HOUSTON OPERA’S GRAND CHALLENGE
Flooded-out company staging production at convention hall
The George R. Brown Convention Center’s Exhibit Hall A3 is a mammoth room — two football fields’ worth of shiny hard floors, ceiling-level pipes and white lights evoking a blend of a high school gymnasium and an Amazon warehouse.
There are no box seats, dressing rooms, bathrooms, lobbies or orchestra pits here. This is the last place you’d expect Houston Grand Opera to stage a production.
Yet the opera company, still rising out of post-Harvey paralysis after 12 feet of water flooded the Wortham Theatre Center’s basement levels and disabled the company’s administrative infrastructure, is mounting an unprecedented effort to transform the convention hall into an arts destination.
Houston Grand Opera has been in the process of making this gaping gray rectangle of a space into a new home for the 2017-18 season, which begins Friday with “La Traviata,” a production known for its lavish party scene and grandiose scenery. Carpets are being laid and chandeliers installed inside this space now dubbed The Resilience Theater.
Just over a month after Hurricane Harvey shut down Houston’s Theater District — the Wortham Theatre Center, Alley Theatre and Jones Hall are still dark — the city’s top arts organizations are forced to make bold decisions
“People have asked me, am I going to cancel the season? That never crossed my mind.”
as they battle to recover at a time considered to be the start of the performing arts season. It’s a time of great importance to these organizations, including the opera, which was hit by Harvey just as it was about to enter its biggest sales season.
What the opera hopes to stage on opening night is not only a minimalist take on Verdi’s Italian classic in a completely transformed space but also a heroic act of recovery by a company that still has no home, no full computer or phone systems, staff members with flooded homes and an artistic challenge ahead of them unlike any other faced in the modern opera world.
Like much of a city that is still recovering from being drowned and deluged by Hurricane Harvey, there is a lot at stake here. Some performing arts organizations, after being affected by Tropical Storm Allison in 2001, reported spending up to five years trying to recover financially. After Harvey, the opera expects somewhere between $5 million and $15 million in losses, the kind of hit that can have long-lasting, existential effects on the opera and the broader Houston arts district. For some context, during the 2015-16 season the opera had an operating budget of $24 million.
“How do we start to heal the organization?” said HGO managing director Perryn Leech on Wednesday, while taking a short break from running around the George R. Brown. “To me that feels like it won’t start until we’re back at the Wortham.”
That return isn’t expected until May. But HGO’s more urgent priority lies in the present. The company is tackling hundreds of daily logistical hurdles in its goal to maintain the opera’s artistic standards within a drastically shortened time frame and unlikely setting.
But, like much of the city that was drenched and displaced by Harvey, the opera is making it happen as they set up a temporary home and try to build a sense of normalcy.
Facing a challenge
Leech’s vision for turning Exhibition Hall A3 into a makeshift opera house involves tricking the eyes, and ears, into thinking they’re sitting somewhere other than inside a gigantic box.
That means sectioning off the hall into distinct “rooms” separated by large black curtains that cordon off sections like the mainstage, backstage and lobby. There’s a patron’s lounge, and portable, luxury bathrooms have been brought in.
A giant, $40,000 plastic tarp curves around the bare-bones “La Traviata” stage, allowing the sound to project evenly into the audience while also serving as a white backdrop for light projection.
The acoustics in this space, Leech says, will be among the opera’s biggest challenges yet. Opera singers don’t generally use microphones, so a perfect balance of every acoustic element is required — if players are too far away from each other, they can start to perform out of sync; if sound reverberates, this can disorient the singers.
But there is another challenge for the singers.
The orchestra, which at the Wortham is in a pit in front of the stage, will be situated behind the stage at the GRB. That means violins have to soar past a chorus that’s used to hearing the music in front of them and that the conductor is no longer in view of the singers.
As a whole, these issues can feel mountainous. But “La Traviata” director Arin Arbus says she’s diving right into the challenge and has experience staging theater in unlikely situations. The New York-based director has directed theater in prisons, which often forced her to use nothing but a single prop.
“I have a lot of experience stripping down things to only what’s essential. You pick your battles,” she said. “Can I tell you my hope for the show? My hope is that this will feel more intimate then it might have in the Wortham. Because the spectacle has been stripped away.”
‘It’s doable’
Staring out over the expanse of 1,700 bleacher seats, Leech strains his head to look from one side to another. The bleachers put audiences in a flat, broad arrangement, with seats stretching to the sides beyond the stage.
Behind him is a worker operating a lift, installing lights and wires onto the hall’s tube-filled ceiling that resembles the underbelly of car. The stage is a flat disc sloped downward toward the audience — the same platform intended for the original production — yet none of the walls nor changeable scenery is present. Electrical wires are everywhere.
On this Wednesday morning, Leech says the opera is about 60 percent at full functionality and the “HGO Resilience Theatre” is 30 percent built. He laments that everyone, for the past month, has been telling him he looks tired.
Viewed one way, the scene is incredible. Viewed from another perspective, it’s yet another day of artists and technicians doing their job and figuring out solutions to problems, albeit in a unique circumstance. But of all the questions HGO has right now, perhaps the biggest one regards the audience. Will they come? Will they buy tickets for a “La Traviata” not with two scene changes, but none at all? In an opera house with not 2,400 seats but 1,700? To support a downtown arts destination relocated outside the Theater District?
To entice patrons the opera is offering deals that provide 10 percent off tickets plus two free rides from the car service Lyft.
Still, the uncertainties around this situation mean that audiences are taking a leap of faith — one HGO hopes that it has earned as an entrenched and marquee part of the Houston arts community.
“People are scared of the unknown,” Leech said. “But we’re embracing that uncertainty. People have asked me, am I going to cancel the season? That never crossed my mind. I’ve built venues before. It’s a lot of work, a lot of money, a lot of people, but it’s doable.”