Opera Pacific Gets a Financial Boost : Performing artsA large anonymous pledge and the first surplus since 1997 put the company on more solid footing.

Opera Pacific--Orange County’s only opera company--has bounced back from an accumulated deficit of nearly $1 million and is poised to regain its financial footing after struggling the last three years, company officials said Thursday.

The good news comes to the financially strapped company by way of a $1-million anonymous pledge received last May and a small budget surplus--its first since 1997--for its just-ended 1998-99 make-or-break season. The 1999-2000 season opens Sunday with an outdoor performance in Laguna Beach.

The company attributed the financial turnaround to a series of administrative changes, including handing over the artistic reins to John DeMain. Business matters now are handled exclusively by retired venture capitalist Martin G. Hubbard, who brought new financial know-how to the company when he took over as executive director in 1998.

“We have given the company a focus that it has not had this strongly in the past,” Hubbard said Thursday. ‘But the art comes first. If we’re not doing art well, the other efforts won’t work.”

The announcement comes as the Irvine-based company closes the books on its fiscal year ending Aug. 31. Final budget figures will be announced in the coming weeks, a company spokesman said.

And in an effort to position itself for the future, Opera Pacific on Thursday also announced a three-year campaign to raise a total of $3.5 million.

Hubbard said funds raised will go toward attracting the opera world’s finest singers, creating state-of-the-art productions, expanding education programs and providing a reserve to further DeMain’s vision of making Orange County a first-class opera destination.

“We want to make the company a vital part of the community from border to border,” DeMain said. “Opera Pacific must have a chance to be up there with the finest, allowing us to be on the cutting edge of opera in the way that top American opera companies are performing at this time.”

Sunday’s concert is an outdoor performance of “Festa Italiana” at Laguna Beach’s Irvine Bowl. That particular venue was chosen, in part, as a way to reach a new audience, according to Kevin Crysler, Opera Pacific’s director of marketing.

The company’s regular season--its 14th--begins thereafter with four productions at the 3,000-seat Orange County Performing Arts Center through April 2000.

In years past, Opera Pacific’s annual $5.5-million production budgets have far exceeded revenue and donations.

Indeed, the company has been in survival mode since posting its last budget surplus of $6,000 in 1997, when Patrick Veitch was general director, handling artistic and business affairs. After 15 months on the job, Veitch left abruptly in December 1997.

In 1998, Hubbard assumed his position on an interim basis for a $1 annual salary, which continues today. Soon thereafter, Hubbard laid off one-third of the company’s staff in an effort to stop the financial hemorrhage.

Now that the company is healthy again, Hubbard says, the sky is the limit.

“Orange County is a vibrant economic entity and a vital community,” he said. “There is no limit as to what we can achieve here artistically. . . . It’s logical that we try to make Opera Pacific one of the best in the country--even in the world.”