Bringing the Pieces Together: Jim Wright on engaging community and advocating for the audience
In a rollicking and candid conversation, Jim Wright reflects on his storied career and his 17 years leading Vancouver Opera and spills the beans on long-held desire to be a senator from Indiana
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Ashley Daniel Foot:
Welcome to Inside Vancouver Opera. My name is Ashley Daniel Foot. Today we're joined by Jim Wright, former general director of Vancouver Opera, a position which he held for 17 years. As you can imagine, Jim has a lot of stories and our conversation is wide-ranging, fun and insightful.
Jim Wright:
My degree was in theatre, an acting major, and a year or two after university I was working in a little touring theatre company that toured the west. Then I went with a friend back to Pittsburgh, Kansas where I worked for a while and then I needed a job. So I applied for a gofer's job at the Lyric Opera of Kansas City and stayed four years and fell for it. It was work waiting for me to find it. I had a theatre major, 12 years of piano. I liked politics, I liked business, and all of a sudden there it all was. Within a year and a half, I was the number two in the company. And that's how it all started. I saw my first opera in university.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
What was that opera? Do you remember?
Jim Wright:
La Boheme.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
And you were entranced, I'm assuming?
Jim Wright:
Not so much. I was a theatre major, one of those of many who sort of disdained the artificialness, we thought, of opera… compared to theatre and naturalistic and realistic and contemporary theatre. We just didn't get it because we just didn't get it. We didn't do that kind of stuff, that was our music department, which was somewhere else on campus.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
So what do you think changed for you? When did you realize it had all the things you wanted?
Jim Wright:
When I began working with the opera company in Kansas City. I was able to put several of my interests and passions to work and the general director was very generous in letting me go beyond what I should have gone beyond being such a new person to the business. I was involved in union negotiations right from the beginning. I went to auditions with him nationally. Our office was in a building we owned, so I was right above the stage, right on the side of the stage. So I got to know the stagehands very well, the singers… just everything fit for me. And because of my background in music, I was always interested in music, in classical music, and all of a sudden there were all these pieces that I enjoyed working on and it just fit. Getting involved in opera, I very soon realized I'd been a fool…. along with many of my theatre colleagues. The first opera I worked on ever was Carlisle Floyd's Susannah, and he [Floyd] was there directing it.
And it's such a theatrical piece, the sense of it's so understandable and in English and it was like “gee whiz” this is what I was studying, this is what I was going to do. And the second production, it was Marriage of Figaro. So right off the bat I was seeing and hearing some of the best opera, contemporary and traditional.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
17 years in the centre of things. What do you think the role of the general director, I mean we all know what we think it is, but what is it really?
Jim Wright:
I think it's bridging and bringing together the disparate pieces of the organization, and particularly two big chunks: artistic and production, and administration - marketing, development, sales. So often those two pieces, we'll just call them two big pieces, don't converge as well as they should. And they have different goals and different ways of looking at things. It's changing now in many of these fields, but traditionally for 50, 60 years, I always felt that opera had the best management system because a symphony has a music director and a CEO. A dance company has an artistic director and a managing director, whatever. If you're not careful, it goes parallel up to the board. But with a single leader, those things have to be solved before one thing goes to the board. And I think the role of the general director is to see that the board is presented with a singular unified idea and plan.
So I think that's very important and I think it's very important that that person be the spokesperson out in the community and have a presence in the community. Most general directors, myself included, always have to lean on a lot of people - for casting help, for set decisions, for that sort of thing. And that's one reason it's not called artistic director, it's the general director, which comes from a European “general intendant.” And so it's bringing the pieces together, making them work together, making them fit, and sending something up or out that is a solitary agreed upon vision and direction for the organization.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
This journey that you've had is remarkable. You've championed so many new works, you've created works for young audiences, and you've gone out into the community in ways that are really significant. Can you talk a little bit about how and why that's something that's so powerful and was so important to you in your role?
