Slow Ticket Sales Force Scale-Back of AIDS Benefit

Claiming that the show will definitely go on, organizers of an AIDS benefit featuring Soviet ballerina Maya Plisetskaya and leading opera singers from around the world said Friday that they have sold only one-sixth of the tickets for Sunday’s event in Pasadena and have had to scale back the gala because of a failure to raise money.

Ticket prices have been reduced but if sales don’t improve, organizers said that instead of raising $500,000 for the AIDS Hospice Foundation as they had hoped, they could wind up losing tens of thousands of dollars.

“We’ve still got a damn good show, but we’ve had to cut, cut, cut, cut, cut,” said Alan Sievewright, producer of the International Gala of Opera and Ballet benefit, scheduled for 7 p.m. Sunday at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium.

A variety of factors was being blamed for the situation, including charges of public disinterest in AIDS, but there was also finger-pointing among the organizers over how the event was managed.

“I’ve never experienced anything in Europe the way I’ve experienced it here,” said Sievewright, who has been presenting operas and concerts in England for two decades but never in the United States. “I’ve had some wonderful help, but nobody seems to give a damn about anything to do with AIDS.”

According to organizers, among those scheduled to appear Sunday are American sopranos Martina Arroyo and Veronika Diamond, Hungarian soprano Sylvia Sass, English soprano Elizabeth Connell, and Louis Lebherz of the Los Angeles Music Center Opera.

Bolshoi Ballet dancers Vitali Artyushkin and Alla Khaniashvili-Artyushkina will perform two pas de deux, and Plisetskaya, 65, will dance her signature piece, “The Dying Swan.” Actress Jane Seymour will host the program.

But organizers said they could not afford air fare for Spanish soprano Victoria de los Angeles, German soprano Marika Napier, Danish ballet dancer Peter Schaufuss and members of the English National Ballet (formerly the London Festival Ballet), and Greek tenor Mario Frangoulis, a 24-year-old newcomer who was to make his U.S. debut, all previously announced participants.

(Ballerina Lynn Seymour, formerly principal at the Royal Ballet of London, will not appear because of an ankle injury, officials said.)

In some instances, more ambitious staging also had to be abandoned, said Roland Brown, a member of From the Heart, an independent committee that raises money for the AIDS Hospice Foundation and is helping to organize Sunday’s event.

Tickets for the event, originally priced from $25 to $300, have now been reduced to $25, $50 and $100. A $500 ticket includes a post-performance reception, Brown said.

Committee treasurer Patricia Naidorf said that only 500 tickets for the 3,000-seat auditorium had been sold as of Friday morning.

One corporation has donated money: 20th Century Fox, at Brown’s request, gave $5,000 for scenery by artist David Hockney that was commissioned for the gala, she said. And some plane tickets, hotel rooms and a special flooring for the ballet dancers have also been donated. In addition, From the Heart committee members have given $50,000 out of their own pockets, Naidorf said.

But expenses (including $45,000 for the Pasadena Symphony, pay for stage hands and theater rental) total about $190,000 so far and if ticket sales--which totaled $50,000 as of Friday morning--don’t pick up, Naidorf said, the organizers stand to lose tens of thousands of dollars.

“People say this is a late town, that people don’t buy tickets until the last minute,” she said. “I hope that’s true.”

Sievewright and Brown, who have produced benefits together before, attributed their money problems to a combination of factors, including broken promises of funding and disinterest in the cause.

One corporation had “said they would present $15,000, and $1,000 came,” said Sievewright, refusing to name the firm. “I think a lot of people let the (AIDS foundation) down in a bad way. I’m horrified.”

Brown, whose West Hollywood home serves as the organizers’ headquarters, said he wasn’t sure whether support for AIDS was currently “fashionable.” “Ecology is fashionable at the moment.”

But organizers laid much of the blame to Conway and Associates, a Los Angeles event-management firm hired by the From the Heart committee. Brown charged that the firm, which has organized fund-raisers for Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), other individuals and ventures, failed miserably in publicizing the event, and in finding a single major corporate funder and support from individuals.

Conway and Associates “just didn’t know what they were doing and they took on something which they did not understand,” Brown said.

Conway vice president Robert Ellis refuted these accusations, saying that the firm was hired only to assist the effort and that the “guts and the heart of any fund-raiser, mailings of invitations to the event,” were handled entirely by the From the Heart Committee.

As for corporate sponsorship, Ellis said that corporations determine their major contributions “a year in advance. We’ve only been on this job for 90 days. . . . And we are not responsible for any ticket sales. All tickets sales were handled through Ticketron and the (Pasadena Civic Auditorium) box office.”