In The New York Times on Sunday (9/8), Michael Cooper reports that New York City Opera “will be forced to cancel most of its current season and all of its next season if it fails to raise $20 million by year’s end, company officials say.… ‘The company’s been living on the edge and hand-to-mouth for a number of years, and we’ve gotten through our own share of troubles,’ George Steel, the company’s general manager and artistic director, said.… ‘We’ve had balanced budgets for the last two years, and we’ve been doing, I think, incredible work onstage. But we can’t forge ahead without a significant infusion of capital.’ The company’s $20 million fund-raising goal is nearly twice the $11.5 million it reported raising last year. And it is more than the troupe was able to raise in better times.… The company is still preparing to go ahead next week with the highly anticipated American premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s opera ‘Anna Nicole,’ a coproduction with the Brooklyn Academy of Music. But it will cancel the other productions it has planned for this season … if it cannot raise $7 million by Sept. 30, Mr. Steel said.” The company hopes to raise $1 million of that $7 million through an online Kickstarter campaign.
Posted September 9, 2013
