Opera Australia has something to sing about this financial year, posting an operating surplus for 2011 – its first after two successive deficits.
The company’s reported profit of $319,189 in 2011 is a significant turnaround from the previous year’s $500,258 loss.
Chief executive Adrian Collette credits the new staging of Puccini’s La Bohème, directed by Gale Edwards, as the catalyst for this change in financial fortune. Set in the decadent cabarets of 1920s Berlin, the production sold $6.9 million worth of tickets in Sydney and Melbourne. It accounted for 20 per cent of total box office takings for 2011 ($35.5m compared to $34.2m in 2010), a season featuring critical successes that were nonetheless harder sells: Handel’s rarely performed Partenope and American composer Carlisle Floyd’s Of Mice and Men.
The financial report serves as powerful vindication for artistic director Lyndon Terracini, whose first programmed season began with La Bohème. His purported strategy has been to entice broader and younger audiences, as well as to strip opera of its reputation as an elitist artform.
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