James Levin with his brew crew of volunteer clients, outside the old CPT on Carnegie, January, 1984

The lexan cube that sits next to a chair in David and Carola Bamberger's impeccably clean living room looks like a lottery prop — it's filled with torn ticket stubs. But the retired directors of Cleveland Opera aren't gambling away their retirement. The ticket stubs — more than 28,000 of them — document a local record that's likely to stand for a while: The Bambergers and the opera team they built from scratch sold more tickets to their 1988 production of West Side Story than any opera company has sold for any production in Cleveland.

As the recently retired founders of the company, the Bambergers are part of a wave that has swept over the nation's performing arts landscape like a quiet tsunami: The people who founded arts organizations in the '70s and '80s, and built them into something worth handing off to new leadership, have begun to retire. And the handing-off has been in high gear for a few years now.

Opera Cleveland board president Peter Rubin calls it "the closing of the founders' era." Whatever you call it, the trend has a new crew of directors all having their impact on what Clevelanders have available in the way of dance, drama and music.

As Verb Ballets Executive Director Margaret Carlson says, the trend has impacted cities across the U.S. For most of the country's history, performing arts companies were concentrated in big cities along the coasts. Early in the 20th century wealthy philanthropists founded orchestras and art museums at cities in between, but if you wanted to see dance, or hear opera, or an orchestra dedicated to 20th century music, pickings were pretty slim.

Then came the National Endowment for the Arts, founded in the early '60s, in part to spread culture in places like Cleveland. In the '70s the results became apparent as cities across the country — Cleveland among them — came alive with new organizations. People like the Bambergers, Cleveland Public Theater founder James Levin, Repertory Project founder Susan Miller, the late Ohio Ballet founder Heinz Poll, and Cleveland Chamber Symphony founder Edwin London took up the challenge of building an artistic product, an organization to sustain it, and an audience to buy the tickets. Two or three decades later, inevitably, it was time for the founders to retire or move on.

Under the best of circumstances, such a massive change in leadership would change the city's arts landscape. Their successors would inevitably have different visions, as well as strengths and weaknesses. But especially in Cleveland, timed as the retirement wave was with the departure of major corporate donors and a downturn in the economy, the effect has been to leave a substantially different arts landscape than what was here just five years ago. For the new generation of directors, taking charge has been a trial by fire. Each organization that goes through the transition seems to show a different version of how it can go.

The Bambergers started Cleveland Opera in part because someone asked them to. David came to Ohio to run the opera program in Oberlin from 1972 to 1975. John Heavenrich, a corporate attorney who had just been transferred to Cleveland and was disappointed that the city had no opera company, saw Bamberger's work in Oberlin and, after a performance, asked if he was interested in starting a professional company.

"We didn't know anybody, and we didn't have any money," David Bamberger says. "It seemed like conditions were appropriate for us to start."

The first year the company had a total budget — production costs, salaries, promotions — of $45,000. As they and their audience grew, the company slowly hired better and better-known singers and took opportunities as they came — from the world premiere of Stewart Copeland's opera Holy Blood and Crescent Moon to bringing the Three Tenors to Browns Stadium. When they retired after more than a quarter-century, the Bambergers handed off a company with a budget of $4 million.

Their successor would have big shoes to fill. The board's first choice to take up the challenge was Robert Chumbley, a conductor and composer. Chumbley opened his first season with Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin. As board president Rubin tells it, the man who followed the Bambergers was "so consumed" by the opera's large and complex score that "the business side suffered." Chumbley's tenure lasted less than a year.

Still, Rubin credits Chumbley with putting into motion merger talks with Lyric Opera Cleveland, which, Rubin says, were necessary if either company was to survive. "We had more opera production capacity than demand in Cleveland," he explains.

So the two companies merged in April. Foundations pledged more than $1 million to facilitate the transition, and Rubin promised a "fiscally responsible, revenue-driven business model." Cleveland Opera artistic advisor Leon Major and Lyric Opera Cleveland artistic director Jonathon Field both kept their roles. But the dust has yet to settle. While the board was sorting through resumes to find someone to take charge of the business side, Field resigned from his post. Rubin says the search committee has substantially narrowed a field of more than 60 applicants, and a choice could come at any time.

Whomever he hands the company off to will manage a season of about half the grand opera the city used to enjoy, but should preserve both light and grand operatic production in the city. The success of the merger strategy, however, will be measured by whether the new director can keep the company in business.

