis' "I Told You So" to orient Opera Tolerators to "Eugene Onegin."

"It's sort of counterintuitive, but it works," he said.

Allen also did away with the Opera's traditional big-ticket opening-night gala. It's been replaced with a $25-a-head party that will feature food, drinks and live entertainment.


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Courtesy Anchorage Opera
Torrie Allen is in his third season as the Anchorage Opera's general manager and artistic director.

"I just felt like (the gala) was too exclusive, and really not the kind of message we wanted to send out," Allen said. "Instead of 80 guests, let's have 400."

Another of Allen's priorities is developing local talent. Under his leadership, the Opera has instituted a studio artists program to provide comprehensive training for local singers, and has recognized as resident artists local performers like Marlene Bateman and Kate Egan who, Allen says, "could be hired to sing in any opera house." The Opera has also partnered with the University of Alaska Anchorage to establish an apprenticeship program for voice students enrolled at UAA.

"I think there's a lack of appreciation for our own talent -- homegrown talent," said Allen, a singer himself who will perform as a soloist when the Anchorage Concert Chorus presents Bach's Mass in B minor next March. "We do have the talent. What we don't have is an appreciation for the amount of time it takes to develop and grow, especially with singers."

"We brought her in for one reason: We wanted theater," Allen said. "I didn't want boring opera." Allen said he told Pond: "Don't worry about the music. Don't worry about the singing. I've found that, when singers stop thinking about singing, they sing better. Let them think about singing when they're in the studio. But here, just focus on the drama."

And, he said, that's exactly what Pond has done.

"We're pushing it with both of these shows," Allen said. "They're set in their times, but there's such an emphasis on the drama here that we're going to rattle some cages. I said to (Pond), I want to be able to go on radio and say there's more drama. And she's doing it."

Although Allen is open about the challenges the company faces, he is deliberately non-critical of his predecessors, and he clearly loves his job. He's acutely interested in where the Opera has been (on our tour of the shop, he had as many questions for me as I had for him), but he's far more passionate about where the company is going. He's excited about the coming season. He's working on establishing partnerships with opera companies in Fairbanks and Juneau and with the Last Frontier Theatre Conference. He wants to explore using communications technology to bring opera to rural Alaska. He's talking with a teacher in Nome about bringing students to Anchorage to see "Eugene Onegin" and hear from tribal leaders about traditional stories that share common themes. He wants to start an arts business council. And always, always, he's thinking about how to fill more seats.

"Our core (audience) is only about a thousand, and we have to reach 3,000," Allen said. "So we have to reach 2,000 more people. That's tough. Believe it or not, even in this community of 300,000-plus, it's really tough to get 2,800 people to want to buy opera tickets. I know that can be changed."

Opera should be "egalitarian," Allen said. He wants anyone in Anchorage to feel comfortable walking into the Discovery Theater on opening night.

"Our savior is going to be when the average person thinks of us like they think of the fire department or the police department," he said.

Contact Maia Nolan at maia_alaskadispatch.com.

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