1989
Murray Bramwell talks with Bill Gillespie, General Manager of the State Opera of South Australia, about his plans for getting the company back to strength.
While it may be appealing for the leading characters to have true hearts and empty pockets, the same is not true for Opera companies. Little more than a year ago the State Opera of South Australia was in the cactus. The deficit was more than $500,000, the subscriber base could only be called precarious and attendances were not likely to increase for the sort of the dippy repertoire choices the company had been making.
By April last year, Premier, and then Minister for the Arts, John Bannon, intervened and the company was put on a stern regimen – fewer productions, a move from the Opera Theatre, (its permanent base in Grote Street), and a drastic cut in staffing. The wardrobe and workshop was to be closed and the company was to look to joint ventures, improved box office and increased private sponsorship to remedy its difficulties.
The hard decisions had already been made by the time Bill Gillespie arrived in the following July but his was no easy task. His staff was further reduced, from twenty-nine when he joined to about eight in February this year, and he inherited a programme- The Barber of Seville, Carmen, the operetta Paganini, and Fidelio- over which he had little or no artistic control.
While State’s predicament posed specific problems, Gillespie is no stranger to the particular needs of regional opera companies. For almost four years prior to coming to Adelaide he was Director of Administration for the Pittsburgh Opera and has worked in San Diego, Chicago, Galveston and Houston. Armed with an MBA from UCLA, Gillespie, in his late thirties, has a quiet, patrician style which suits the Adelaide parish. And his steady diligence is paying off.
Both for Gillespie and State Opera, Fidelio, which finished its season just six weeks ago, was bound to be a litmus test. Most of the new ingredients were in that production. While the Festival Theatre had been used for opera before, notably The Fiery Angel during the last Adelaide Festival, shifting State Opera away from the Opera Theatre (at which point it regally returned to being called Her Majesty’s) was an uncertainty. Then there was the problem of a shorter
season – four instead of the usual seven or eight at the smaller venue.It gives less time for the buzz to get around and as Gillespie explains, it can mean light houses for the first two nights and then more demand than you can find upholstery for on the last two. Even the programme was not a blue chip certainty, Gillespie had his apprehension that Fidelio might be perceived as too severely teutonic for the often unfathomable tastes of Adelaide.
He is pleased with the result. The houses were strong but not brilliant – 70% houses but, promisingly, more than double the subscriber list. There was no problem with slow houses for the first two nights, the reviews were warm, the set -on hire from the AO – didn’t look like a retread, the Adelaide Symphony played vigorously and the punters went home pleased. At least, many took the trouble to contact Bill Gillespie to tell him so, a new and, for him, encouraging sign. Fidelio also made a modest contribution to the coffers and Gillespie announced a surplus of $103,000 for the fiscal year ending June 30th.
With justifiable pride he has made his first repayment to the State Government who floated the company around $400,000 to be repaid in three years. The debt, effectively the staging cost of The Fiery Angel for the Festival, continues to challenge Gillespie, but with a quarter of it already repaid he is sanguine that his objectives can be met.He is also quick to point out that in the two financial years 87/88 and 88/89 there were nearly comparable seasons (the difference being the twenty performances of Sweeney Todd) in the 87/88 year expenditure reached $3.6M with a deficit of $557,000 compared to expenditure of $1.9M this year with a surplus of $103,000. So he is not very receptive to the idea that he has put the company back on track simply by not letting it produce any opera- although as he wryly puts it : “Every time you raise the curtain you lose your shirt.”
Equally pleasing to Gillespie is the healthy state of the cash flow: “We actually had Fidelio perform in the last week of the fiscal year. In the first three weeks of June we spent $300,000 in cash, a seventh of our budget and we did not have to touch a penny of the advanced box office. We were able to exchange cheques with the Festival Centre Trust- we paid them rent and the bill for house staff and the staging crew and they paid us the box office for Fidelio.”
But Gillespie makes it clear that he doesn’t spend his entire time hunched over the abacus. “Obviously a company needs much more than financial management, ” he says with emphasis, “but getting that house in order forms the basis from which I can represent myself and the company in a positive way.”
By that he means appealing to sponsors as something more than a turkey raffle.”We have to have people in the business community relate to our problems and yet not have them say, Gee, they had a really lousy deficit last year, why should we give them our money.”
In fact the sponsorship has been steadily consolidating since Western Mining started digging in their pockets in January. The first $30,000 from them secured the highly successful Gala Concert and also provided funds for Fidelio. From there Gillespie was able to build a funding drive directed to Adelaide based sponsors of whom Adsteam and SGIC have been notable. As Gillespie observes, confidence is everything.
“A most fundamental goal for a manager who takes over a company at a very low ebb is to try to restore confidence immediately. But it is a chicken-and-egg one that. You can’t restore confidence unless you have the product, and unless you have the product you can’t go to corporations or other sponsors and say ‘No, this is not the year you should cut back because you are worried about it all going down some horrible deficit rathole, you have to give us more money- because we need your money more this year than ever.”
This is starting to happen as Gillespie also knows it must. He refers guardedly to the old days when the company looked to the Government to pay the bills, not fundraising and box office. “That’s where the company now has to be forever and ever,” he insists.
While he has been singled out for praise from State’s Board of Directors, Bill Gillespie is quick to share it with his colleagues.”When you come to a new city and inherit a very difficult situation and you make a lot of positive pronouncements you think,’ I can do it but can my staff handle it ? Who are these people I am working with , my assistant, the production manager, I don’t know these people from Adam.’ The fact is, without the staff at State I would not have been able to follow through.”
Gillespie has a quiet finesse with all his public dealings. He makes a point of attending every night there is a performance and talking with the cast before they go on. He is also very diplomatically apparent when it comes to meeting sponsors, subscribers, and opera die-hards at interval. “Performers say they really enjoy working with us,” he reports, “they want to come back again, and they also become our ambassadors in a way.”
There has certainly been no shortage of CV’s arriving announcing artists’ interest in working with the company. Even more so, with the kind of joint ventures Gillespie has in mind. He has a keen interest in blending quality with value for money . His ticket prices, by the way, actually went down this year much to the disbelief of his fellow opera managers around the country. He also knows that audiences want to hear the best voices available. “When it comes down to it I think the audiences would much rather hear fantastic voices and have hire scenery as long as it looks decent, than say I’m going to buy a $38 A reserve ticket because they have just built this new scenery. That’s not to diminish the work of designers, of course, and obviously the pool of available hire production is going to dwindle.”
Gillespie is convinced that co-productions with the Australian Opera and others such as the VSO provide good opportunites for artists as well as economies in preparation. “I can have artistic input as far as design and construction is concerned rather than say, see Traviata in Melbourne and think I’d like to hire that in two or three years. Also with co-performances we can have essentially the same cast , with singers common to both cities and if they play in Melbourne first they would have twelve of sixteen performances under their belts before they even get to Adelaide by which time they should be in superb form. By saving money in production costs and gaining better calibre performances it is a win-win situation all round for audiences and a contract for a co-performance run is very attractive for the best artists as well.”
Bill Gillespie makes a gently convincing case. “The successful conclusion to the financial year has bought me enough time to have enough presence of mind to do the sort of long-range three year planning I’m used to from the US. It means being able to line up the best talent I can find in this country and have it come through, without bumping against the brick wall of the AO saying, sorry, Marilyn Richardson can’t be released for that period, or whatever. It’s being able to make offers to people as legitimately as any other company and have people say yes.”
“State Opera Punting on Old Warhorses”, The Advertiser, June 17, 1989, p.12.