Founding directors often drive their organizations with personality, or with special skill sets. James Levin founded Cleveland Public Theater with a plan to be part of the resurgence of an urban neighborhood and produce politically challenging plays. He had done some community theater while studying law at Case, before he went to New York to work as an actor, but back in Cleveland he didn't know anyone in the arts or funding communities. His first production, A Midsummer Night's Dream, was at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo. The show's entire budget was $6,000.

Levin has a quiet and reserved delivery as he tells stories of CPT's early years: Eviction from one performance space just before a show was to open; a legal injunction that gave him permission to reclaim his costumes, props and set "by any means necessary"; and labor — plumbing, electrical work, carpentry — bartered from criminal defendants, his clients, whom he dubbed "the brew crew."

Susan miller "I leveraged my passion."

He wanted to help kindle the spirit and economy of a neighborhood, so he didn't go looking for space downtown or in the suburbs. He recalls coming to Detroit Shoreway to look at the Capitol Theater, but knew upon seeing its raked floor that it wasn't right. Walking around the neighborhood minutes later, he came to a bearded man sitting in a chair on the Detroit Avenue sidewalk who asked, "Are you looking for the space?"

What the man with the serendipitous question showed Levin was a cold storage space with no electricity, heat or plumbing. But at $100 per month the price was right. Levin signed a lease, the brew crew worked its magic, and Cleveland Public Theater had a home.

The budget grew slowly, taking years to reach $100,000. He attracted artists by giving them opportunities to pursue adventurous, risky theater and paying minimal stipends. By the time Levin resigned, he'd built a $1.1 million company acclaimed for its neighborhood activism as well as political and artistic provocation. He had also renovated two theaters, and personally had bought three buildings on adjacent properties, including a church.

"Jim had a real specific way of doing things," says CPT's current executive artistic director Raymond Bobgan, "so the culture had to change when he left. I think Jim was often able to pull things off out of force of personality. He was a big risk-taker. He will imagine big and go for it."

When Levin resigned from CPT in July 2004, his board of trustees and new Executive Director Randy Rollison were left to make big adjustments. CPT was one of 17 organizations in town that went through the Cleveland Foundation's BASICS program — a grant targeted at helping "at risk" companies around the region shape themselves for long-term survival. Through the planning process that went along with the grant, Bobgan says, the post-Levin organization began to catch up to its own growth.

"The organization had grown exponentially, and the culture hadn't grown with it," Bobgan says. "Jim made the organization what it is, but Randy made it possible so that someone else could run it besides him."

But in addition to whatever challenges came with following James Levin, Rollison took the job at an economically challenging time, and for two consecutive seasons had to cut the theater schedule short in the last quarter because of financial difficulty. Bobgan says the company is still about $350,000 in debt, but that it has "stabilized somewhat."

"I've chosen to try to announce a whole season and go for it," he says. "The season looks good right now."

A person could learn a lot about Susan Miller's artistic vision from a party her dance company — the Repertory Project, precursor to Verb Ballets — once threw in an empty lot next to SPACES.

"In the '60s women were burning their bras," Miller says. "We decided that we should burn some toe shoes."

Miller wanted to push boundaries. She had never been part of a dance company, but studied ballet from childhood through college, where she took a liking to the "cool, saturnine" choreography of Merce Cunningham and her teacher — one of Cunningham's dancers — Albert Reid. After teaching on Northeast Ohio's circuit of college and nonprofit dance schools, she eventually landed a job at Cleveland State University, where she founded the Summerdance program. Then she decided to build her own company. The Repertory Project's first concert was in 1987.

Miller recalls organizing fundraisers that helped the fledgling company pay bills and the parties that helped keep the company's and audience's energy level high. She'd coax friends into bringing wine for receptions after performances. Or she'd tell entire audiences at Cain Park that the post-show party was at her house, and that their Repertory Project ticket stub was their ticket to get in. Rallying help for fundraisers, she'd tell friends, "Just because you're bringing the cookies doesn't mean you don't have to pay to get in."

"I leveraged my passion," she says today.

At a time when Cleveland had a big ballet company and Akron had a chamber ballet, she was building something different. She ran the company cooperatively, with dancers involved in decision-making and the board following the artists' lead. But as the company grew and the dancers and trustees changed, the way the company ran had to change, too. Like CPT, the Repertory Project had become successful enough to win one of the Cleveland Foundation's BASICS grants. Miller says it became clear through the process that if the company was to survive, it would need a stronger board that would govern with more formalized policies and business planning than what she had used.

