Several recent developments have rippled ominously through local theatrical waters like those menacing chords from Jaws promising imminent carnage. Though portending nothing like the feeding frenzy that consumed massive chunks of government, corporate and private donations to arts organizations following 9/11, simultaneous acknowledgments of financial stringencies at Beck Center, Kalliope Stage and Opera Cleveland are sufficiently unnerving to induce administrative lifeguards to start scanning for circling fins.

Of that trio's fiscally motivated measures, Beck's abrupt cancellation of All the Great Books (Abridged), a scheduled November booking, is seemingly the least far-reaching. The move, however, is puzzling, and not really explained by the official excuse that more resources were needed to promote the holiday Beauty and the Beast. Kalliope's problem is more pressing. It's reported that the storefront operation has to shortly raise a sizable sum or go under. This dire circumstance, however, may result less from a general funding malaise than the fact that the current season is the theater's first without the financial guidance of resigned co-founder John Paul Boukis, who apparently was the main man in managing money.

For area music lovers, however, full-blown disaster is already a reality in Opera Cleveland's announcement of staff reductions and a severely truncated 2007-08 second season. Candidly, the attempt to fuse the former Cleveland Opera with Lyric Opera Cleveland has been a botched mess from the onset of merger negotiations, which were rife with backstage rumors of warring boards of directors and a public round of enough administrative hirings, firings and resignations to unhinge a revolving door.

The bollixing began even while joint talks were underway in 2005, when Robert Chumbley, CO's executive director and prime candidate to head the merged company, suddenly resigned for reasons never clarified, leaving CO's and LOC's artistic directors, Leon Major and Jonathon Field, as next likely choices. But, in August '06, Field severed all connections and, after being subsequently named artistic chief in September, Major announced his resignation just three months later, explaining that "My vision for Opera Cleveland diverges from that of the [Board's Artistic] Committee."

Add to the ongoing disarray the trumpeted hiring last fall of Executive Director Jeff Sodowsky as a reputed financial wizard, who was nonetheless summarily dumped last month, along with Judith Ryder, longtime education director, whom many insiders consider an essential contributor to the sustainability of local opera. Then there's the unheralded news that OC's critically applauded principal conductor Richard Buckley, in an apparent cost-cutting, double-duty move, will surrender his baton to new Artistic Director Dean Williamson, who is to conduct the entire 2007-08 schedule.

That tepidly timorous schedule is the clearest indication of the stultifying restructuring of area opera performance that has occurred. La Boheme, The Marriage of Figaro and Hansel and Gretel are all imperishably beautiful compositions, but warhorses so overworked as to incur the wrath of ASPCA chapters everywhere. What they signify is that, intentionally or not, the stodgier Cleveland Opera old guard has staged a coup, swallowing up and totally eliminating the adventurous, sensibly progressive Lyric Opera Cleveland, like a chain store gobbling up a mom-and-pop.

Operatically, this brings us back to square-minus-one, with nine performances a year instead of CO's traditional 12, of a sadly predictable repertory, which would seem to be due less to a fiscal than a philosophical shortfall.