Stars, innovation, and smaller audiences: Looking back at Opera Philly’s Festival O

This year’s Festival O sold out one venue but was barely able to fill another half-way. It assembled a star cast for a relatively rare but important Verdi jewel. And it garnered some positive press for its artists and the city.

Opera Philadelphia’s annual fall opera festival recently got one more feather in its cap. On Wednesday, O23 was named a finalist for “Best Festival” in this year’s International Opera Awards.

O23, which ran for 10 days ending Oct. 1, was a more modest affair than in the past. The company has struggled — as all arts groups have — to anticipate appetite for tickets and arrive at the right number of performances in the post-COVID era.

This year, with one exception, the opera company felt that O23 hit the mark in terms of supply and demand, said Opera Philadelphia general director and president David B. Devan.

“I think, post COVID, we found the right sort of volume of activity,” he said. “We had a lot of patrons say, ‘This is great. It wasn’t too much of a marathon, but it was substantive enough that it felt like a festival.’”

In 2019, before the pandemic, the festival distributed about 12,000 tickets. For O22, it dipped to 6,970. This year, the number of tickets sent out crept back up a bit, to 7,600.

Paradoxically, it was one of Opera Philadelphia’s best-ever productions that failed to fill the house. Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra ran for four performances in the Academy of Music, selling just 51% of available seats. (The Opera Company defines “available” as 1,800 of the hall’s 2,743 seats — those whose views are unobstructed by columns or other structures.)

The opera featured a cast of A-list singers in their prime, including baritone Quinn Kelsey in the title role, soprano Ana María Martínez, and bass-baritone Christian Van Horn, and the production received strong reviews. Verdi is an immensely popular composer, but Boccanegra isn’t one of his most popular titles.

“We planned it three years ago, before we knew what the changes in taste were going to be in terms of audience behavior,” said Devan. “So on the one hand, I think we had a huge success — thousands of people got to see this beautiful expression of opera. And as we think about the future, we’re going to have to take those data points [ticket sales, number of performances, and costs] into consideration. I think we’re seeing in the field that contemporary music and sort of big titles seem to be doing well, and things that are less-known are having a more difficult time filling houses, even when done absolutely top-level.”

In addition to the Verdi, O23 featured 10 Days in a Madhouse by composer Rene Orth and librettist Hannah Moscovitch in its world premiere at the intimate Wilma Theater. The piece, which depicts pioneering investigative journalist Nellie Bly doing undercover work in a New York asylum, drew supportive and admiring (if not always enthusiastic) reviews.

“Bly’s room without a view grants a jarring perspective, and we have Orth to thank for handing us the keys,” wrote Washington Post music critic Michael Andor Brodeur. 10 Days sold out and had a waiting list and standby lines for its final three performances, an opera spokesperson said.

Unholy Wars, a reflection on the Crusades of the Middle Ages, was performed at the small Suzanne Roberts Theatre — “mostly a beautiful fusion of music, video, and dance,” wrote David Patrick Stearns in The Inquirer.

In addition, the festival brought cabaret performances and song recitals.

O23 was supported mostly by philanthropy, with ticket sales covering just $550,000 of its $3.4 million production budget (in addition, the festival had marketing and other costs). The percentage of total seats filled across the entire festival was 59%.

Devan says the relatively low attendance for Simon Boccanegra doesn’t mean the company won’t be doing pieces like it again, but that it’s important to “figure out how to do them in the right measure and the number of performances and the economics of it.”

Of course, Devan won’t have control over such questions much longer. He is stepping down at the end of this season, a decision announced in August along with the news that Opera Philadelphia was cutting its budget and production lineup to minimize an operating deficit.

But he will be around long enough to plan O24, whose details are still in draft form.

“We’re going to be spending the next short period really evaluating and thinking and discussing what we learned from this festival,” Devan said, “so that as we look forward to planning the next season we’re making the right choices.”