Thoughts and wild speculations on Opera Boston's demise

A lot of people have been emailing to ask, "Why the hell are you diddling around with the sh*t that Parabasis says, when you're not covering the collapse of Opera Boston?"

And I don't really have a good answer to that.  Although I have been trying to find out the truth about why the fat lady sang for that intrepid opera company, really I have.  I wasn't always kind to their productions, I admit, but I always appreciated what they were trying to do - that is, forge a niche in Boston for productions of both rarely-produced and avant operas.  And more than once they succeeded brilliantly - last fall's mounting of Béatrice et Bénédict was often enchanting, and La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein was one of the best (and funniest) opera productions the Hub has seen in a decade at least.  Previous seasons had boasted strong productions of Nixon in China and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.  Boston had much to thank Opera Boston for, and its closing was a tragic loss - as well as something close to an insult to the incredibly hard-working guiding light of the company, musical director Gil Rose.

So like many of you, I was really shocked that the Board could act so precipitously - and on so seemingly thin a pretext (a debt of $500,000, hardly small change, but also hardly a death knell in the world of opera), leaving not only many employees and visiting artists, but also a whole host of subscribers, in the lurch.

And to be honest - the suddenness of the action made me a little suspicious.  We have a history of boards behaving badly around here, and from what you could piece together from press accounts, the Opera Boston Board's last-minute actions sounded a bit fishy.  The pieces of the puzzle included: a suddenly looming debt; newer Board members who were eager to put together a plan to save the organization; and a sudden agreement to shut up shop anyway by the elder members, in a meeting from which many younger members were missing.  Essentially, a contingent of the Board closed down the company summarily and unilaterally - even the Artistic Director didn't find out till after the fact.

The question of the hour is - why?

Now you don't really have to be Sherlock Holmes to begin piecing together a rather unflattering picture from those disparate data points.  I mean, to put it bluntly - why would you suddenly slam the door on a basically-viable organization - unless you wanted to slam the door on its books, too?  Was there something that one part of the Board knew that it didn't want the other part of the Board to find out?  Hmmm.  No wonder the rumor mill has been buzzing! But nobody I know will go on the record about what they know - at least not to me.

But I do know that Geoff Edgers is writing up a story about the whole affair for the Globe (which to its credit, called for an investigation into the Board's actions on its editorial page). And that's never a good sign, is it? No, it is not.  Word is it the Edgers story will drop this week.  So for once I'll be buying the Globe!  Can't wait.