During her visit to the Capital Region last month we shared lunch at Jack’s Oyster House in downtown Albany.  I thought the conversation would be  about opera repertoire and casting (and wondered if I’d be out of my league).  In an unexpected role reversal, I was the one being peppered with questions. Zambello wanted to hear about the local economic and culture scene and to learn where else she should go and who else she should talk to in order to build support for Glimmerglass.

“I’m the artistic director but also the associate development director,” she joked.

Beyond fundraising, another priority is building ties to other cultural and civic organizations with the goal of reaching new audiences. For this coming summer, Zambello is setting in place collaborations with regional groups as diverse as the Baseball Hall of Fame, the Fenimore Art Museum and the Ommegang Brewery, all in Cooperstown, as well as the Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute in Utica and even the local penitentiary (with the notion of getting inmates to help spruce up the grounds).

Opera also came up, of course, but Zambello didn’t give any hint as to what’s in store for future seasons. She said that the programming decisions for her entire three-year contract are in place and that more big name artists can be expected.  The headliner for this coming summer, of course, is Deborah Voigt in “Annie Get Your Gun.” Zambello’s close associations was such major artists was one of the reasons she got the job.

Though Zambello never suggested that the Cooperstown-based company is exactly on the ropes, she conveyed a palpable urgency and determination.  Tight finances, she said, are common throughout the field. “As a director,” she said, “at every company I work at, the question is how to do things better but for less money.”

You can hear more of Zambello’s history and plans for Glimmerglass at the company’s website, which has an audio recording of a talk she gave this summer in Cooperstown.

Photos courtesy Glimmerglass Opera.

For 35 years, Peter Haley has been the Pied Piper of opera in the Capital Region.  As founder of the 400-member Siena Opera Club, he teaches classes on the art form, leads dozens of bus trips every year to performances across the east coast, and organizes European tours.

Preparing for it all means long days immersed in music and logistical details. And Haley doesn’t even get to take the summers off.

That’s because the local opera season is concentrated during the months of July and August.  At the head of the pack is the Lake George Opera at Saratoga, which Haley and his crew call “the home team.” The company launches its 48th season tonight with a new production of “Carmen” and continues on Friday with Donizetti’s “Viva La Mama.” Meanwhile in Cooperstown Glimmerglass Opera’s opening weekend features Puccini’s “Tosca” on Friday and Copland’s “The Tenderland” on Saturday.

Still more opera is ahead at Bard College, Tanglewood, the Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy and Hubbard Hall in Cambridge and the Seagle Colony on Schroon Lake.

The Siena Opera Club will show up in force for most everything.

“They’re enthusiastic and knowledgeable opera-goers,” says Curtis Tucker, artistic director of the Lake George Opera.  “Peter Haley’s leadership of the organization has been extraordinary. He has made the Siena Opera Club an important group, serving individuals, opera companies near and far, and the art form that we love.”

“Our mission it to put people in front of live opera,” says Haley, 70.

That’s also an apt description of Haley’s life purpose.  He’s had sundry other musical pursuits, including 54 years as a church organist, starting in his teens and continuing at various parishes in the region. But opera’s been his primary focus since at least 1975 when he was recruited to teach an appreciation course in the tiny music department at Siena College in Loudonville.

Haley recalls that when he became a full time faculty member there in 1984, “I was the music department, teaching an intro class, music history and introduction to opera.”  He retired five years ago but continues a pace with the club.

According to Haley, the class in opera was surprisingly popular with undergrads, partly since it met just one night a week but was worth three credits. But it also drew a healthy contingent of adult students from the community.  In 1980, the regulars prevailed on Haley to continue offering monthly seminars and to expand the range of excursions.  Bus rides to the Metropolitan Opera have been happening ever since, sometimes a dozen times a season.

“If you live in the Albany area and are a die hard opera fan, it’s the best deal going,” says Deborah Onslow, former president and general manager of WMHT, who’s been a member for about four years. “It allows me to go to New York and not have to spend the night. Sometimes those operas are so long that there’s no hope of catching the late train back.”

