Cue the fat lady.
Representatives for the New York City Opera’s orchestra and singers said the musicians have given the go-ahead for a possible strike after negotiations broke down over money and job security.
The unions are threatening to bring the curtain down on the company’s weeklong run of Verdi’s “La Traviata,” scheduled to open Feb. 12 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Union members said that the company’s proposal would turn them into freelancers making a mere fraction of what they earned in the past.
The company, meanwhile, says it’s in such dire straits that it had to abandon its Lincoln Center home and slash its staff by 40 percent.
“If City Opera continues down this path, the singers have no alternative but to strike,” Alan Gordon, national executive director of the American Guild of Musical Artists, said in a statement posted on the union’s Web site.
He said that without the professionals, the operas would be performed with “volunteer and student singers.”
The opera’s general manager, George Steel, said a strike would be sadder than Pagliacci, the forlorn clown.
He said a growing deficit and declining attendance have already taken their toll, and have forced him to cut the company’s budget from $31 million to $13 million.
Last spring, the company announced it would stop performing at Lincoln Center and rent space instead at a number of different venues around the city. This season, it’s scheduled tol perform at BAM and John Jay College.
“This impasse is a deep disappointment to all of us. But we hope the unions can put aside rancor and political theater and find a way to move forward—we need to do the work New Yorkers expect of us,” Steel said in his own statement.
“We will move heaven and earth to mount a spectacular season, one way or another.”
But Gordon said Steel has done little to cut one of the company’s biggest expenses — Steel’s salary. His paycheck actually was reduced from $360,000 to $324,000 a year, according to an opera spokeswoman.
But union workers are unimpressed, considering singers would earn approximately $4,000 a year and lose their health insurance under the company’s proposal, Gordon said.
Last season, they earned about $40,000 a year with year-round company-paid health insurance.