West Bay Opera’s mission is to bring professional quality opera to the communities of the Peninsula at an affordable price, maintaining a regular season of at least three fully staged productions, while supporting emerging local talent in all fields related to opera and encouraging community participation and support.

Description:
West Bay Opera is a smaller regional opera company with a 52-year history of uninterrupted programming and a reputation for high standards. The company presents 3 fully-staged productions each season. The season extends from October through May. The company has an annual budget of under $600,000, and it attained non-profit corporation status several decades ago. It draws its audience primarily from the Peninsula. West Bay Opera productions include a significant amount of volunteer labor, in addition to employing professional directors, conductors, designers, singers and orchestra musicians. Typically about 75 volunteers are involved in each production. The West Bay Opera Guild helps to support and promote the company. West Bay Opera also runs the Opera In The Schools (OITS) program, which reaches 20,000 schoolchildren every year with abridged productions of real operas. The children participate in the productions. This is a major component of our audience development program. We have a long-standing subscriber base that needs to be re-energized a bit, and we need to expand our Board and develop more effective corporate, foundation and donor outreach programs. We also need to improve our ability to generate bequests and replenish our endowment.

History:
When Henry and Maria Holt founded West Bay Opera, in 1955, the San Francisco Opera had been well established for many decades. West Bay Opera was not created to compete with the San Francisco Opera. It was envisioned as a community-oriented company that would expose people to opera, and draw them to the art form. From its inception, the approach was to offer people in the communities of the Peninsula opportunities to volunteer for many artistic and support activities necessary for producing operas, from singing in the chorus to building and painting sets, to ushering; and transform all that positive energy into shoestring productions that everyone could be proud of. In short: bring the community to the opera, so that we can bring opera to the community. Henry Holt understood the difficulties that young singers faced in getting cast by professional companies. For most aspiring singers, opportunities to perform in costume and with an orchestra were very rare, and the chances for a career break without having stage experience were not good at all. He decided to focus on providing such opportunities to young local singers. He also set out to attract local conductors, stage directors and set, costume and lighting designers who had a genuine interest in opera but needed experience producing operatic works. Over the last 50 years, this approach generated a prodigious body of volunteers from the Peninsula, and a very respectable roster of artists who were able to parlay their starting roles at West Bay Opera into professional operatic careers. Thus, well before marketing consultants had even discovered opera, West Bay Opera was addressing the two crucial ends of the business: developing community support and new audiences through community involvement, and encouraging the emergence of new operatic talent, including not just singers, but directors, conductors and designers.
Today, we are recognized as the Peninsula’s own opera company. We own the building where we operate, in Palo Alto, and our finances are relatively stable. We exist thanks to the interest and support of a large number of individuals and families in Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Menlo Park and other Peninsula communities. And we continue to provide a tremendously valuable opportunity to up-and-coming singers to learn and perform a role in a fully staged production, in a 420-seat theater that is ideally suited to the performance of operas. The Company has evolved, and over the past two decades we have increased our resources, enabling us to pay singers, who used to perform for free, establishing a tenured orchestra, retained 4 part time staff members, including a General Director, Production Manager, Box Office Manager and Costume Shop Manager, and vastly improved the artistic quality of our productions. The Company has also, over the years, established a reputation for adventuresome programming, managing to stage 20th century works, including some by local composers, to critical acclaim.
The aspiring local singers of today regard West Bay Opera as an excellent place to develop and try out a new role in a fully staged production, and under the guidance of very talented professional directors and conductors.
We are still not competing with the San Francisco Opera, but many of our regular patrons have come to prefer the freshness of our productions, the immediacy provided by the cozy Lucie Stern Theatre, where we have been performing for decades, and the convenience of having us in Palo Alto.

Contact people:

Jose Luis Moscovich, Executive Director, (phone), (email) Michele Sullivan, Operations Manager, (phone), (email) Pat Campbell, President, (phone), (email)

Main office number: (650) 843-3901
Office fax number: (650) 843-3905

Address:

221 Lambert Ave Palo Alto, CA 94306 (See a map)

Web Site: http://www.WBOpera.org

Directions:

This is approximately 6 blocks southeast of El Camino and Page Mill Road in Palo Alto. Take El Camino southbound past Page Mill. Turn left onto Lamber Ave. Go to the end of the street. We're on the right side,. . . (more)   Nearest Metro/Subway Stop: California Station (Caltrain),   Walk distance (in minutes): 10

Miscellaneous Information

Besides English, which languages are spoken at your agency?
	French, German, Italian, Spanish
What is the minimum age for volunteers at your agency?
	18
Is your agency wheelchair accessible?
	Yes
Does your agency have the capacity to host groups of more than 10?
	Yes
Does your agency have the capacity to host groups of more than 20?
	No