Jim Wright:
When I was with Anchorage Opera back in the '80s, the artistic founder of that company was a woman who'd moved to Alaska to work with Robert Shaw. And she started three university music departments, a couple of professional choruses and the opera company. And she was a Mennonite from Kansas who had an incredible desire for community service interest in the welfare of others. And I saw that in her everyday life we were quite close and in how she managed the opera company's music director side. So that was early and important for me, skip ahead to Charlotte. And in the mid '90s we had a political social challenges in Charlotte that had to do with the LGBT community especially, and it kind of boiled into a big community brouhaha, about what we were as a new south town and all that. Meantime, and not because of that, we'd already planned it we produced The Crucible, Robert Ward's wonderful opera written in the '50s about Miller's play The Crucible.
And we took advantage of what we were doing and what was happening in the community to put together a group of people interested in talking about mass hysteria, the leadership, what can happen when things go off the rails. And we had major downtown Protestant churches talking about what we were doing and why we were doing it. It was a fantastic experience and the press we got for that, you can't buy. All of a sudden the opera company meant something to the community. All of a sudden you didn't have to go to the opera or like opera to appreciate what the arts, in that case us, could be doing in the community. And that was a game changer for me to see how with enough resources you could make that be such a major thing.
So here, my second or so year, we did Of Mice and Men and I got a few staff people and two or three board members together, including Arlene Gladstone, a dear, dear friend of mine still and talked about wanting to do a big community focused event, festival almost, based on the issues of Of Mice and Men. They looked at me like I was nuts and I said, trust me, you're going to have to trust me on this one. I know this will work. And so we had people from the Abbotsford Food Bank, from MOSAIC, all these groups. What we told them was if they want to partner in this adventure you're in. So it was a great success, really a very big success for us all. So when we repeated it on that scale, two years later, I think with Madama Butterfly, I think we ended up with 20 organizations involved in this project and the key thing was we told them, we're not here to curate you.
If you think you belong, if you think you're doing something that makes sense to this production of Madama Butterfly, you're in. So that's where it came from and I believed in it from the beginning and I still believe in it. It can take different forms. It doesn't have to be what we did particularly, but engaging in the community and letting the community know we think we're about more than what goes on in the theatre.
I think another really good example of that was Nixon in China. I don't think we sold many - at all more tickets - with our Nixon programming, but what we wanted to do was show the community that we are a good citizen and so we brought Alexandre Trudeau and we did all this stuff, and the American ambassador, all of this, not to sell tickets, but to show the leadership community and the business community that we wanted to be a good citizen and do our part in recognizing who we are and where we were in 2010.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
That's amazing. I want to push on something that you said earlier about showing how opera is more than just what happens at the opera on say a Saturday night at the Queen Elizabeth and you created that in the community, a tangible and meaningful set of events, but also a conversation. Why is that something that's still important to our field and our sector?
Jim Wright:
One, it's good for the company to be seen as participating more widely in the community. It has tangible benefits often of bringing in new donors, bringing in new funders, being strategic about who you talk to about what you are going to do anyway, but getting people on board with it financially and people buying tickets that might not have bought tickets otherwise. So first of all, I think it's really good for the company, in the middle of that it's good for the arts community because other organizations can benefit from say we're doing can benefit something the Symphony wants to do and vice versa. The other big reason is I have a great interest in politics. I wanted to be a senator from Indiana. Didn't pan out.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
What stopped you, Jim?
Jim Wright:
Money… other people's interest… lots of things.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
You became the opera senator instead, didn't you? There you go.
Jim Wright:
My parents owned a newspaper, so we knew our congressmen and we knew people like that and we were always interested in politics and I've always been interested in governance and politics. So I think the other big reason is I wanted to be involved in an organization that spoke to the community beyond what we did internally, to be part of the civic fabric, if you will.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
You believed so strongly in sharing the power of art form more than just beyond it, what you've spoken beautifully about, it's not easy though to make it all flow, but you made it last for 17 years. I have to wonder, there were moments when you must've been ripping your hair out because you have to balance all of these things together. What was the secret sauce that kept you able to do that?
Jim Wright:
A board president, relatively towards the end of my time, really remarked on my tenaciousness. I didn't give up on something easily… unless it was obviously a dumb thing. I've had my share of those too and showing that it was a dumb idea. But plowing ahead, showing people that it can be done and bringing an invigorated staff and board along.
