Held in May 2001 under the auspices of Opera Music Theatre International (OMTI), an organization of which McCully is general director, the competition boasted big-name judges and a letter of support from soprano Dame Joan Sutherland and her husband, conductor Richard Bonynge. Among the adjudicators were soprano Evelyn Lear, tenor Thomas Stewart, and baritone Ryan Edwards, all three of whom gave master classes on the first day of the event. Other judges were baritone Dominic Cossa, soprano Mattiwilda Dobbs, conductor Neil Goren, and Baltimore Opera music director Bill Yannuzzi.
This seemed a prime opportunity for young singers—a chance to be heard, win a cash prize and add a gold star to the résumé. But the reality did not live up to the promise. While McCully and his chairman, Alan Schrum, put all of the right pieces in place for a prestigious event, they failed to produce adequate infrastructure and funding. What they ended up with was a lovely house of cards that collapsed when occupied.
In the weeks and months leading up to the competition, troubling signs emerged: a lack of communication with contestants and judges, changing cut-off dates, unexpected fees exacted of singers, unorthodox methods of preliminary judging, no support staff, insufficient volunteer support, negligible sources of funding, and chronic squabbling between the two principal operatives, McCully and Schrum.
Singers and officials complained of disarray in the planning process. Contestants didn’t receive notice of acceptance until three weeks before the competition. Judges received no contracts initially and were ill informed of schedules and logistics. And nowhere on the website, or in any of the glossy ads promoting the Marjorie Lawrence competition, was the prize money mentioned.
But because the contestants and adjudicators didn’t communicate with each other, and because participants assumed that such a high-profile event had staff and sponsors, they took these signs as isolated incidents or anomalies. In retrospect, however, it became clear that a pattern of irregularities marred the Marjorie Lawrence event from the outset.
On the final day of the competition, the singers sang, the judges adjudicated, and winners were announced. Music director Neal Goren distributed trophies to the victors. “When I arrived in [Washington] D.C. for the competition, I was quietly informed that the prize money had not been raised,” Goren says. “I told the powers that be that I could not participate unless they guaranteed that everyone would get paid promptly, specifically the singers, who presumably needed the prize money most of all. They not only promised that, but made an announcement at the winners’ concert that a major donor had stepped forth to fund the prizes.”
In the following weeks, the question of payment went from sporadic attempts at communication with McCully to a torrent of e-mails, phone calls, speculation and accusation. Singers and judges were rarely able to get through to anyone at OMTI. Upon further investigation, they found that the organization’s phone number was actually an answering service, as was the address listed on its letterhead and website. McCully’s home phone, which has since been disconnected, was automatically directed to the answering service. Queries about money met with conspicuous silence. On a few occasions, McCully did respond with excuses and/or a promise of imminent payment.
But the prize money was not forthcoming. Right after the award ceremony, McCully told the winners and competition judge, Domenic Cossa, that checks would be in the mail on the following Monday. When that didn’t happen, he said the accountant was out of the country and checks would be forthcoming upon her return. Still nothing. He then sent out tax forms saying OMTI needed the information in order to send checks. Doing so produced no result. Finally, McCully told participants in a letter dated December 7, 2001—almost seven months after the competition—that there was no prize money. He blamed his chairman, Schrum. In that letter, McCully wrote:
“We hired Mr. Alan C. Schrum as Chairman based upon his ability to donate money and raise funds for the Competition. Unfortunately to date, Mr. Schrum has not raised any funds or donated any money … This has resulted in a severe cash flow problem.
“I give you my personal assurance that we will honor all our obligations. It is our hope that we can quickly raise these funds, so that everyone can move on to future endeavors.”
Most of the judges, master-class leaders and one accompanist did receive payment from OMTI after threatening litigation and negative publicity. But at the time of the writing of this article (April 2002), the winners, two accompanists, judge Yannuzzi (who had remained aloof from the controversy), and at least one vendor were still waiting—11 months after the competition [See Publisher’s Note, page 11]. The young singers were especially frustrated and suspicious, and it’s no wonder.
Says Anna Tonna, who placed third in the Artist division and spent $500 to participate: “I felt frustrated when I called McCully and didn’t get an answer. I’m a veteran of many competitions and I’ve never encountered anything like this. This is the only one that I’ve done outside of New York and I’ve never spent that much money to compete.” She and the other winners can’t fathom how such a seemingly prestigious event could fail to pay them without even the courtesy of a proper explanation.
Finding the answer is like walking in quicksand: the more you try to move forward, the deeper you sink in muck. Because OMTI held the competition, the most logical place to inquire was the organization’s Board of Directors. But that was a dead end. Though Schrum was chairman of the competition, he says he was not on the OMTI board, and that he never went to a board meeting or met board members. There were no names of board members on the website or the letterhead.
