Don’t talk down New York, Peter Gelb
During the pandemic it’s become a cliché that it may take up to four years for national and global tourism to return to New York City. No cultural institution has leaned into this idea more than the Metropolitan Opera, especially in its contract renegotiations with its labor unions.
The Met has typically started negotiating with its singers, orchestra musicians and stagehands by demanding 20%-30% pay cuts, with half the cuts restored only when ticket sales and donations grow all the way back to pre-pandemic levels. Ultimately the Met has tended to negotiate fixed pay-and-benefits reductions with substantial or full restoration after three years. But the proposed labor deals are still intuitively tied to the idea of a multiyear tourism drop.
So imagine the surprise last Sunday when The New York Times carried a Page 1 story with the headline, “New York Is Counting on Culture to Lead the Way on Reopening.” Far from theater, opera and dance having to suffer behind New York’s other attractions, the article cited leading city figures as expecting cultural institutions to jump out ahead.
“There is not going to be a strong recovery for New York City without the performing arts leading the way,” said Eli Dvorkin, policy director at the Center for an Urban Future. “People gravitate here because of the city’s cultural life.”
The article did carry photos of people crowding inside and outside “the Met” — except those were shots from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, not the Metropolitan Opera. You say it’s easier to reopen an art museum than an auditorium where people are stuck in their seats? The article also carried a photo of a long snaking line of people waiting to see Springsteen on Broadway, in a theater-district scene that could have been lifted from any pre-pandemic summer.
Yet throughout the pandemic, Metropolitan Opera General Manager Peter Gelb has used strikingly definitive language to deny that he can do much of anything to put fannies back in the seats. “Even when we return, the audience is not going to return the same day,” Gelb said last October on a video and podcast series called Screaming Divas hosted by singers Sondra Radvanovsky and Keri Alkema. “The audience is going to come back slowly over a period of one or two or three years.”
Notably, Ms. Alkema immediately challenged him in a way that now seems prescient. “I truly believe, in America especially, that once there is a vaccine and we’re able to take it, the doors will be packed,” she said. “I think that people will be running to Broadway, to opera, to live theater because we all miss it and need it so tremendously much.”
Amazingly, Gelb countered that the mid-thirties-ish Ms. Alkema was in no position to gauge Covid fear and risk. “You’re young, and you do not represent the mental attitude of the older audience that comprises a large part of our audience,” he lectured her. “We’ve surveyed our audiences. We’re in touch with them all the time. First of all, people say they don’t even want to take a vaccine. They’re scared of a vaccine that may not be safe. It’s going to take months, if not several years, before people really feel comfortable.”
In fact, we now know that Gelb’s core audience of relatively older white patrons from both the New York area and elsewhere is almost certainly the most likely population to be fully vaccinated against Covid. And it’s a little shocking to hear Peter Gelb, of all people, talk down the prospects for travel and culture in New York City.
His father, Arthur Gelb, capped a career at The New York Times as managing editor after building his reputation on broadening and deepening the paper’s arts and entertainment coverage. And he joined together with Peter’s mother, Barbara Gelb, to co-author what’s considered the definitive biography of Eugene O’Neill, the dean of American playwrights.
Perhaps a visit to Broadway’s Eugene O’Neill Theatre when the rather racy but still hilarious musical The Book of Mormon reopens there might convince Arthur and Barbara Gelb’s son that lots of people of all ages still go to see stuff in New York City.
Tightly restricting artist compensation to a multi-year recovery in attendance seems to be based on the same faulty zero-sum assumptions that have led the Metropolitan Opera to badger even brand-new attendees for donations via telemarketing. With just a little greater imagination, the Met instead could have lobbied the city’s tourism organization, NYC & Company, to include a shot of an opera in its $30 million visitor marketing campaign along with scenes from the movie version of the Broadway musical In the Heights.
The atmospherics matter, and the downer approach threatens a replay of a divergent result from a previous crisis. Gelb was gifted a mini-boom in opera popularity when he became Met general manager in 2006. While nobody in either classical or popular show business closed up shop during the 2008 financial crisis, both opera and Broadway suffered tourism and attendance drops through 2009 and part of 2010. But Broadway roared back during the following decade, while overall attendance at the Met’s 3,800-seat house continued to slink back toward an uneconomic 66% of capacity in the two full seasons before the pandemic.
Yet in the partial season culminating in a catastrophic shutdown for every art form, the Met scored two surprise hits with sellout crowds — the Philip Glass opera Akhnaten about ancient Egypt starring charismatic countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, and a revival of the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess attracting every manner of age and ethnic background to the opera house. The following year of negative opera publicity centering almost entirely around lockouts and picket lines and orchestra pit musicians abandoning New York City sapped all the momentum that could have been built on bringing these hard-won new audiences back to Lincoln Center as soon as fate allowed.
In fact, here’s another New York Times headline from last week: “Broadway Is Back! A Guide to Shows, Tickets and Covid Protocols.” Imagine if the Times — now with its abundant national and international readership — also had a helpful article about Covid house protocols at the reopening Metropolitan Opera, rather than a note about the company canceling at least one of its productions early next season because of the late arrival of the previously locked-out stage crews to the building.
At twice the size of most of the world’s other major opera houses, the Metropolitan Opera is very largely about the attraction of New York City for the best of human culture to a local, national and ultimately global marketplace. No matter what the selected tactics are for tense labor negotiations, talking up rather than talking down the prospects for post-pandemic recovery is the key to the institution’s success.
David Rohde is a Washington-based theater music director, pianist, vocal coach, and writer on both classical and popular music subjects. Follow him on Twitter @DavidBachToRock.
