”It`s like Mickey and Judy,” producer Michael Frazier said. His slight smile and arched eyebrow indicated that his listener should forgive the cliche.
Yes, he and a few dozen colleagues indeed were going to put on a show. And, for sure, it was possible to squint at the construction chaos Frazier supervised that day and remember all those moments when young Mickey Rooney turned to Judy Garland and exclaimed, ”I`ve got an idea. . . !”
Less than a month before, on Feb. 13, Frazier had staged a press conference in the barren interior of a former Jamnastics aerobics emporium at 2700 N. Halsted St. Even armed with such serious instruments as press releases and financial projections, the tall, slightly rumpled Frazier looked boyishly excited that St. Valentine`s Eve. At that point, the first hammer hadn`t touched the first nail.
However, it was entertainment-business reality, not amateurish exuberance, that drove him, his partners and his backers to bring a little show-the Mickey/Judy-like ”Oil City Symphony”-into this brand-new theater space.
Only 38 days after that press conference and six days before the first preview, the storefront building swarmed with electricians, concrete finishers, drywall installers and marketing savants, all working
simultaneously to build seats and to fill them. Frazier looked harried but pleased.
By then, he could see a theater really taking shape. The day after that press conference, when the first plumbing and electrical crews crossed the threshold, the chances for success did not look nearly as certain. Seldom does anyone construct a working, professional theater inside an empty building in a matter of 49 days, complete with a show that would stage its first preview March 28 with an opening night scheduled for this Thursday.
Never mind forgiving that cliche about Mickey and Judy. Please pardon our dust.
The rather plain Jamnastics building would eventually become the Halsted Theatre Centre, complete with a 397-seat main auditorium, a ”black box”
theater for an audience of 160, a 100-seat cabaret upstairs and an adjoining outdoor cafe where a loading dock used to be.
Only the main space with its requisite rest room facilities, dressing rooms, risers, platforms, lights, electrical power and heating-air
conditioning concerned Frazier immediately. The smaller projects could wait a few weeks. As the days slipped by, he began to think of theater construction- which he had never done before-as a form of stagecraft-which he has been practicing for more than 20 years. As the pages of the calendar flipped and the clock hands spun, Frazier made sure that the various crafts worked simultaneously, as much as possible, without getting in each other`s way.
”It was like choreography,” he said. ”I suppose this is a logical extension of what a producer does, but I never expected to be doing it.” For most of his career, the 52-year-old transplanted Bostonian had been practicing show business in New York and other towns the old-fashioned way-mounting productions on Broadway and off, organizing touring companies, creating industrial shows and always remaining ”on the look” for still more properties that might be packaged into hits.
For two years, Frazier presided over two productions of that ecclesiastical farce ”Nunsense,” which closed Jan. 1 at the Forum in Summit and continues to run in Boston. A Frazier-produced version of ”Steel Magnolias” (not the one currently on display in Chicago`s Briar Street Theatre) tours the country. And once the jackhammers died and the turnstiles started humming at the Halsted Theatre Centre, Frazier and his partners planned to start separate ”Oil City Symphony” companies in Boston and San Francisco.
Like ”Nunsense” and the hugely successful musical romp ”Pump Boys and Dinettes,” the show is long on wit, talent and charm without requiring anything like the expensive trappings of a ”Les Miserables,” the Chicago production of which cost $900,000 to mount (after more than $4 million in other development costs already had been absorbed by earlier companies). ”Oil City” costs (aside from the theater itself) would run to a relatively small $200,000, comparable to what Frazier and his backers spent on ”Nunsense.”
The three-character Remains Theatre production of ”Speed-the-Plow” cost $120,000 to mount.
”Oil City Symphony,” on the surface at least, could not be more simple: Two men and two women who once attended the same high school in a mythical heartland town decide to honor their former music teacher by staging a recital.
In the original New York production, which continues to run at Circle in the Square, the theater has been tricked up to resemble a high school gymnasium. On Halsted, Frazier realized, a few days after renovation began, that low ceilings spanned by huge wooden trusses would prevent the
installation of basketball backboards. (Lights would be hung from those beams during the fifth week of construction-as soon as electricians had installed a vastly more powerful new wiring system.) So Frazier chose to make the room a Grange hall instead, complete with folding chairs, corrugated tin on the walls and an ersatz lunch counter along the side.
The show requires a setting like that. For the 80-minute length of ”Oil City Symphony,” the performers sing and accompany themselves on a surprising variety of musical instruments. Their selections (half of them original tunes) steer a clear line between sentimentality and mawkishness, while plucking delicately at tender sensibilities.
While ”Oil City” captivated critics and audiences when it opened off-Broadway in November, 1987, it also attracted the attention of theatrical professionals. Not together, but almost simultaneously, Frazier and a friend and colleague, John Sharpe, both dropped in on ”Oil City,” and both immediately thought they should acquire the rights.
In the early 1970s, Sharpe-a Broadway veteran-produced musicals in Dallas summer stock. ”Oil City” creator Mark Hardwick, then a student at Southern Methodist University, served as Sharpe`s rehearsal pianist and later joined him and Michael Frazier in staging some industrial shows.
That background may have given the Frazier-Sharpe team an inside track when they set out to acquire the Chicago-Boston-San Francisco rights to ”Oil City,” but after some negotiations in the fall of `87, the principals came up with a fairly standard deal. ”You give the original producers a guarantee, about $5,000 to $10,000 down and a weekly royalty of about 10 percent of the gross (receipts),” Frazier explained.
Frazier, Sharpe and Richard Norton-the third producer involved-thought the rest would be fairly routine: Lease a theater, enlist the services of
”Oil City” director Larry Forde, audition a Chicago cast and put on a show.
But appropriate theaters in the Chicago area all were booked. Frazier began looking for buildings he could convert, but again he found nothing.
”Around November of last year, I said to myself, `I`m never going to get
`Oil City` on unless I find a place,” Frazier recalled. ”I looked at an F. W. Woolworth on Lincoln; I looked at spaces in the Congress Hotel and the Palmer House. I`ve looked at dozens of empty warehouses. Nothing quite worked.”