After being pressed to provide a list of board members, McCully provided two names: one was a member prior to the competition and the other, it turned out, had never been an OMTI board member. We could find no one who held a seat on the Board of Directors during the Marjorie Lawrence competition.
As for competition planners, there were just two. Though McCully verbally appointed Goren as music director and Penelope Speedie volunteered to coordinate activities during the competition, neither had anything to do with planning, fundraising or budgeting. McCully and Schrum were it—the sole administrators of the competition, the only inside guys.
According to McCully, the event was a terrific success, except for the non-payment issue. And that, he claimed, was entirely Schrum’s fault. Schrum was asked to serve as chairman because of his fundraising track record and he didn’t come through.
Schrum tells a different story: He never agreed to raise money, he says. On the contrary, he claims to have accepted the chairmanship on the condition that he not be assigned financial responsibilities. Schrum says that as chairman it was his job to get pianists and adjudicators, produce the master classes, and participate in the preliminary judging. “McCully came to me because of my experience as a musician, teacher and concert pianist,” he says. “He felt these attributes would assist him in the running of a vocal competition. Initially, I was inclined not to accept because I had not chaired anything like this. In the end we agreed that I would handle the artistic side and he would handle the business end.”
Contradicting this, Schrum told others that he was raising money, that he “had no trouble fundraising,” and that the prizes were going to be substantial. “Alan most assuredly told me that, as chairman, he would be fundraising,” says competition judge Ryan Edwards. “And when I saw him [later] in New York, he said he could raise that kind of money in 48 hours.” But Schrum never raised a dime for the competition, and he later told Edwards that fundraising for the competition would have conflicted with his obligations to the Baltimore Opera—an unusual thing to say if he was exempt from this responsibility in the first place.
McCully says that by the time he realized Schrum hadn’t raised any money, it was too late to back out of the competition—the applications were in and the event was at hand. Since he had already generated the majority of the funds needed, and had sponsors lined up for the rest, he went ahead. But those sponsors never materialized, nor did any accounting of what McCully had raised or spent. (He says he personally donated about $10,000.)
Because OMTI apparently did not have a Board of Directors, employees or even a volunteer program during the planning and execution of the Marjorie Lawrence competition, McCully becomes the pivotal piece in the puzzle. Reading his biography on the OMTI website, it appears that he has the right background and experience for the job.
The biggest feather in McCully’s cap is the 1998 National Opera Association (NOA) Convention in Washington, D.C., for which he was chairman. This was a tremendous endeavor that attracted the likes of Plácido Domingo, George Shirley, Shirley Verrett, and composer Carlisle Floyd. McCully takes credit for generating tens of thousands of dollars in funding, much of it through ad sales and in-kind gifts, and for personally recruiting talent and quadrupling attendance over the previous year.
Robert Hansen is less enthusiastic. He was president of the NOA at the time of its 1998 convention and currently serves as its executive secretary. “McCully put together an excellent program but with a complete disregard for our budget,” Hansen says. “He persisted in making financial commitments against direct orders and without approval of the board. He exceeded his authority and used the NOA to further the agenda of his own organization. It resulted in significant financial damage that the NOA is still recovering from.” Hansen alleges that McCully inflated his ad sales and in-kind donations, taking credit for deals that were already in place or had been closed by someone else.
Though Hansen says that the NOA did all it could to honor the commitments made by McCully, at least one person fell through the cracks, and her story sounds familiar. Accompanist Betty Bullock was contacted by McCully to play for the Lear and Stewart master class at the 1998 convention. Afterwards, she was told she would receive a check in the mail. She never did. “I made repeated calls that yielded no answer from McCully,” she says. “I talked to someone at NOA, and they said they weren’t authorized to pay me because I had been hired without approval by the officers of the organization.”
McCully vehemently denies that he exaggerated his accomplishments. Hansen and the NOA board were wrong, he says, and they also failed to pay him advertising commissions that he’d been promised. He also denies leaving Marjorie Lawrence participants in the dark about payments. However, eleven people interviewed for this article all say that he consistently failed to respond to their inquiries by phone and email.
In an October 2001 email to Marjorie Lawrence participant Tonna, event chairman Schrum claimed that he was “as shocked and puzzled as you are with regard to communications with Mr. McCully.” In the email, he excused himself from blame and claimed that he too was owed money, as he was never reimbursed for expenses related to the competition.
One month later, McCully sent Schrum a letter removing him from “all positions with Opera Music Theatre International,” and stating that he held Schrum legally responsible for “any and all damages that result from your actions over the past year.”
