The English National Opera will produce musicals in an attempt to draw crowds after a traumatic year, its new head has said.
Daniel Kramer, who begins his role officially as artistic director in August, said that he hoped the move would boost ticket sales and introduce new audiences to the company’s theatre.
The American-born director, 39, who has never previously run an arts organisation, gave a deeply personal speech yesterday as he announced the company’s 2016-17 season, which includes a new production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni and an adaptation of The Winter’s Tale with Rory Kinnear, the actor and playwright, making his directorial debut with the Shakespeare comedy.
Kramer acknowledged that the serial resignations of the ENO chairman, executive director, artistic director and music director in the past 15 months, along with Arts Council England slashing the company’s subsidy by £5 million to £12.4 million, had been hard.
“Let’s be frank,” he said at the Coliseum theatre. “It’s been a very hard year. We underwent a trauma of sorts.”
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The most recent resignation was in March, when Mark Wigglesworth quit as music director over budget cuts. Kramer said that it had been difficult to meet the chorus, which has accepted a cut in pay, and the orchestra and backstage teams. There is a two-year pay freeze in place affecting all staff.
“I cannot and will not make them or you false promises about things that I can magically restore. My goal right now is to get a programme on the main stage and outside of core operas that will magnetise our audiences every year back into this house,” he said.
Part of his plan will be to increase the company’s repertoire of more accessible productions including “one or two operettas every season such as [Gilbert and Sullivan’s] The Pirates of Penzance” that might tempt audiences into returning for more substantial opera.
“I do intend to explore one musical a year as well, partially because opera houses around the world are seeing that one musical a year can help get in a diverse audience that can cross over as well. That does not bother me. Core opera productions are the basis of what we will be doing.”
The Coliseum hosts musicals already, including Sunset Boulevard starring Glenn Close, but they are produced by an external company.
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The move may irritate some producers of commercial musicals who do not have access to public subsidy. However, Nick Allott, managing director of Cameron Mackintosh, said: “If ENO had had their grant doubled then we might be looking sideways at their decision to do a large-scale musical, but given that the opposite has happened then it seems like a sensible thing to do.”
Kramer, who has a reputation for controversial productions, said that his love of opera began at school at the age of seven. “A touring production of Hansel and Gretel came through, and I will never forget the moment when a soprano leant down and picked an imaginary bunch of invisible daffodils.”
The director said that it was a liberating moment during his upbringing on a sheep farm in Ohio.
“My life was changed that day. Being a gay man growing up in a very unfriendly Christian environment, I had a new outlet.”
He said that the arts “became my way to process grief or anger or any of my disgruntled emotions into a positive creative outlet.
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“It’s the philosophy I hope I can bring to the company.”