Two points to ponder on what we go to see in the American theater today:
– Next Sunday, ”Pump Boys and Dinettes,” having played 1,450 performances in 181 weeks at the 373-seat Apollo Theatre on Chicago`s North Side, will become the longest-running musical in the history of Chicago area theater. In so doing, this peppy little country-western show surpasses the previous record of 1,140 performances in 180 weeks set in 1982 by the musical ”Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?” at the 420-seat Forum Theatre in Summit.
– The longest-running show in the history of Chicago theater, and still running strong, is ”Shear Madness,” a cabaret-style mystery comedy with audience participation that has been playing since September, 1982, in the 300-seat Mayfair Theatre of the Blackstone Hotel. It is also the longest-running straight play in American theater history, achieving that record last November at its 3,225th performance in its original production in Boston.
These are not big-name shows in big-capacity houses. That era is all but gone in Chicago and in many large cities across the country. We are now emphatically and inevitably in the era of the mini-hits. Gone are the days when ”The Music Man” and ”The Odd Couple” were the long-run champions in the large downtown houses that formed the center of our theatrical action. Today, the two remaining bastions of Broadway touring productions, the Blackstone and Shubert theaters, are all but inactive. The vacant Blackstone may soon become a branch of DePaul University, and the Shubert, aside from a three-week run of ”Broadway Bound” last March, has no shows scheduled for this season.
There are, of course, the Chicago Theatre, the Civic Opera House and the Auditorium Theatre. But engagements in these huge houses are generally short one- or two-week affairs, and confined almost exclusively to big musicals. As far as a central, constant source of theater for the Chicago area, downtown is a thing of the past.
Escalating costs, a dwindling stock of hits and a rise in the risks of touring have combined to keep touring shows limited to a very occasional sure- fire musical extravaganza such as ”Cats” or the upcoming ”Les Miserables,” due here sometime in 1989. Straight plays are all but unheard of on the touring circuit, unless they carry a star name above the title; even Neil Simon, the most commercially successful playwright in America today, cannot guarantee a hit, as witness the financially unsuccessful run of his
”Broadway Bound” at the Shubert.
But nature abhors a vacuum. A metropolis such as Chicago demands theater product, and in place of the once-prevalent road shows we now have a new kind of long-run show, presented by a new breed of resident producers.
Proven off-Broadway hits, phenomenal local shows and musical revues are the staples of this new production period. As with most of their big Broadway counterparts, these shows are lightweight in nature, offering pleasant, forgettable entertainment. But they are produced on a much lower budget and without expensive stars, enabling them to survive longer without undue strain on their investors, and they are intimately staged in much smaller theaters, allowing them to string out their audiences over several months.
For example, ”It`s a Dog`s Life,” the loopy little comedy that opened with a cast of young local actors last October in the 168-seat Studio Theatre in the Civic Center for the Performing Arts, was produced for a paltry $25,000, needing $4,500 to meet its operating costs each week. ”The Nerd,”
the comedy that bowed last November at the 450-seat Royal George Theatre and transferred last month to the 975-seat Drury Lane Oakbrook Terrace, had the most expensive production budget of all the area`s current long-run hits
($315,000, which the producers actually whittled down to $260,000), but that`s only a tenth as much as the figure needed to mount even the most modest Broadway musical these days.
The reigning maestros of this current boom of mini-hits are Cullen, Henaghan and Platt, the team whose Chicago presentation of ”Pump Boys”
launched a production company that now is a prime factor in the large and lucrative commercial market of the Chicago area.
The production company works out of a cramped, nondescript office a few blocks north of the Royal George, but they operate in much the same way as involved, hands-on Broadway producers do, seeking investors to put money in the shows they want to present and vigorously marketing those shows through such devices as commercial tie-ins and special group packages once they have opened.
Since 1984, their shop has been responsible for eight shows, three of which have been financial failures: ”A . . . My Name Is Alice” (1986) and
”The Illuminati” (1988) in Chicago, and a Los Angeles production of
”Pump Boys.” The other five are already or are expected to be hits:
”Jeeves Takes Charge” (1987 at the Royal George), and the current productions of ”Pump Boys,” ”The Nerd,” ”A Couple of Blaguards” (now at the Ruggles Cabaret-Bar of the Royal George) and ”Driving Miss Daisy,” which producers Henaghan and Platt are presenting at the 399-seat Briar Street Theatre for what they expect will be a good year`s run. (In one recent day, after it had won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, ”Miss Daisy” took in $30,000 at the box office, a sale approaching Broadway proportions.)
In the future, the trio has the Chicago rights to the off-Broadway hits
”Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,” ”Steel Magnolias” and ”Talk Radio.” They also want to remount the comedy ”I`m Not Rappaport,” which played the Shubert last year, at the Royal George.
Michael Cullen, the veteran of the trio, has been producing commercially in Chicago since 1979, when he brought the youngsters of the Steppenwolf Theatre down from their Highland Park basement theater into Chicago to perform in the comedy ”Say Goodnight, Gracie” at the Near North Side Theatre Building. In 1984, after an on-and-off series of producing ventures that had left him deeply in debt, he teamed up with Sheila Henaghan, a former actress, model and teacher, and Howard Platt, an actor who had worked here at the old Drury Lane and Ivanhoe theaters but who had been chiefly identified since then for his regular role as the dim-witted policeman on ”Sanford and Son.” Platt provided the initial money to produce ”Pump Boys,” with funds coming primarily from Texas investors.