I think also I'm a good communicator. I have a friend in the business who said, “God, you tell a great story. You get so passionate…” about whether it's talking about Lillian Alling or something else. So I think there was just a storytelling passion in me that I wasn't going to resolve by being a writer. After I was a senator, I was going to write the Great American novel- I was going to be Theodore Dreiser of my generation.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
That's going to be the headline of this whole article, Jim.
Jim Wright:
There's a lot of things wrong with me. I'm the first to admit it, but I think just energy and enthusiasm takes me a long way.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
You mentioned one of my favourite productions that we’ve done, and that's Lillian Alling. This is story, you would never have thought would've been an opera, but you made it into one. Tell us about how this all came to be.
Jim Wright:
It was time for us, in about 2007, to get serious about doing a new work. So it was time and the governments were pressing us. The Canada Council and Heritage were pressing us all opera companies and others to look at new work, look at Canadian content and Canadian creativity. It was our time and I really liked Murrell and Estacio's Filumena that was done for Calgary Opera. I thought it was a terrific piece with really good music and a good story. And so I approached them and they came back with the idea of Lillian Alling.
As I recall, it was probably originally John Murrell's idea, the playwright and librettist. He was the theatre guy of that pair. And he had somewhere come across this true story of this woman who came to the US, came to New York from Eastern Europe and was seen, actually known to have trekked across North America and ended in British Columbia and disappeared from view crossing into Alaska. Nobody knows the real story of why or how, but we know she did it.
So he took that fact and came up with all the backstory and gave her a reason and developed the plot. And with John created this piece. Kelly Robinson, who had worked with him on Filumena, we also engaged to direct it and do the dramaturgy. So it was, oh, I don't know, two and a half year process or three year process of five workshops. That's one reason new work is so expensive. I mean you can't just rent a set from somewhere else.
It came from Murrell and Estacio and I'm very happy to admit that, and to know tha, because it was a great idea. And again, it was a Canadian story with a nice big fat scene set in Vancouver in the rain.
And originally the plan was that it would be our Olympics piece, but for various reasons we agreed that it probably wasn't quite right for the Olympic period. We needed something a little different. Originally for the Olympics, we commissioned a composer to write an opera about Terry Fox based on Doug Coupland's book, but that got waylaid by the Fox family. So we decided ultimately to go with Nixon in China for the international appeal for the Olympics and funding for it. And then open the next season, just five months later, with Lillian Alling. So 2010 was a heck of a year for this opera company.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
No kidding.
Jim Wright:
And such amount of new work for all of us. I mean producing a new work and all of that entailed and doing something as wonderful as Mike Cavanagh's incredible production of Nixon in China, but scared the hell out of us. I mean with all the new kinds of staging that we used and the airplane coming in over our heads.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
So what was the wildest thing that happened on that production with all of that?
Jim Wright:
Granting Michael's request to spend an extra 40 or $50,000 for an extra rehearsal so that they could fix the Pat Nixon scene and make it work. And they came in on Friday, which is usually a day off for the crew. And so there it was over time-
Ashley Daniel Foot:
You're in double time or premium, right?
Jim Wright:
But he was exactly right and it's exactly what was needed. It was a great experience. Mike's a great director and Erhard Rom the set designer's great and they're a great team. And the shivers came to me the first time the plane came in over our heads it went out, turned around, came back, the scrim was raised, and there was the full sized nose of the 747 facing the audience.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
That's the kind of indelible image that stays with you forever, right?
Since this interview was recorded, Michael Cavanagh passed away. Vancouver Opera mourns the loss of Michael Cavanagh, whose remarkable Vancouver Opera career began as our Resident Director in the early 90s. In this position, Michael was assistant director on VO’s mainstage productions while adapting operas for the Vancouver Opera in Schools program. His work at VO launched a journey that led him to direct over 150 opera productions at more than 30 companies across Canada, the U.S. and Europe. Michael's wonderful personality, his incredible ability to connect with all the artists that he worked with, and the infectious joy that he spread in the rehearsal hall has left deep impressions and made lasting friendships with the VO Chorus and staff members he worked with over a period of 30 years.
Jim Wright:
Just wow! Yeah! And I'm shivering now. It was just such a big step for the opera company, such a huge step forward in technology, in believing that we were doing the right thing, doing a contemporary piece.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
Vancouver Opera is celebrating 65 years. We just launched our 65th season.