For Met performances, members are dropped off at Lincoln Center at 4 p.m., allowing time for a bit of shopping or site seeing as well as dinner before the 8 p.m. curtain.  After the show, they pile into the buses and arrive back at Siena by 1 or 2 a.m.

Membership in the Siena Opera Club is $25 a year for individuals, $40 for families.  Members can pick and chose which performances they’ll attend.  Met tickets, including transportation, are around $150. The advance seminars are free.

“My only regret is that I didn’t learn about it when it first started,” says Roland Hummel of Brunswick.  “I subscribed to the Met for 20 years and took the train. But it’s best to be with other people interested in opera.”

During his 15 years of membership, Hummel has gone on at least a dozen European tours with the club and is looking forward to trip to Spain in the fall.  Though he’s 91 years old, Hummel is not the oldest active member. That distinction goes to John Cetner, age 102.

“It’s the pure pleasure of listening to good music,” says Cetner, who still attends several performances each year. “And Peter is a gem who uses plane language to describe the plots and singers.”

While the membership tilts toward the grey-haired set, vocal students from local high schools and colleges are regularly taken along to performances for free.  Three years ago a partnership was formed with the Opera Club at Lisha Kill Middle School. It consists of students who give up recess to watch opera on DVD and sometimes tag along on the opera club outings.

“Watching the discussions about opera on the bus is my favorite part,” says Lisha Kill band instructor Karen MacWatters. “Suddenly there’s a bunch of crazy noisy kids and the seniors just light right up.”

Quietly presiding over it all is the benevolent Peter Haley.  Also a former critic for the Times Union, Haley is as discerning and experienced a listener as you’ll find, having seen “La Traviata” more than 50 times. But he mostly keeps his opinions to himself.

“I try to respect where my people are and if they’ve had a great time and I haven’t, why bother to say anything,” he explains.  “Though to my friends I’ll bitch up a storm about a bad performance and just let the blood run.”

Without a hint of condescension, Haley continues: “At midnight after we’ve been through an opera and I’m checking people onto the bus, someone will say ‘Wasn’t that wonderful?’ And I’ll just smile.  My pleasure is making pleasure for other people.”

Originally appeared in Times Union.

Photos: Cindy Schultz, Times Union

The internationally known opera director Francesca Zambello has been named the new general and artistic director of Glimmerglass Opera

“Francesca Zambello brings a wealth of experience.  She will take the company to a new level of excellence,” said Elizabeth Eveillard, Chair of the Board of Trustees of Glimmerglass Board.

“It is a great honor and personal pleasure to be invited to lead the company,” said Zambello in a press statement. Having previously directed one Glimmerglass production, Gluck’s “Iphigenie en Tauride” in 1997, Zambello recalled finding “a vibrant theater and a company renowned for innovative productions as well as a training ground for all disciplines set in stunningly beautiful surroundings.”

Zambello has worked at all of the world’s major opera houses including the Metropolitan Opera, Covenant Garden and La Scala. She is currently an artistic advisor to the San Francisco Opera where she is directing a new “Ring” cycle.  Her theatrical credits apart from opera include a massive outdoor production of “West Side Story” for the Bregenz Festival in Austria and Disney’s “The Little Mermaid,” which closed last August after an 18-month Broadway run.  Her stagings are considered fresh and insightful, but not particularly avant garde or extreme.

What Zambello does not bring to the company is any apparent administrative or fundraising experience, having never held a permanent leadership post at an arts organization.  This is in contrast to her two predecessors, who apart from selecting the annual slate of operas focused primarily on administration.   Paul Kellogg ran the company almost from its inception through 2005 and held a concurrent post at New York City Opera for the last years of his tenure. MacLeod’s experience was in orchestral and festival management.

Zambello will presumably direct opera at Glimmerglass, but still to be determined is how many commitments away from company she will maintain. A chronology of her recent work listed on her web site  shows she is credited with 10 to 15 new productions and revivals per year.  While 2011 will be her first season at the helm of Glimmerglass, her “Ring” cycle for the San Francisco Opera is slated to run June 14-July 3 that same summer.

