Magda Krance makes her operatic exit from Lyric
There was that time one lawyer shushed another at “La Traviata” and it led to fisticuffs in the aisle. There was the moment the mezzo-soprano Susan Graham eyed a pair of shoes that matched her outfit, and snagged them for the rest of the night, leaving a publicist in emergency pumps. There are memories of the panic that ensued when the soprano Renée Fleming’s gowns got locked in an airport closet in White Plains, New York, after an employee went home for the weekend.
Big-time panic at the opera in Chicago.
And there was that opening night in September 2001, when Lyric Opera of Chicago hung a huge American flag on its massive stage and the curtain rose unexpectedly on the entire chorus singing the national anthem, all to the amazement of thousands of weeping subscribers.
Such is a grand life in the opera. Such was the career of Magda Krance, officially Lyric’s director of media relations and really its supremely confident and thoroughly unflappable public-facing problem solver for some 30 years. As was the late, great Cindy Bandle at the Goodman Theatre a few blocks away, Krance has been an old-school promoter and defender of her employer and its ever-changing cast of demanding divas, by no means all of whom were singing on the stage.
“A large part of a publicist’s job is apologizing,” Krance says. The “I’m so sorry” dispensations are offered to a variety of aggrieved constituents: the singer ill-used by the
writer, the writer ill-used by the singer, often both feeling the same disappointment at once. Newsrooms and the performing arts embody much the same fragility and a great deal of similar tension.
Krance’s tenure reaches back to the era of the great Danny Newman, the father of modern subscription selling and an old-school technophobe known for his Rolodex, his rotary dial phone and his Rabbinical skill at calming aggrieved donors and subscribers. Once Newman worked his legendary telephonic magic in the 1970s and 1980s, a furious subscriber threatening to cancel would most likely be converted by the end of the call into a major donor.
Krance, 66, makes her own professional exit at
the end of the month. Her departure comes as the two strands of her professional life — the media and the so-called high arts — are consumed by different existential crises, each of them fighting off economic chaos and their own potential marginalization or demise.
When Krance joined the Lyric in 1992, Chicago had powerful newspapers, must-read gossip columns, zesty stables of full-time cultural critics, thick Sunday arts sections rippling with high-arts previews penned by dedicated staffers, magazines that were willing to devote their covers to the arts.
Opera still was a relatively mainstream ticket, rather than a cultural outlier: the soprano Beverly Sills remained a frequent guest on Johnny Carson’s
“The Tonight Show.” And newspapers like the New York Times could be coaxed by an enterprising publicist into publishing epic, multipart features, as happened in 1999 when the writer Bruce Weber filed a massive opus from Chicago on the process behind William Bolcom’s operatic adaptation of “The View from the Bridge.”
And opening nights were encrusted with ticket scalpers, old-school excitement and entire rows of critics. Lots of reviews to put in the artists’ mailboxes (Lyric does not do that anymore).
To say the landscape has changed, is to understate.
Over coffee, Krance is wearing an outfit she aptly describes as “black and white and red all over.” This is a retro reference. “I had started wondering,”
she says, dryly, “what it means to be the manager of media relations when there is now so little media to manage.”
When Lyric premiered its commission of Robert Altman’s production of Balcom’s “McTeague” in 1992, scores of arts journalists flew into Chicago from all over the world.
“I remember thinking back then that this is just what happens when you work for a major opera company in a major city and you do a major thing,” Krance says.
Now? Krance generally hears that local publications have not the bandwidth nor the time nor the resources. Writers mostly weren’t born when Krance started work at Lyric. Streaming networks pump out an endless river of promotion, capturing what little media attention is to be acquired.
An opera company mostly has to fill this void by generating its own content, profiling its own artists, maintaining a presence on social media. Media relations is not so much about relationships anymore as about branded material and data-driven audience engagement. “The landscape,” Krance says with a sigh, “has changed.”
Her interlocutor for this exit interview sympathizes. Does he ever.
Krance leafs through a clutch of photos, featuring warm messages of thanks from the likes of Denyce Graves, expressed with a flourishing golden pen. She talks of her favorite productions: David McVicar’s 2007 staging of “Julius Caesar,” pretty much anything and everything directed by George C. Wolfe or Peter Hall or Peter Sellars. Her own tastes tend toward the contemporary and the avantgarde, a lifetime peppered with Puccini promotion notwithstanding.
And the busts? “We’ve put a few things on stage I’ve found curious,” she says. “But I think you have to ask from whose perspective is the disaster? I remember the 2001 ‘Rigoletto’ that audiences hated. They are still talking about it 20 years later.”
Which is, Krance opines, a good thing and a reason to exit with optimism.
“People often just haven’t been to the opera and they don’t know what it is like,” she says. “They don’t know that the singers aren’t wearing microphones, that you can follow the story on the subtitles, that this is raw, human sound and it is magnificent.”