Jim Wright:
Yes! Got my brochure in the mail.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
Why do you think opera is still something that is going strong, company after company all over the place?
Jim Wright:
We're very fortunate that we are doing very well here, the city. I think the symphony is doing well, the opera's doing well. Tom (current General Director of Vancouver Opera Tom Wright, no relation) and his whole team have done a great job. There are a lot of companies in the States which are not doing very well. They've not recovered as well as they had hope. From big, big companies like The Met to small companies, and companies in between, for one reason or another have not recovered from the pandemic.
So we're one of the winners. And so I'm very happy about that. And you're right, there are lots of winners and I think that's in part because nobody wants to go back to pre-pandemic. It was such a watershed for so many things, not just the arts and changed how people look at things and think about things and do things.
And I think repertoire selection, I think reducing the number of productions and performances to fit the desires of the community is very important. When I came here, the company was doing five performances and five productions. And the board and I, in my first months, we looked at each other and said, “uh-uh this doesn't make any sense.” So the first thing we did was reduced to four productions and the next thing we did was reduced to four performances. So there's nothing wrong with adjusting your productivity to your market-
Ashley Daniel Foot:
To the conditions of our market.
Jim Wright:
Yeah. I mean, it's stupid not to. So I'm really pleased to see full houses. I'd rather see nine really full enthusiastic audiences than twelve, 70% houses. So I think that's been one of the things. And adjusting programming, adjusting marketing. The online marketing is terrific. What you are doing is terrific. The visibility the company has really grown. I think it's the organizations reflecting on new desires from old and new audiences and figuring out a path in.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
And not every idea is a win, as you well know. How did you tolerate or handle when things didn't go the way that you'd hoped in terms of an opera that didn't maybe sell as well or wasn't received in that way? How did you manage?
Jim Wright:
Well, it's always disappointing because one doesn't produce a piece with the expectation that it won't be loved as much as you love it. There have been great disappointments, not in the work themselves, but Albert Herring, which was a charming, charming piece. Nobody wanted to come. There's been two or three. One of my favourite operas is Girl of the Golden West, La fanciulla del West. People weren't interested. It's to me, the best Puccini opera there is and the story is wonderful.
And there's been a couple of others along the way that I just thought, wow, I didn't expect them to sell out by any means, but very disappointing. And every once in a while there's a director or a singer. It's more often a singer than a director, who just doesn't deliver what you thought he or she would deliver.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
What do you do in those moments when you realize that?
Jim Wright:
Usually there's not much to do about it because it has to be pretty lousy before you can use the hook.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
Have you ever had to use it?
Jim Wright:
Oh, yeah. Well, all through my career I've had to use it, but you have to be very careful because it's all about judgment. I don't think she is going to be able to sing this on opening night. And the agent says, “how do you know that that's five days away? You don't know what she can do in the course of time to get where she needs to be.” “Well, I don't think she will.”
Ashley Daniel Foot:
That's a tough, tough call.
Jim Wright:
Yeah. And you have to feel certain enough that you're making the right call.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
And you're advocating for the audience ultimately, right?
Jim Wright:
Oh yeah, for sure.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
And the company's success.
Jim Wright:
Absolutely. And you can't pull the hook too early because people do need to develop. Sometimes a cough disappears in two days. Sometimes it's not going to. When I was first general manager in Anchorage, my first general manager's job, and that founding woman I talked about was still involved with the company, and we did Il Trovatore and she and the conductor wanted to use a certain singer, an American singer, who made most of his career in Europe.
So I hired him as the tenor and he wasn't doing well through rehearsals. “Jim, I just can't do it just now.” And then you get to the sitzprobe, “Well, I don't think I can sing it tonight.”
Well I said, “So Mr. X, when am I going to hear you sing?” “Well, I guess opening night.” And I said, “Well, that's not good enough.” And so I went around and around and he didn't sing on the Saturday afternoon rehearsal. And I went back to the office and I called his agent and I fired him. And then I picked up the phone and I called the singer. He said, “Well, I'm feeling better. I think maybe things will work…” I said, “It's too late.” I said, “You've got the hotel for one more night. You'll have a check and you're out.”