Though born of American parents, Zambello, 54, was raised in Europe and speaks French, Italian, German and Russian.  With her companion, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and critic Manuela Holterhoff, she maintains homes in New York, London and in the lower Hudson Valley near New Paltz.

Previously on MyBigGayEars:

Francesca Zambello, Standing up to armies, singers, waiters (2004)

Below are shots of a few Zambellow productions, by Ken Howard (from www.francescazambello.com)

Billy Budd, Pittsburgh Opera, 2007:

The Little Prince, San Francisco Opera, 2008:

An American Tragedy, Metropolitan Opera, 2005:

A simple “No, thanks” would have sufficed.

I’d actually forgotten about that, having put out of my mind some of the stormier aspects of bringing to market that title and the two volumes of “Gay American Composers” discs at CRI.  But Laura and I have remained friends for years and she herself reminded me of the letter about a year ago when we had a little reunion at Symphony Space.

The occasion was the premiere of David Del Tredici’s song cycle “My Favorite Penis Poems,” which Laura had programmed in her capacity as music curator. (The most startling aspect of that event, by the way, certainly wasn’t David’s typically eloquent music, nor the two singers performing at times in their underwear. No, it  was approaching the venue on Broadway and seeing “PENIS POEMS” on the big bright lighted ribbon of a marquee.)

A couple of months ago when the New York Times announced that Laura had been named the new artistic director of Symphony Space, succeeding the illustrious Isaiah Sheffer, I hesitated to put her on this website about (out) GLTB artists in classical music. But recently Laura contacted me, praised the site, and said she wanted to be on it.  With pleasure.

Though she doesn’t officially take the reigns of Symphony Space until July 2010, Laura already has had a broad influence in the programming decisions and she’s kindly pointed out a few of the more queer-friendly events coming up, including:

A concert (earlier this month) of Gavin Creel, star of the current Broadway revival of “Hair”

Another Del Tredici premiere, written for guitarist David Leisner on April 29, 2010.

A recital of the all-female Colorado Quartet on May 7, 2010.

“I have been trying to reach out to the gay arts community in NY to get them to pay attention,” emails Laura, adding that Symphony Space also shows lots of operas in HD.

As for Laura Kaminsky the composer, she’s at work on a string of new pieces including a quartet for the Cassatt, which will be part of an all-Kaminsky program at the Greenwich House on April 15.  How she has time to run Symphony Space, write music and teach at SUNY Purchase is a wonder, but she also makes time for a girl friend, the artist Rebecca Allan.

Following recommendations of friends, he spent that summer in the young artists program at the Seagle Music Colony outside the little Adirondack village of Schroon Lake in Essex County about 90 miles north of Albany.  Founded in 1915 by renowned baritone Oscar Seagle, the colony has offered generations of young singers a haven to study and grow before venturing on to professional careers.  It’s transformed Darren Woods’ life at least a couple of times now.

Woods did go on to a respectable singing career, performing with the New York City Opera and numerous other companies. But it was the role of J. Pierrepont Finch, the deft wheeler dealer in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” which he played during that one summer at the Seagle Colony, that really pointed to how Woods would ultimately make his mark in the operatic world.

First, in 1996 Woods returned to Schroon Lake to take a one-season appointment as general director of the Colony. He has remained its guiding force ever since and is widely credited with transforming an organization that was on the brink of closure.

Next, in 1999, Woods ended his performing career to become head of the Shreveport Opera in Louisiana. In a tenure of just 24 months he also saved that outfit from near extension.  And as general director of the Fort Worth Opera since July 2001, Woods has again brought vigor to a company once written off as provincial and moribund.  In a profile of Woods in its July issue, Opera News Magazine referred to his “national presence” and called him a “turnaround master.”

In addition to his duties in Fort Worth, Woods regularly gives master classes at universities across the country and frequently serves as a judge of auditions for the Metropolitan Opera National Council, the Richard Tucker Foundation, and other organizations. But he still summers at the Seagle Colony, where he now holds the title of artistic director. We spoke recently over coffee in Sarataga Springs.

“Opera is in me to the corps of my being,” he says. “I’m a servant to the art form.”