Now, according to Cullen, they have a file containing 500 names of past and potential investors, and, with their proven track record, they are able to negotiate more securely for the New York shows they want to bring in. They don`t produce anything they aren`t sold on personally, and, according to Henaghan, considerations of the right performance space, cast and director affect all their decisions.
Experience has taught them, Henaghan says, ”not to invest our own money in our shows and to concentrate on the market we know best, which is Chicago.” They advertise and promote extensively, with group sales as the backbone of their weeknight business. And, Cullen adds, ”We spend more money in areas where you don`t think people go to the theater.”
That is one of the characteristics of the new mini-hits. They go out to people who aren`t considered theatergoers, people who don`t go to the theater but who want to see a show for a nice night out. And it should be a show that is light, funny and safe, one that`s suitable for the kids or mom or a group of couples on a special occasion. It can be uplifting, but it definitely should not be demanding.
The appeal of this kind of entertainment has created a whole sub-genre of mini-hits: the Roman Catholic musical. Pioneered in 1979 by ”Patent Leather Shoes,” a gentle satire of growing up in the Roman Catholic school system, this form of nostalgia, laced with song and dance, is now thriving with
”Nunsense,” the musical about a group of jolly nuns that has played at the Forum Theatre since March of 1987 (one of 55 productions of the show playing throughout the world), and a revival of the long-run hit ”Patent Leather Shoes” at Marriott`s Lincolnshire Theatre, where it was 70 percent sold out before its first preview and is breaking every box-office record in the house`s history.
”We get them all,” says Kary Walker, Marriott`s producer, ”the people who have seen the show five times before and the people who were just waiting for it to come to their neighborhood.”
Suburbanites, some of whom rarely venture into the city for theater, are a major element in the reign of the mini-hit. ”Jerry`s Girls,” an all-female revue using the Broadway songs of composer Jerry Herman, opened last January in the 249-seat Rose Theatre of the northwest suburban Westin Hotel O`Hare and has been humming along ever since.
According to David Dillon, the show`s co-producer and director, ”We draw our audiences primarily from that area, and, of course, we have the great environment of the hotel, where you can get a drink or dinner in the same building and you have plenty of parking.”
When Cullen, Henaghan and Platt moved their ”The Nerd” out to the 975-seat Drury Lane Oakbrook Terrace in the ripe territory of DuPage County, they signed two actors known for their roles in television situation comedies, David Lander (”Laverne and Shirley”) and Richard Kline (”Three`s Company”). Lander, called home because of his mother`s death, left the show before it opened, but Kline remains, and the name of director Charles Nelson Reilly, veteran game show and talk show guest on television, has helped the box office, too. ”People associate his name with having a good time,” Platt says.
The downtown area has not been entirely abandoned. Both ”Shear Madness” at the Blackstone and ”It`s a Dog`s Life” at the Civic Studio Theatre draw audiences from out-of-town visitors looking for a show to see within easy reach of their downtown hotels. ”We get a lot of our business from the Hot Tix (half-price) ticket booth on the State Street mall,” says Fred Solari, the Civic Center`s assistant manager, ”and when there`s a show playing at the Shubert that also gives discount tickets, we can tell the difference through the dip in our business.”
None of these shows can equal the potential weekly gross of a monster hit such as ”Cats,” which plays huge theaters, and some of the long-run shows here, including ”Jerry`s Girls” and ”It`s a Dog`s Life” have yet to make their relatively small investments back.
But the box-office power of the genuine mini-hit is nonetheless awesome. Their houses are smaller, their performance schedules lesser, their ticket prices lower ($15 and $26.50 being the present low and high boundaries); but the Boston and Chicago productions of ”Shear Madness” alone bring in $2.5 million a year, and producers Marilyn Abrams and Bruce Jordan have refused buy-out offers of up to $6 million for their little gold mine.
With the exception of ”Driving Miss Daisy,” the mini-hit is a determinedly light entertainment, offering at least a reasonably pleasant evening. These are commercial ventures and consumer products, with no pretentions toward significant theater. At best, however, as in ”Pump Boys and Dinettes,” the entertainment is thoroughly enjoyable and professional.
And their importance in filling an important audience need for entertainment is growing. Cullen, Henaghan and Platt, though not yet producing original work, have moved into the market of shows once reserved for nonprofit resident theater, and they have all but taken over the few mid-size (300- to 500-seat) houses in Chicago with their carefully cast Chicago companies of off-Broadway hits, creating a problem for some small nonprofit resident theaters that want to move their season`s successes to larger houses.
”We would like to build our own theater,” says Cullen, always optimistic about his future plans.
”With a restaurant and parking nearby, and maybe in a northwest suburb,” Henaghan hastens to add.
And would these giants of the mini-hits, if the right show and cast and opportunity and money arose, want to produce on a larger scale, in a big downtown theater such as the Shubert?
”Oh, sure,” responds Cullen. And he says it without hesitation.
