Overall season occupancy reached 88% in Gelb’s first two years before the 2008 financial crisis hit. When Gelb became general manager in 2006, American opera was still benefiting from the tail-end of an uptick in interest from the “Three Tenors” era. Sure, the days are gone when the opera house was filled to the brim every night, but that should be okay. With amazing precision, the trend at the Met has followed this same vertigo-inducing pattern. The profit-and-loss swing between the two occupancy benchmarks is strikingly steep. Put only 65% of people aboard and the crushing fixed costs win out. Stuff 85% or more people into the available rooms or seats on a given night or flight, and the business is golden. In those businesses with very high fixed costs, the occupancy rate makes all the difference. But in this way, the Met operates less like a typical performing arts organization and more like a hotel chain or airline. They can pull down compensation packages of $200,000 or $300,000 a year that can surprise the general public when they learn about it. The Metropolitan Opera does have very high expenses owing to generous collective-bargaining agreements with its very talented musicians and other artists. But in reality, the cuts speak to the revenue situation at the opera house before anyone had ever heard of the coronavirus. Met General Manager Peter Gelb would like you to think that the cuts are needed because there was no ticket revenue over what will end up as an 18-month pandemic and no one knows how many people will travel to New York anytime soon. The orchestra musicians not only have balked but almost half of them have moved away or retired. While the chorus may have tentatively acceded to something like that, the stagehands have firmly said no. The chorus, musicians and stagehands have all been asked to take 30% pay cuts for the foreseeable future. The reopening of the New York theater mecca on September 14 presents a very bad look for the opera company if it can’t open the doors of its 3,800-seat house on September 27 as scheduled.Īnd one of the Met’s three major unions - the one for the currently locked-out stagehands - has brazenly announced that the house has no chance of opening any time this year. Photo by LumenSoft Technologies on UnsplashĪlready in crisis, the Metropolitan Opera now faces a new problem: the contrast with Broadway.
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