Such lofty language might suggest that Woods is working from some lyric libretto and longs to be back on stage. But his pronouncements are given with a sincere and matter of fact tone and spill out of him as fast as a Rossini overture.  Whether its identifying and encouraging good singers, knowing the vast operatic repertoire, or finessing rich folks out of their money, Woods seems always on his game.  His respective companies are the beneficiaries.

The year he took the reigns of the Seagle Colony, it gave three staged productions over five weeks, and operated on a budget of roughly $30,000.  This year, there are six productions, a nine-week season and a budget of nearly $575,000.

One of Woods’ first outreach efforts for Seagle was to churches — offering free music on Sunday mornings. “Mr. Seagle belonged to the Community Church and we provided soloists there since time immemorial,” explains Woods. “I thought, well why not sing in the Catholic Church too? I walked over and there were like a 1,000 people, while the Community Church had about 40. Soon the priest was announcing our performance schedule.  Now we sing at so many churches, everywhere from Putnam to Keene Valley, we can only provide (each congregation) about two Sundays per season.”

Education was Woods’ first focus in Shreveport. “I dreamed up a program to take opera to little kids in the sticks where there were no arts,” he recalls. “I made up a study guide and a brochure and we got literally $300,000 worth of bookings. So then I hired three singers and a director and we had the ‘Piped Piper’ and ‘Little Red Ridinghood’ and did everything I had laid out in the brochure. And it underwrote the mainstage productions.”

Though the job in Louisiana paid considerably less than he had been making as a singer, Woods thought the experience could serve as the equivalent to a masters degree in arts management. By the time Fort Worth came calling, he had developed considerable confidence.

“I went through a four-hour interview and was blatantly honest about what I knew of the company. The quality was in the tank,” he says. He went back to Shreveport thinking that was that.

Some six weeks later, in the midst of a summer at Seagle, he got a call back. This time, he spoke not just of impressions but gave assessments based on research.  “I said your repertoire here is old school and boring and if all you want to do is the top 20 operas just send me home now. You’ve not done Handel or Britten or anything 20th century except ‘Turnadot’ and that hardly counts. Plus you can’t afford the season you planned.”

In addition to the tough talk, he also passed around copies of a five-year plan.  And he got the job.

Woods has countless stories, both amusing and horrific, about rebuilding the board and the nearly 24-hour charm offensive it takes to raise enough funds to keep an opera company in the black.  But his results speak for themselves. He’s grown the company from a $2 million budget to the current level of about $4.5 million.

In 2007, with support from the local chamber of commerce, the Fort Worth Opera abandoned its traditional spring and fall seasons and concentrated its efforts into a compacted two-week “festival season.”  This past May, the lineup featured Bizet’s “Carmen,” Rossini’s “La Cenerentola” and “Dead Man Walking,” an acclaimed 2000 adaptation by Jack Heggie of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Sr. Helen Prejean about counseling a death row inmate.

After the season concluded, Scott Cantrell of the Dallas Morning News (former staff writer for the Times Union and a notoriously tough critic), wrote, “Fort Worth Opera has become one of the country’s premier opera festivals. No kidding… Give the credit to Darren K. Woods, who eight years ago took over the fragmented mess that was Fort Worth Opera.”

The recent Opera News article about Woods went further and voiced something that others in the field also foresee:  that in the coming years, Woods will likely be heading up one of the country’s major opera houses, such as Seattle, San Francisco or Houston.

While not dismissing the talk, Woods puts it as only a singer could: “There are some high notes I’ve still not hit.”

Yet he assured me that his connection to the Seagle Colony will endure.  With its centennial coming up in six years, some in Schroon Lake are talking of building a new theater.  Woods wants to build an endowment that will keep the program’s focus on young singers. And as the saying goes, he’s put his money where his (very active) mouth is. “This place is in my will,” he says.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Times Union.

Though duties in his new post are varied, from working with street cleaning crews to organizing restaurant nights, Weidrich’s immediate attention has gone to Art on Lark, the annual day of exhibitions, demonstrations and sales on the sidewalks of the main thoroughfare in Albany’s Center Square that takes place Saturday afternoon.

