KAISER OVERSEES REOPENING OF ROYAL OPERA HOUSE.

LONDON--Michael Kaiser has a triumph on his hands. The extension and renovation of one of the great theaters of the world, the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, will be completed, more or less financially in the black, in time for the December opening. For this, the smiling forty-five-year-old New Yorker is currently London's favorite American and is even a hero in London's traditionally testy press.

In a recent interview in his office, Kaiser exuded friendly confidence, yet even his charm has a well-polished, perhaps well-calculated diffidence. Kaiser is the recently appointed executive director of the Royal Opera House, one of Britain's grandest cultural institutions and, with constant accusations of mismanagement and elitism, certainly its most controversial.

When he arrived in London last November, Kaiser was an unknown. He had left his job as executive director of American Ballet Theatre lauded for effecting that company's financial turnaround. He had sold his New York City apartment and given away his best friend--a seventeen-year-old miniature dachshund called Nicole, barred from entry by the rabies-mad British immigration rules.

On the day he started work, the first newspaper he picked up had the cheering headline, "Chaos Reigns as Kaiser Enters Opera House." He learned that five of the leading male dancers of the Royal Ballet had resigned that morning to join Tetsuya Kumakawa, who had already left the company and was starting a new company in Tokyo. Moreover, the entire Royal Ballet was thinking of leaving Covent Garden's sinking ship and starting out on its own--a provision perfectly possible, if almost perfectly unthinkable, under the terms of the Royal Ballet's own Royal Charter.

Covent Garden's most prominent artist, music director, and chief conductor of the Royal Opera, Sir Bernard Haitink, had just resigned, with the sad remark that there was "little point in being music director when there is no music to conduct." The opera's administrative head, Nicholas Payne, was also leaving to head the English National Opera, Covent Garden's pushy and much-admired rival located a few streets away. Looking out of his rather dingy office, Kaiser could see nothing but workmen struggling over the rebuilding of what was now his opera house.

Kaiser's task, to balance the budget and ensure that the house would reopen on time after a thirty-month closure--during which it was refurbished, largely rebuilt, and vastly extended over a 2.5-acre site at a cost of $345 million--was widely regarded as a mission impossible.

Kaiser's immediate predecessor, Mary Allen, had been fired after about eighteen months and left describing the position as "a dog of a job," while her own predecessor, Genista Macintosh, coming from the Royal National Theatre, to which she later smartly returned, stayed only five months, saying that she thought she might become ill if she continued. But with his American experience and a work ethic that has him arriving at the office at 6:30 a.m. and leaving at the evening performance's final curtain, Kaiser's qualifications were markedly better than most in Britain had realized at his appointment.

He had strong musical interests--he once unsuccessfully tried to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather, a longtime violinist with the New York Philharmonic. Then Kaiser hoped for a career as a professional singer. He was also a successful management consultant. He moved into arts management, and turned around the finances of three American dance companies, Kansas City Ballet, Alvin Alley American Dance Theater, and ABT--"those three alone should earn me the Dance Magazine Award," he said, not quite jokingly--and worked with such organizations as New York's Morgan Library and Cape Town, South Africa's, Market Theatre.

And he performed the necessary Covent Garden miracle. The house is expected to open on time. A brand new 420-seat experimental Studio Theatre--which the Covent Garden board of directors suggested could not be opened on time--will also be opened. A deficit of $32 million has been effectively wiped out, so the opera house opens its new doors with a balanced budget. Another debt of $32 million, due on the rebuilding project, has been reduced to $27 million. This will largely be wiped out by selling off adjacent property, which has been made redundant by the space in the new building. By the end of September, Sir Colin Southgate, chairman of the Royal Opera House, was able to announce that it was within $8 million of the $160 million targeted to be raised from private sources.

Kaiser himself has initiated a deal with the Arts Council of England (the appropriate government subsidizing body) for a slightly increased grant (about $32 million a year) but has promised not to come back for more--a total change from the Oliver Twist mentality of his predecessors.

How did he pull it off? Kaiser is cool in response to the question. "Things were not as bad as they thought they were," he says. "The disaster was a matter of perception. People were looking back and finger-pointing at one another instead of looking forward." He also started fundraising, his specialty, in an all-American fashion, and has whittled down administrative costs. As he says, "I'm a nice person. It is not my style to come in cutting and slashing." However, there were 850 administrative personnel on the staff at the closure. The opera house will be reopening with 540.

He has not touched the artistic product--"never cut corners on the thing you have to sell"--and he has persuaded Haitink to stay on until 2002, when the thirty-nine-year-old British-born, Italian-American conductor Antonio Pappano comes in from Brussels. However, Sir Anthony Dowell resigns as Royal Ballet chief in 2001, and one of the Opera House's next priorities is to find a replacement. The disarmingly frank Kaiser was generally cagey about any possible con tenders, even off the record. The job was first publicly advertised at the beginning of September. Other, perhaps easier, appointments are being filled: In September it was announced that Elaine Padmore, artistic director of the Royal Danish Opera for the past six years, was coming on board to administer the opera.

Apart from the various cast changes, Kaiser remains insistent on making the entire Opera House and its companies more open to the public in terms of education and access. Cheaper seats, especially on weekends, is one proposal. Using the Studio Theatre for certain free performances is another. He has done away with decades of Covent Garden bureaucracy--including many of its multiple advisory boards--and is intent that both the Royal Ballet and the Royal Opera should regain their positions on the world scene and also be innovative leaders. Can he do it? If ABT is evidence, the capable Kaiser--linked with the right artistic team--can work minor miracles. Hopefully, this will continue even after his present honeymoon period with the British public and, more especially, the British press, is over when the Opera House itself moves into action.