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Headlines from your favorite supermarket tabloid? Try promotional descriptions of productions by the Baltimore Opera Company.

Thanks to clever marketing, the use of English translations and the rapid growth in regional opera companies, opera is thriving locally and nationally as never before. Baby boomers who grew up with the Beatles are embracing "La Boheme." Even twentysomethings from Glen Burnie are becoming opera subscribers.

Since 1980, opera audiences have grown by 30 percent to nearly 6 million Americans. And during the recent recession, opera held onto its audience while other performing arts organizations struggled to keep their subscribers.

In Baltimore, where the opera company was on the verge of bankruptcy in 1990, the company has increased its subscribers by 40 percent during the past three years. There are now nearly 8,000 subscribers -- part of an estimated audience of 25,000, according to opera officials.

The company's financial troubles forced it to trim its season from four to three productions in 1991. This year, however, popular demand added an extra performance to each production. Baltimoreans also enjoy operas produced by the Peabody Conservatory and the Municipal Opera Company of Baltimore, a predominantly African-American performing group founded in 1991.

Much of the credit for the Baltimore Opera Company's resurgence belongs to its humorous effort to reach beyond opera's traditional, classically cultured audiences by promising, as one brochure says, "Decadence and Immorality the Whole Family Can Enjoy."

"When one's advertising budget is as limited as ours, you don't want to spend a lot preaching to the choir," says Michael Harrison, director of the company. "We want to make opera more appealing to greater numbers of people, especially to those who may think it is a foreign kind of thing or elitist."

Gray Kirk VanSant, the Baltimore advertising firm that developed the irreverent pitch, suggested targeting such non-traditional audiences as the listeners of alternative rock station WHFS.

"We went for the comedy, we went for the jokes," says Jeff Millman. Gray Kirk Van Sant's senior vice president and creative director. "I figured those ads were talking to me: early 40s, ex-hippie, someone who grew up and continues to live with rock music. I figured I would never consider opera unless someone did something to change my mind that it wasn't the stodgy, old boring experience I assumed it was."