The ageless audience

The AUDIENCE for live classical music, theater and dance is, like, dying -- OMG! They're sitting in the dark in the concert hall or theater, aging so fast that their gray hair will be white by intermission. And someday soon, the last of the bunch -- a doddering sourpuss who writes letters to his local newspaper with a fountain pen -- will keel over in his velvet seat, done in by the effort of yelling "Brava!" at a plus-sized soprano.

Although performing arts professionals don't envision the problem in quite such drastic terms, it's generally accepted that the audience for live performing arts is aging at an alarming rate -- and, to paraphrase the prehistoric rock band Led Zeppelin, soon to buy a stairway to heaven.

But like any other panic-inducing assumption, the "graying audience" theory bears examining, much as did the widely quoted -- and since disproved -- "fact" from a 1986 Newsweek article that a single woman over 35 is less likely to get married than to be attacked by terrorists. (Well, at least the poor thing has tickets to the symphony.)

Is it true? Is the audience for live performance really aging, dying and disappearing, never to be replaced? And who is that audience, exactly?

As with the statistic about single women and terrorists, it would be nice to be able to say that the aging of the performing arts audience is a false assumption. The numbers, however, say it's not.

But most performing arts professionals say there's a lot of gray area -- no pun intended -- in this conversation. And most can offer compelling reasons why texting an obituary for live performing arts may be highly premature.

Deborah Borda, president of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Assn., has been hearing the alarms for decades. "When I first started in the business, they said, 'The audience is going to be all old people,' " says Borda, who was formerly executive director of the New York Philharmonic and before that held leadership positions with orchestras in San Francisco, Detroit and St. Paul, Minn. "But if you look at the statistics kept by the American Symphony Orchestra League, you'll see that concert attendance is up throughout the United States. And if you look at the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Walt Disney Concert Hall, we're averaging 92% attendance."

Borda has more reason to be thinking about youth than most: The Philharmonic recently hired Venezuelan wunderkind Gustavo Dudamel to take over as music director in 2009, replacing 50-year-old Esa-Pekka Salonen. Dudamel is 12. Oops, sorry, he's 27; must be the progressive lenses.