Plucky troupe struggles in the shadow of the biggest opera company in the world. Faced with the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression, the company slims down, laying off staff and cutting the budget.

But then it rallies. It raises millions of dollars. And emerges triumphant.

Treacherous twists and turns no doubt still lie ahead for the Opera Company of Philadelphia. But consider what's been accomplished in the last 18 months and you have to be impressed.

The sold-out boutique series of edgier, more specialized works in the Perelman Theater has a waiting list of 200 hopefuls this season. The main-stage series in the Academy of Music has a modestly growing subscriber base. The company is within spitting distance of realizing the goal of a $5 million fund-raising campaign conducted during the economy's near collapse.

The opera's leadership feels confident enough about the current business and artistic blueprint to start thinking about an ambitious endowment drive.

You can view next season, OCP's 36th, as a manifestation of new organizational ideals. It will feature two box-office darlings in the Academy: a Tosca with the rich singer-actress Adina Nitescu making her company debut in the title role, and Gounod's Romeo and Juliet, featuring the popular husband-and-wife Academy of Vocal Arts graduates Stephen Costello and Ailyn Pérez.

In the smaller Perelman - which, though expensive, has production costs about a third less than the Academy's - OCP continues its collaboration with the Curtis Institute of Music in Janácek's The Cunning Little Vixen. OCP alone will do the U.S. premiere of the widely praised Phaedra by Hans Werner Henze, 83, the highly esteemed German composer.

The fifth production, in the Academy, will be OCP's first outing with Verdi's Otello.

Company veteran Robert B. Driver says the season represents artistic growth - an important new score, a first Otello, a rare move into Janácek that could lead to Jenufa.

"You're always trying to move the company and to grow the company," he said.

But only within certain parameters, adds David B. Devan, who took the administrative reins with the title of executive director almost a year ago, while Driver has moved from general and artistic director to artistic director. Both report to the board chairman.

If Driver is the dreamer and Devan the realist, several adjustments made under Devan's guidance contribute to the current state of health and stability that allows them to coexist.

The company recently rejiggered its cash-flow pattern so that its $1 million or so in advance ticket sales for the following season is put into escrow and not spent until the season in which those productions occur.

That meant somehow getting ahead by $1 million, so the board - just at the start of the Great Recession - raised $500,000 from its own table and an additional $500,000 from three area philanthropies. The money the opera company takes in now from subscribers buying tickets for 2010-11 won't be spent until those expenses are incurred.

The board also created an artistic fund to pay for productions. The $5 million drive has $900,000 to go. Prime targets for the rest of the money, Devan said, are Philadelphia operaphiles whose support now goes to New York's Metropolitan Opera, the Washington National Opera, or the Santa Fe Opera. He feels they might be motivated to give more locally to a niche company.

OCP, with its $8.6 million budget, will never be the Met, which spent $274 million in the year that ended July 31, 2008, according to its tax returns. But what it can be, Devan says, is the model of a medium-sized troupe doing specialized repertoire geared to variegated audiences.

"I'm here to build a highly differentiated opera company that can live in a competitive marketplace," said Devan, 47, a former competitive ice skater who previously ran Pacific Opera Victoria. "In both our venues, you are able to connect in a greater way to the artistry on stage. Also, in casting, audiences are getting the right balance between established artists and emerging artists. There is a palpable excitement about a singer experiencing a role for the first time."

Devan appears to have settled in after coming to OCP as managing director, reporting to Driver, in 2006. He and his husband, David Dubbeldam - they married in British Columbia two years ago - recently moved into a Center City loft. (Dubbeldam spent 18 years working for the Bank of Montreal but now studies religion at the University of Pennsylvania. He plans to enter the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia after graduating from Penn in May.)

Devan says the opera board has approved an additional $5 million drive for the artistic fund, which will commence with the 2010-11 season.

Donors will have ample opportunity to see how their money is being invested.

In October, the Otello is possible because the Opera Company piggybacks onto a Welsh National Opera-Canadian Opera Company coproduction already bring brought to North America for the Canadian company. "Despite the economy, we tried to find a creative way to make it happen," said Driver. Tenor Clifton Forbis repeats the title role he has performed at La Scala and Vienna State Opera, sharing the part with Arnold Rawls.

Romeo and Juliet, last performed here in 1994, will be done in a new production by Manfred Schweigkofler.

"We started to search for something to do together, and when I met with him a few months ago he said he really didn't feel like doing a period piece," said Driver. "So we're doing a modern setting with fashion houses in competition."

Driver said he planned to meet with fashion designers in Milan about doing the costumes. Armani? Versace? He declined to say.

"That's the goal . . . if we do that, it would bring some pizzazz," he said of the production next February.

Tosca, last performed in 2000, will be done in a traditional setting, Driver said, but what's notable about this iteration, next April and May, is the Romanian soprano Adina Nitescu. "You don't do Tosca unless you have Tosca," he said.

The two Perelman operas will be new productions. Emma Griffin directs The Cunning Little Vixen, and David Zinn, who recently designed a new, large-scale Vixen for the Lyric Opera of Chicago, will create something different for the smaller Perelman Theater. The Curtis cast for next March has not been announced.

With the exception of one role, Curtis is not a partner in June's Phaedra, Henze's take, with librettist Christian Lehnert, on the Greek myth of the wife of Theseus, he who slew the Minotaur. The production is not the one used at the 2007 premiere at the Berlin Staatsoper, but a new one by Driver and designer Philippe Amand. It will be conducted by the company's music director, Corrado Rovaris.

Phaedra is a Henze opera that wasn't supposed to happen. The composer had declared himself done with opera after The Upupa and the Triumph of Filial Love in 2003, but in 2006 revealed he was at work on Phaedra.

The first act adheres to Greek myth. But the second - written after Henze's recovery from a mysterious, coma-like, two-month illness - departs in unexpected ways.

"Phaedra is an astonishing achievement," Tom Service wrote in The Guardian. "Henze's unerring feeling for drama, pacing, colour, shines through every bar of the score, which is as deft, luminous and moving as anything in the 14 operas he has written so far."

Rovaris says that Phaedra promises a mental workout for audiences, but that the payoff is tremendous.

"It presents many problems, but we have to take the chance," he said. "It's a very special score."