Condition Critical
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Four years ago the company left the Athenaeum Theatre for DePaul’s Merle Reskin Theatre; the South Loop location was supposed to prepare audiences for the troupe’s eventual move downtown into the long-delayed Chicago Music and Dance Theatre. But last season the group returned to the Athenaeum because DePaul had consigned it to performing during the summer months, not the best time to sell opera tickets.
Chicago Opera Theater had long scheduled its offerings for the spring to avoid competing with the Lyric Opera’s fall and winter season. But last year the company mounted a fall production–Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel–to give it a year-round presence, according to Ratner. This October it will present four performances of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville. And next July it plans to mount Philip Glass’s Akhnaten, a coproduction with Boston Lyric Opera that will coincide with the Art Institute’s exhibit of ancient Egyptian art, “Pharaohs of the Sun.” The company is hoping the opera, directed by Mary Zimmerman, will be a box office hit, with 6,000 tickets available for six performances.
Dickie departed in 1993. “I think the company’s board of directors and Brian mutually agreed that would be the best thing for him to do,” says Cathryn Gregor, Canadian Opera’s administrative director. Some of the changes he initiated, however, are still in effect under general director Richard Bradshaw, who was hired by Dickie as the company’s music director. “Brian made a conscious effort to hire Canadian directors to work with the company, including Robert Lepage,” says Gregor, who notes that Dickie also was exceptional at developing young singers.