Ashley Daniel Foot:
And you take no pleasure in this.
Jim Wright:
No, not at all.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
It's a brutally hard thing to do.
Jim Wright:
But the reason I'm telling you that is it goes with the job and you've got to be able to do it, and you've got to figure out. And I just thought, this is my first opera as the general director of a company in the United States, and the whole world's not looking at Anchorage, but enough in the business are that I was not going to be pushed over. And so figuring out how, when, where to do that, it certainly comes up. So you get a different singer. So you go on. And there have been singers that have not performed well for me, who should have, and who I've made a point to go see later, either in a performance or something and make sure the relationship itself is repaired because you don't do that kind of stuff to last forever.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
65 years of Vancouver opera. What do you hope for the next 65 for our company?
Jim Wright:
That it continues to evolve, continues to look at new ways of doing what needs to be done, and who knows what those ways are? I mean, what's going to change in our society? What's going to be required of performing arts companies to stay involved in their communities? I don't know what those things are right now, and I think anyone who says they do is probably making it up. To keep listening, keep working, keep trying new things, be willing to accept failure. And I'm speaking to a governance board as much as anybody in that kind of situation. Failure comes along with it. It's just part of it.
And it doesn't have to be a huge, massive failure. Failures happen in small ways too. You budget too much revenue on a show that you think is and then it isn't, or the snowstorm comes or the whatever, and just having to go with all of that. I think there's going to have to be more and more work addressing the increasingly frightening world and figuring how to tell those stories, help people understand those stories and help people live through and respond to those stories is going to be very important. And I think it's just going to take more and more introspection in an organization and more and more listening to its community.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
What music do you listen to again and again from our repertoire that still speaks to you? What engages you? Was there a piece of music that you keep coming back to in our repertoire?
Jim Wright:
I love Dialogues of the Carmelites, all of it. Andrea Chénier, which is set at the beginning of the French Revolution, and it's hope in a very difficult time. I mean, there's individual arias that I love to death that speak to me, but pieces like Elektra and Salome that look at troubled people in troubled times and those issues don't change. We still have those same troubled people dealing with the same things.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
That's true. And Jim is still working hard. He's on the board of directors for Indian Summer Festival and serves on many other nonprofits across Vancouver. You can find him most mornings holding court at the Sylvia Hotel. It's where I first met him when I got the job here at Vancouver Opera.
I think you'll agree he's a great interview and so much fun,
and I want to thank you for listening. You can always follow us on all the places you get your podcast, leave us a review on iTunes. As always, thanks to our wonderful audio producer Mack McGillivray, and I'll see you at the opera.
Jim Wright led Vancouver Opera for 17 years, undertaking with VO's board of directors and senior management, a bold new direction for the company including an Opera Festival as part of its season in 2016/17, "redefining opera" for regional audiences and stronger collaborations with community and other arts organisations. Before joining Vancouver Opera he held leadership positions at the Lyric Opera of Kansas City, Tulsa Opera, Anchorage Opera, and Opera Carolina.
Jim sits on the boards of directors of The Nature Conservancy of Canada-BC, Vancouver Chamber Choir, and Indian Summer Festival, and previously served on the boards of the Vancity Community Foundation and the TELUS Vancouver Community Board. He also was a member of the National Arts Centre's Creation Fund advisory committee.
Inside Vancouver Opera is hosted by Ashley Daniel Foot, Vancouver Opera’s Director of Engagement and Civic Practice. Boundlessly creative and fascinated by the way that art is created and presented, Ashley has guided arts organizations across Canada to craft messages and tell unique stories.
At Vancouver Opera, Ashley carefully develops all programming that takes place off the mainstage and looks for unique and unexpected ways to highlight the power of opera in the community. He also manages all education, community partnerships, and guides the company’s commitment to justice, equity, reconciliation, and diversity. He’s particularly proud of his recent collaborations with with the Vancouver Public Library, BC Alliance for Arts and Culture, Vancouver Art Gallery, and Rumble Theatre. He is also the co-chair of the City of Vancouver’s Arts and Culture Advisory Committee.
Inside Vancouver Opera is produced by Mack McGillivray, an audio producer creating shows for radio and podcast. Mack is passionate about cultivating local community and a lifelong lover of opera.