"The best way for me to allow them to become a governing board," Miller says, "was to step aside." So she resigned September 12, 2001.

A year later, the board hired Dr. Margaret Carlson as executive director, and Hernando Cortez — whose resume includes dancing lead roles with Paul Taylor Dance Company, and performing with Mikhail Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project — as artistic director.

Holy Blood The Cleveland Opera gave the world premiere of Stewart Copeland's opera.

Most organizations don't give up their brand equity when they go though a change of leadership. In the case of the Repertory Project, however, taking a new name — Verb Ballets — helped Cortez broaden the repertory to include works by masters like Martha Graham, Paul Taylor and Heinz Poll, as well as members of the company and his own work.

Carlson says that when she was hired, the BASICS planning process had the company's business side well-organized. And she says Miller's ability to organize always impressed her.

Verb doesn't have a subscription season, but has been busy with performances at Ingenuity, Cain Park and parks around the city. This weekend it'll perform at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. In the spring it has a residency at Beck Center, followed by commitments at Playhouse Square and the Cleveland Play House FusionFest. Carlson says the company has made a commitment to keep its budget under $500,000 in order to stay nimble. She and her collaborators talk about whether they'll offer a subscription series, but right now they're using their vagabond schedule to build an audience.

"We're not competing with other arts organizations," she says. "We're competing with the world. TV. Computers. This shift in what people find interesting is just as critical as other factors."

Harpist Jocelyn Chang remembers almost verbatim what she said in a brief speech to mark the retirement of Cleveland Chamber Symphony founder Ed London. "I said all of us thanked him for being our dear teacher and friend and cajoling us for 24 years in the merry making of new music."

After she and a colleague spoke, before the opening notes of what could have been the ensemble's last concert, the musicians walked single-file into the audience to embrace the composer and conductor who'd brought them all together.

London came to Cleveland in 1978 to be chair of the Cleveland State University music department. Two years later he founded the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, programming new music alongside classics.

"We didn't do much the first year," he says in a phone interview. "But the reception was so positive that we kept building. I think we gave one concert the first year. It was a small beginning."

After composers Klaus Roy, Rudolph Bubalo and Howie Smith encouraged him, London started concentrating on new music — particularly new music from Cleveland. Within two to three years, CCS was performing five- and six-concert seasons.

The Cleveland Chamber Symphony was a rare thing, often described as unique in the country — a professional orchestra with a full season of concerts dedicated to performing new music. This mission brought the group support from local, state and national sources, including a plethora of foundations interested in contemporary music. In 23 years, the ensemble performed more than 170 world premieres, most of which the orchestra itself had commissioned. It was a rare outlet for composers anywhere, and Cleveland composers, including students, were first in line to get their work played.

When London retired from CSU, however, the orchestra's future became uncertain. London says he thought someone else on the faculty would take up the orchestra as an ongoing project, but that would not be the case. Without sponsorship from a faculty member, the orchestra's ties to the university were severed. And because of the relationship with CSU, the orchestra wasn't prepared to go out on its own; it had never incorporated independently, and didn't have a formal board of trustees.

But in a twist that bears testament to the resourcefulness and tenacity of artists, the musicians themselves took up the charge. Pianist Mark George made a pitch to Baldwin Wallace Conservatory's Catherine Jarjisian, and in 2004, the ensemble was booked for a concert in BW's FOCUS Festival of new music. George became president of the orchestra's board of trustees, and Steven Smith, who conducted the last concert at CSU, took on that role permanently. Over the last two years, the orchestra's schedule and its relationship with Baldwin Wallace has grown — but this time, George says, the group is incorporated.

As part of their comeback, the musicians formed a strategic planning committee three years ago, and are in the second year of a five-year plan. With one concert in 2004, and two in the '05-'06 season, they recently announced a series of four concerts this year, beginning in January.

Smith says he "jumped at the chance" to lead the group London built. The musicians had developed rare expertise handling the constant stream of challenging scores, and the orchestra had become a nationally important outlet for the music of our time.

"What Ed did is to create an ensemble that is a fantastic resource for people writing music today — something that transcended Cleveland and got the attention of composers around the world."

And that's a tradition worth continuing for at least another generation.

mgill@freetimes.com