John Bowen, who served as an accompanist for the Marjorie Lawrence event and runs his own organization, Opera Vivente, finds McCully’s total dependence on Schrum incomprehensible. “I don’t know why he would put all his fundraising hopes in one person,” Bowen says. “You must have a lot of irons in the fire and a lot of prospects in order to raise money. And OMTI needed to start writing grants for this event right away—even a year is not enough time. How could they be so ignorant of even the most basic precepts of fundraising?”
The conspicuous lack of a paper trail to corroborate claims on either side is even stranger than the fact that the two principal operatives are blaming each other for the funding fiasco. A few judges who insisted on it had contracts, but Schrum, Goren and Speedie did not. People in key positions didn’t have a description of duties. The competition seems to have had no plan of action with scheduled assignments, no budget and no accountant. There was no Board of Directors to provide oversight. And attempts to discover the nonprofit status of OMTI produced nothing—McCully didn’t respond to requests for basic documentation that nonprofits are required by law to produce.
Other irregularities marred the Marjorie Lawrence competition as well. Applicants were asked to pay a $50 entrance fee in advance and then an unannounced $50 accompanist fee when they arrived at the event, even though two of three accompanists were not paid.
Preliminary judging resulted in the selection of every applicant as a semi-finalist. Music director Goren, who’d listened to and evaluated each tape, was surprised by this development. “Out of all those tapes, I chose only three or four to go on to the semi-finals,” he says. “And I didn’t understand why we had a tape round if everyone was to be invited.”
Schrum claims it was because McCully didn’t get the kind of response he wanted and was waiting until the very end for more applications. But according to McCully, they did so because Schrum withheld the tapes until it was too late to choose properly. Yet in a letter to semi-finalists, McCully states:
“Competition was unusually strong this year; many capable and worthwhile artist [sic] applied with professionalism and talent, making the evaluation process longer and much more difficult. Decisions were based on the level of artistry, technique, vocal performance, skill and compatibility with the overall mission of the competition’s initiatives.” He sent the letter less than three weeks before the start of the competition.
Accompanist Bowen was asked to play only two or three days before the event. “It was very unorganized,” he says. “There was miscommunication about when to be there and what to do.”
Volunteer activities coordinator Speedie arrived on the first day of the event to find that nothing was set up. “I thought I was organizing the order of singers and making sure everything ran smoothly,” she says, “but I ended up assigning pianists to singers, assigning times, making sure master classes ran smoothly, arranging seating, finding clipboards and pencils, getting water for people—all the little details.” She pulled one all-nighter during the three-day contest and paid all of her own expenses, including meals.
After the Marjorie Lawrence event had concluded, full-page color ads announcing the success of the competition came out in Classical Singer magazine and The Washington Opera program, causing consternation among those who were waiting to be paid.
More ironic than irregular is the fact that the winners, judges, McCully and Schrum all received expensive crystal trophies during the awards ceremony. Schrum says the trophies cost $2,600—money that could have almost covered the competition’s $3,000 first prize.
On either side of the mess that is the Marjorie Lawrence competition, you have two grown men pointing their fingers accusingly at each other. Without considerable investigative resources or costly litigation, it’s unlikely that anyone will ever discover which of them is telling the truth. But in a way it’s irrelevant because the facts tell their own story. And here it is in a nutshell:
Opera Music Theatre International held the Marjorie Lawrence International Vocal Competition. McCully is the only identifiable officer of OMTI. He appointed Schrum as chairman of his event. Schrum accepted the appointment. They were the only principals involved in the planning and organization of the event. At least nine people were not paid when the competition was over, including the very singers the event purported to serve.
Because neither man accepts responsibility for the results of the event they created together, readers will have to draw their own conclusions. Meanwhile, six young singers have learned a costly lesson about competitions: Beware. Things are not always as they appear.
In the case of the Marjorie Lawrence competition, even experienced professionals were lured by an elaborate façade built with a variety of promotional tools, and sprinkled with the glitter of renowned personages. And this is by no means an isolated occurrence. Though the vast majority of the contests out there are respectable and worthwhile, bad apples that fail to pay are scattered amongst them. The reasons for such failure range from deliberate fraud to incompetence to best intentions gone awry.
So what can a singer to do to ensure the viability of a competition? Marjorie Lawrence judge Cossa sums it up: “Look for something that has a history or that is held by a reputed organization. Being the first OMTI voice competition, the Marjorie Lawrence was an untried contest by a small organization. Also, be wary of those that ask for a substantial amount of money up front.”
Even though he feels burned by the Marjorie Lawrence event, first-place winner Charles Reid isn’t bitter. “I think this is a rare thing. I really do,” he says. “My advice would be don’t let it deter you from entering competitions. They have been very helpful to me in getting my career started. If a competition has a track record of winners, you can feel pretty safe about entering.”