“Lark Street is the heart of the arts in Albany, and it’s becoming the capital of the arts for the whole Capital Region,” says Weidrich. Citing the recent start of gallery nights in Troy and Schenectady, he adds, “First Friday created a ripple effect that all comes back to Lark Street.”

Much of it also comes back to Weidrich, 34, who’s lived in Albany since 2003 and in Center Square since 2005. He’s a native of Buffalo and holds a bachelor’s of fine arts degree from Syracuse University. To join the BID, he left a position as director of technical services and office manager of the Albany law firm Green and Seifter.

Weidrich’s hiring might be viewed as a new acknowledgment by the Lark Street BID that the arts can be a key to vitality in the region, especially since his two predecessors had backgrounds in real estate management and architecture. But working with the arts community actually dates to the organization’s earliest days.

Art on Lark was the first activity that the Lark Street BID produced after its establishment in 1996. Initially, artists were invited to show art along the avenue every Sunday afternoon for most of the summer. In subsequent years, the plan was retrenched to one Saturday afternoon in early June, with exhibitors dispersed on Lark Street between Washington and Madison avenues.

Although weather is always an unknown factor, registrations have held steady in recent years at about 70 exhibitors, who pay $35 for a 10-foot-square space. Up to 5,000 people are expected to attend this year.

“Art on Lark is my favorite show,” says potter Mary Sanza. “The (other) artists are fun to be with, and the crowds are usually an interesting mix of people. I have a couple of repeat customers, who I enjoy seeing year after year.”

Weidrich says that in addition to the independent exhibitors, this year’s fair will continue some traditions and also include some new offerings.

The People’s Choice exhibit will return for a second year to the Upstate Artists Guild, where viewers of a special exhibit vote with ballots for their favorite pieces of art. Last year, more than 40 artists participated, paying $5 to show up to two pieces each.

New this year will be the closure of two side streets for special activities. On Lancaster Street there will be a chalk art contest. And Hudson Avenue will be the site of “Creative Chaos,” in which artists will demonstrate their working methods, and folks can also try things out themselves, from painting to pottery.

Creative Chaos is presented by eba, the dance and fitness studio that has been a fixture on Hudson just off Lark since 1977. Showing the public how art is made (and not just the finished pieces) was part of the original concept of Art on Lark, says eba founder Maude Baum, who’s also a founding board member of the Lark Street BID. Says Baum, “Sharing in the creative experience of what the artist is doing makes people much more interested in the arts and in pursuing the arts themselves.”

Baum successfully tried out the Creative Chaos idea at last year’s Lark Fest – the annual September event when Lark Street is closed to auto traffic for a full day. It’s the Lark Street BID’s largest production. She says that participatory art-making and an additional stage with more family-friendly entertainers has helped move Lark Fest away from being “a college drinking fair.”

Coordinating First Fridays for the past nine months has allowed Weidrich to arrive at the Lark Street BID with a built-in network of artists, business owners and neighbors. Add to that his other involvements – director of the Romaine Brooks Gallery in the Capital District Gay and Lesbian Community Council building, board member of the Albany Charity for Arts in Education, and contributing writer for Upstate Fashion and Art Magazine – and it doesn’t seem like too much of an exaggeration when he says, “I feel like I know everybody and everybody knows me.”

But thanks to Weidrich’s revealing digital photographs, art gallery goers sometimes also see a rather intimate side of him.

In April, a meeting of Lark Street restaurant owners was held in the UAG gallery. After Weidrich was introduced as the new Lark Street BID director, he rose to speak and quickly realized that a piece of his art – in which he poses nude – was displayed on a nearby wall.

“Everybody was looking back and forth at it and at me,” he recalls with a laugh.

The particular piece, “Tsohanoai” (after the Navajo sun god), was created specifically for UAG’s “Angels and Devils” show and depicts a golden-toned, winged Weidrich against a flaming background. It’s part of an ongoing series of pieces in which original digital photos are fragmented and manipulated into circular patterns, like the effect of a kaleidoscope. Weidrich uses the Hindu term mandala to describe them, and has created about 200 such pieces since 2004.

