ON STAGE

"The Marriage of Figaro"

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Atlanta Opera. 8 p.m. Saturday ; 7:30 p.m. April 29; 8 p.m. May 2; 3 p.m. May 4. Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre. 404-817-8700. www.atlantaopera.org.

You could call Jim and Peggy Lowman "opera tourists."

Longtime season ticket holders to the Atlanta Opera, the DeKalb County couple also take one or two trips a year to see opera in such cities as Berlin and Prague. Last month, they went to New York to see four Metropolitan Opera productions, including the critically acclaimed but famously ill-fated "Tristan und Isolde," which was plagued by its stars' illnesses.

"We go when we can see four operas in a row," said Jim Lowman, a retired research physician for the American Cancer Society. "We call it our opera orgies."

During the Lowmans' recent trip, they booked a room a block from the Met's home in Lincoln Center —- and were not surprised to find the hotel packed with other traveling opera devotees.

America is experiencing an opera boom, with 114 opera companies now in the United States —- more than half of them formed since 1970, according to the trade group Opera America. Annual admissions to live opera performances are estimated at 20 million —- nearly the same attendance as NFL football games (22 million, including playoffs, in 2006-07), according to The American, an online journal.

And while there has been much hand-wringing in recent years over declining interest in "high" arts in general, opera is gaining in popularity, according to the most comprehensive recent study by the National Endowment for the Arts. From 1992 to 2002, the opera audience grew by 8.2 percent —- the largest increase of all the performing arts, the study found.

Opera buffs are so dedicated to their art form that the Met now sends high-definition simulcasts into movie theaters worldwide, including seven in metro Atlanta. And the San Francisco Opera this year began showing digital movies of its productions in 121 U.S. theaters, including three in Atlanta's suburbs.

For many, however, even high-quality movies are no substitute for live performance. So well-heeled opera fans travel to see opera, whether in San Francisco or Atlanta, where about one-quarter of the audience this season came from outside the metro area.

Dan Maslia, retired CEO of Associated Credit Union, lives in Atlanta and has season tickets to the opera here. He also takes his son and teenage grandsons to see operas at the Met. His wife isn't an opera fan, so he has traveled by himself to Italy and Australia to see productions.

Maslia attributes opera's growing popularity in part to supertitles, English translations of the text projected onto a wall above the stage. They began to be used in live opera in the 1980s. "Now people can follow the story," he said.

Europe, the birthplace of opera, will always be a destination for American opera fanatics. But as European cities become increasingly expensive, more Americans are sticking to highly regarded opera venues in the United States, from Santa Fe to Charleston's Spoleto Festival, tour operators say.

Of those who came from outside the metro area to see the Atlanta Opera's productions, more than one-third were from out-of-state, said Dennis Hanthorn, the opera's general director.

Leonard Wicklund, a retired architect in Chicago, has seen several Atlanta Opera productions. Wicklund's main reason for coming to Atlanta is to visit his daughter and her family. But he plans trips around the opera's schedule. In early 2005, he saw Beethoven's "Fidelio" performed at Chicago's Lyric Opera, then flew to Atlanta a few months later to compare it to the Atlanta Opera's production.

"I was very impressed with the staging in Atlanta," he said. "It was simple and stark, yet so effective."

The opera's new home, the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, is a more attractive destination for travelers than its old home, the dated, cavernous Boisfeuillet Jones Atlanta Civic Center. But the Atlanta Opera still isn't on the itinerary for the major travel companies that specialize in opera tours.

"In order for a company to be on our radar, it has to have a repertory season, so we can see two or three operas in a short amount of time," said Gail Petit, vice president of Great Performance Tours in New York.

It also helps for an opera company to be adventurous in its programming, she said. "Our people are real opera devotees, and they're tired of 'La Boheme' unless there's a really big star in it."

The Atlanta Opera may eventually put on two operas in repertory, Hanthorn said. "We know that's attractive to tour companies. That's an option for the future, probably five years off," he said. "For now, we're trying to build our ticket base."

In the meantime, however, the Atlanta Opera's next season will have an adventurous production aimed, in part, at out-of-town tourists. The opera will perform the Egyption-themed Philip Glass opera "Akhnaten" at Emory's Schwartz Center next year —- timed to coincide with the Atlanta run of the blockbuster exhibit, "King Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharoahs."