Joan Lounsbery returning to the Skylight

Joan Lounsbery served the Skylight Opera Theatre as managing director from 1992-1999; she will take up that job again, on a temporary basis, on Aug. 24.

Lounsbery, though, has no intention of giving up her California retirement to manage the Skylight on a continuing basis.

“A lot of it has to do with succession,” she said over the phone from Santa Rosa. “If we can hire a new managing director really fast, I’ll go home. I said from the start that I want to be gone before the first big winter storm. I can’t imagine I’ll stay for more than three months. I don’t want the job, I just want to help. I’ll do what I can in this short period of time.”

Back in the 1990s, Lounsbery succeeded Colin Cabot as managing director. Cabot stayed on for several years as a volunteer. The two of them played key roles in the Skylight’s transition from the late Clair Richardson’s personal project to Milwaukee institution and anchor of the ascendant Historic Third Ward.

Lounsbery and Cabot were close then, and they’ve become close again recently, though she has long since moved to Santa Rosa, California, and he has long since moved to New Hampshire. When the Skylight hit financial and public relations icebergs in June, Lounsbery and Cabot went into emergency mode and close consultation.

Cabot has already taken over as unpaid artistic director. Lounsbery, 66, will soon replace Eric Dillner as managing director. Dillner became the center of controversy after the abrupt firing of artistic director William Theisen and four others on June 16. Dillner has since resigned, as did board president Suzanne Hefty. Terrance Kurtenbach is now interim president.

Cabot asked Lounsbery to come to Milwaukee to help, and she accepted. Kurtenbach took her offer to the board of directors. After a disastrous summer in which subscription sales plummeted and dozens of artists withdrew from their contracts, the board was ready to accept help from two popular, iconic figures from the company’s past.

Lounsbery said she’s been spending four to five hours a day on Skylight business for some time. She’s been poring over financial reports and working with Cabot to draw up a recovery plan.

Lounsbery wouldn’t share that plan; it is a work in progress and has not been shown to board members. She and Cabot will formally present it to the full board of directors the day Lounsbery arrives in Milwaukee.

“It addresses finance, marketing, development, building issues, succession, the cabaret, everything,” she said.

Lounsbery will inherit a daunting in-box containing the recovery plan; an urgent search for a successor; re-ignition of the subscription campaign; a reduced and shell-shocked staff; a bank line of credit approaching its limit; an economy that has shrunk the value of the endowment and made potential donors stingier; a building in need of expensive maintenance; and a 2010-2011 season that must be put in place very soon.

“We have a giant money issue that has only gotten worse,” she said. “We have two big campaigns going to address that issue, and they are the top priority. We had a good year at the box office last year, but we lost two months this summer and we have to make that up.

“The message I want to get out is that now, more than ever, is the time to support the Skylight. I’m so proud that this company has held its artistic product together. The ‘Barber’ that opens in four weeks will be dynamite. The company coming back to the Skylight everyone knows, the company that makes people want to buy tickets.”

Dillner and the Skylight board got into trouble with artists and the Skylight’s audience mainly by trying to cut cost by rolling Theisen’s job into Dillner’s. Many opera companies consolidate the managing and artistic director positions in that way, but those companies do not produce musical comedy, as the Skylight does, or stage more than 100 performances a year. None of them produces every show from scratch or puts so much stock in the theatrical part of the equation.

Lounsbery personally believes that the two top jobs cannot be merged at the Skylight. And she thinks that the next managing director ought to be someone with a history with the company and thus an understanding of its unique nature. She pointed out that in company’s 50 years, just one managing director had no prior Skylight history: Dillner.

“The Skylight is a quirky little guy,” she said. “It needs a particular kind of attention. It’s not like other companies.”