“At my peak, I could produce a dozen pieces in a week. That’s when I had nothing else to do,” he says. Over the past year, new pieces have been created in the odd late-night hours and mostly for entry in particular shows.

Regarding the nudity, Weidrich says, “I started with some clothing and sort of lost it all along the way.”

Coinciding with Weidrich’s rising prominence in the community, a new and less self-referential direction began to evolve in his art last fall with three pieces created for the “Vacancy” show, a popular annual fundraiser for the Historic Albany Foundation showcasing artistic depictions of empty city buildings. The works maintain the mandala technique but focus on the Wellington Row buildings, across from the State Capitol.

“Michael is pragmatic but also a visionary,” says Jeff Gritsavage, a Center Square resident who is the Lark Street BID’s new president. “The combination of a business sense and artistic creativity is not always the easiest to find, and with Michael we think we have that.”

Weidrich, however, plans to bone up on his fundraising and accounting skills by enrolling in a certificate program in nonprofit management at The College of Saint Rose. He’s already completed a similar post-graduate program at Saint Rose in computer education. Also on his agenda is a greater outreach to the various neighborhood associations that have vested interests in the success of Lark Street.

“I feel a great responsibility to everyone in Center Square,” Weidrich says. “There’s no place like Lark Street. It’s a universe unto itself.”

Originally appeared in the Times Union, June 3, 2007.

Also available in Artists & Activists: Making Culture in New York’s Capital Region.

In the ensuing years, the space has been used for a variety of civic activities, and there have been attempts at having a resident organization, such as a professional repertory theater company, a community theater troupe and a folk music group. But since 2003, when Cohoes native and off-Broadway actor Jim Charles, 47, moved back home with his partner Tony Rivera, 35, a dancer with a background in management, the city of Cohoes has had not just a theater but also a professional theater company.

C-R Productions at the Cohoes Music Hall, as their nonprofit organization is known, has a paid staff of five, an annual lineup of a half dozen musicals and a hopping box office. Between the main productions and a variety of children’s programs, last year’s performances were attended by more than 20,000 people. The company has a base of 1,000 loyal subscribers. Its final production of the season, Stephen Sondheim’s “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.”

“Their performances have brought thousands of people to downtown, where we never had anybody coming to downtown previously,” says Cohoes Mayor John T. McDonald III. “The shows bring people from a radius I never would have dreamed of, like people from the Berkshires. Five or six years ago, I never would have believed that would happen.”

Although Charles and Rivera carry the respective titles (and ensuing duties) of artistic director and producing director, they occasionally appear on stage as well. Charles himself is leading the cast of “Forum.” He plays Pseudolus, the high-strung singing and dancing slave who goes through madcap antics to gain his freedom.

Actually, the role isn’t much of a stretch for Charles, since juggling myriad tasks and maintaining a generally good humor is how he and Rivera run the Music Hall on a daily basis.

“We’ve been here four years, but just now got the go-ahead (from the city’s historic preservation watchdogs) to put some stuff on the walls,” says Charles, standing in the lobby and rolling his eyes at the empty brown walls as only an actor could. “We’re very lucky,” he continues, “the community loves this place.”

Charles and Rivera’s first show in Cohoes was “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight!” a one-night-only revue in March 2002. It was born out of a post-9/11 desire to look beyond life in Manhattan, where the couple had been living.

“We called about 15 of our friends from off-Broadway and television and said we want to do a revue-type show,” recalls Rivera. “We got a cellphone with a 518 area code, and that was our box office.”

“Tonight” included local as well as out-of-town talent, as have all subsequent productions, and met with huge popular success. And it led to Charles and Rivera being courted by new fans in Cohoes.

“I used to call them every other day and say, `Get up here,’” recalls Eunice Antonucci, owner of Smith’s Restaurant. As one of the only dinner spots in Cohoes, Smith’s has benefited from the traffic brought in by the theater, and Antonucci has joined the board of C-R Productions. But she appreciates more than the commerce.

“We like coming out of their shows singing and tapping our feet,” she says. “We need that. This is a depressed area with a loss of the mills and business.”

