A first-class opera house in Columbia?

By Temple Ligon
June 20, 2013  

Could happen; probably won’t, but it could

The Crescent, the Amtrak passenger train, runs between the District of Columbia and New Orleans, where a connection with the Sunset Limited can be met for Houston.

In Europe, music-loving American tourists take opera tours as rail-connected vacations. They buy two-week railpasses and get off wherever opera is playing. The entire two weeks could be spent in one country – Italy, for an obvious instance – or they can criss-cross the continent, spending just about every night with another opera performance in another opera house that’s the pride of the community, sometimes the pride of the nation.

Between America’s capital city and Space City, there is not one genuine opera house. That is, once the Kennedy Center is left behind in Washington and before the Wortham Opera House is seen in downtown Houston, a performing arts facility designed primarily for opera cannot be found anywhere along the route.

The Belk Theater inside the Blumenthal Performing Arts Center in Charlotte comes close, but even at such a grand venue, grand opera doesn’t fit so well as it does in DC or in Houston. Charlotte’s opera house had to run through programming compromises to come out as a performing arts hall suitable for a number of purposes while it still met the needs for opera.

The Blumenthal was built, by the way, around the same time as the Koger Center in Columbia and the Peace Center in Greenville. Houston’s Wortham came along about then, as did the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas.

Targeting the late ’80s as a construction cost reference, it’s an ideal time to compare costs among the performing arts halls in Charlotte, Columbia, Greenville, Houston and Dallas.

Charlotte’s Belk Theater was built for about $20,000 per seat in late-’80s money, as was Houston’s Wortham Opera House. A little bit better deal, assuming cheaper is better, was had in Greenville’s Peace Center where each seat cost about $15,000. The best deal of all was the Koger Center in Columbia for $7,000 a seat.

The Meyerson Symphony Center, designed by architect I. M. Pei, cost the people of Dallas $50,000 per seat in the late ’80s. Since then, Dallas went through the motions to outdo Houston in opera.

Twenty years later, 2009, Dallas opera fans caught up with Houston’s Wortham and opened the Winspear Opera House, part of the $354 million Dallas Center for the Performing Arts. The Winspear cost about $80,000 per seat, straining to separate the Winspear’s cost as apart from the rest of the Dallas Center such as the Wyly Theater (600 seats), City Performance Hall (750 seats), and two little theaters at 200 seats each. Also, the Dallas Center connects with Strauss Square and its 2,500 outdoor seats. Still, looking at the Winspear Opera House on its own, you’re talking about $80,000 a seat when construction was complete in 2009.

Atlanta tried opera in the early ’90s in the Fox Theater, which was built mostly for movies well before WWII. The Fox has 4,648 seats, which puts a lot of people in the back too far away from the stage. And the stage was not designed for opera. Neither were the restrooms.

Regardless of the seating capacity, opera houses need a minimum of four stages: left, right, rear and the performing stage. The idea is to roll on a set while another set is being rolled off the performing stage. Four stages minimum, while the Bastille Opera in Paris has nine stages, one a huge motorized Lazy Susan. NYC’s Metropolitan Opera House has its carousel, too. Since the Fox was not designed for opera, it fails in the stages category. And the Fox fails in its restroom count.

At the movies, people tend to run to the restrooms on a staggered as-needed schedule. At opera, everybody jams the restrooms at intermission. The restroom accommodation at the Fox failed miserably every opera performance. I personally ran across the street to the hotel bar.

After a few years of that mess in the Fox at intermission, Atlanta moved the opera to the Atlanta Civic Center and its 4,600 seats and the largest performing arts stage in the Southeast. Again, too many people were too far from the stage.

Atlanta now has three opera productions a year in the Cobb Energy Center and its 2,750 seats, which locates the opera fans close enough to the stage but which locates the performance in northwest Atlanta’s Cobb County on the way to Chattanooga. Opera is an urban game, more like urbane considering the sophisticated patrons with high-brow tastes, and Atlanta treats opera like a suburban TGIF franchise.

If the Wortham’s $20,000 per seat in downtown Houston upon completion in 1987 is brought forward to today, figure on about $40,000.

In theory, at least, a new opera house can be built for $40,000 per seat if the $80,000 in Dallas runs off civic leaders looking for a real opera house, or close to a real opera house.

A real opera house doesn’t have to be big. Opera fans might prefer a smaller venue, just as long as the stage works and the reception areas are almost perfect for the see-and-be-seen crowd. The smaller venues, such as La Fenice in Venice and its 1,000 seats, allow for a tight proximity with the performance stage for every seat. But even with just 1,000 seats, La Fenice still has the requisite stage accommodation found in opera houses with more than twice the seating capacity.

The scenes on the stage are why people go to opera, obviously, but the next best scenes are in the lobby during the intermissions, typically two. Alcohol service is always available, but some lobbies are far better than others. The best lobbies move the alcohol the fastest – no long lines and not much waiting for service. The Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden has just about the fastest Champagne service on the planet. It wouldn’t hurt Columbia’s Koger Center staff to take a fact-finding tour of Covent Garden.  I offer my experience as a guide.

Columbia’s Koger takes almost forever to get a glass of bar-brand wine.

Faster wine service is attainable anywhere, but can Columbia ever hope for an opera house? The real deal?

The market is there. The Palmetto Opera’s productions over the past few years prove that. But there’s no movement to put together a first-class opera house in Columbia, certainly not at $40,000-$50,000 a seat. That would price the Koger Center’s 2,256 seats at a total tab today of  probably more than $100,000,000.

And you have to worry about parking. Never forget parking.

But people do it. Lots of people do it. Houston’s Wortham cost $66 million to build in 1987, and every dollar of that $66 million was in private donations. The total for the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts and its opera house came to $354 million in 2009, and only $18 million of that was public money.

Start showing Darla Moore houses in Shandon.

 

Temple Ligon: [email protected]

 

---

Sign up here to receive MidlandsLife weekly email magazine.