“We’ve cornered the market on the musical theater fix people need from September to May,” says Rivera, who played Bernardo in the 2004 production of “West Side Story.”

Every season at Cohoes includes a mix of classic Broadway musicals alongside newer staples from the ’80s and ’90s. For example, next year features “Carousel” and “42nd Street” as well as “Little Shop of Horrors” and “Miss Saigon” (but don’t look for a helicopter on the small Cohoes stage).

Each show is rehearsed and mounted in a tight two-week production period and runs for three weekends. A typical cast numbers 12, with half that many more musicians in the pit. Last fall’s “Ragtime” was the largest production to date, with an onstage company of 37.

What sets Cohoes apart from almost any other professional house in the country is the absence of amplification. In contrast to today’s Broadway, where the sound is as powerful as at the movies, hearing the natural voices of the performers re-emphasizes the intimacy and immediacy of live theater.

“When Jim first told me it was an acoustic house, I said, `You’re kidding.’ That’s very rare and it means we have to get actors who can handle it,” states music director Michael McAssey. A 20-year veteran of off-Broadway and regional theater, McAssey relocated from Aspen to join the Cohoes team this season. He continues, “In a lot of ways (singing without a mike) is a lost art.”

That observation is borne out every time auditions are held.

“A lot (of young actors) don’t get the concept,” says Charles, “I say, `We’re an acoustic house,’ and they say `What?’”

“C-R Kids” is the umbrella name for a variety of educational activities at the theater. Coming up is a Circus Summer Camp. In December, 3,000 children saw school-day performances of “The Sound of Music.” The January production of “Disney’s High School Musical” featured a local cast of 32 kids, culled from 250 who auditioned.

“We treated them like professionals. We’re not like the high school, where you rehearse for four months,” says Charles, who recalls that his own teenage theatrical ambitions were met with a dearth of local opportunities for training and performance. He’s gratified that one place where he did connect with like-minded souls is still around – the Spenwood School of Dance and Gymnastics.

“You knew from the beginning Jim would do something with the theater, one way or another. He was a showman, he came in that door and you knew,” recalls Margie Pascale, who’s run Spenwood for 45 years and gave Charles his lessons in tap dancing.

When Charles came in the door again, this time as a producer and director, Pascale had no trouble recognizing him. In fact, the two did more than renew acquaintances. Dancers from Spenwood were prominently featured in the revue “Tonight!” and the school’s studios are frequently used for rehearsals of upcoming shows.

C-R Productions has received some of its most substantial funding for its education programs, including a $22,000 grant from the federal No Child Left Behind program to fund after-school enrichment activities for Cohoes middle schoolers. The largest grant to date has been $50,000 from New York state, secured by Ron Canestrari, the majority leader of the state Assembly and former Cohoes mayor. The funds are designated for capital improvements including lights, sound equipment and curtains.

The organizations’ current operating budget stands at around $300,000, with approximately two-thirds of that figure covered by earned income from ticket sales and subscriptions.

The city of Cohoes provides gratis use of the theater and covers the utilities. But the company does pay rent in downtown Cohoes – on a 2,500-square-foot scene shop and seven apartments that house actors. “That’s seven National Grid bills,” says Rivera, who hopes to one day have all operations outside the theater consolidated into one building.

To date, Rivera and Charles have not given themselves salaries, functioning in essence as full-time volunteers. To cover their own living expenses Rivera teaches gymnastics at Spenwood and Charles gives voice lessons to 20 or more students a week.

Except when one of them is performing in a production. Then, something has to be cut from the busy routine. But as they look toward a fifth season and beyond, Rivera and Charles have reached a certain comfort level so that even during the peak of a production period, they’ll take time to leave the theater and have dinner. Carving out personal time will become an even bigger priority, since the couple is taking steps toward adopting a child in the next year.

“We’ve grown into this. … It’s not as consuming at this stage,” says Charles. “We’re in this for the long haul, with our commitment to the city, the community and the building.”

Originally appeared in the Times Union, April 29, 2007.

Also available in Artists & Activists: Making Culture in New York’s Capital Region.