When good theater was in scant supply in Chicago through the 1950s and 1960s, legions of intrepid travelers climbed into their cars and made the daunting trek to little Marengo, 65 miles northwest of the city, where they were treated to old-fashioned fried chicken and sprightly summer stock productions in a converted dairy barn.
Awash in verdant green farmfields, Shady Lane Farm had nearly perfected the dinner-theater entertainment format long before such competing venues as Candlelight and Pheasant Run were even glimmers in their developers’ eyes.
The 1980s, alas, weren’t very kind to Shady Lane. Higher gasoline prices dampened theatergoers’ willingness to travel long distances. By then, moreover, there was plenty of competing-and, frankly, better-theater in the city and its suburbs. Even Rockford, 22 miles to the west, had its own year-round professional company, New American Theatre, that had undercut Shady Lane’s appeal.
The farm finally closed in 1990, its last owner mired in bankruptcy, its ceilings leaking rainwater onto decades worth of mildewing costumes and a stage steeped in entertainment lore. This was the place where such stars as Jeff Chandler and Geraldine Page got their starts as professionals, but it was now gone to seed.
The obituaries recording the presumed final curtain for Shady Lane three years ago proved premature, thankfully. An angel, Manor Enterprises Inc. of Rockford, has suddenly taken roost at the farm, overseeing a loving renovation of the old facility that promises a return to its glory days.
The roof is patched, the menus updated and the remodeled theater is open again, currently featuring a robust revival of the 1971 Stephen Schwartz musical “Godspell.” There is even talk about eventually adding a small shopping mall and a country inn adjacent to the carefully preserved barn.
The architect of this turnabout is William Koulis, chairman and president of Manor Enterprises, which owns six restaurants, including family-style establishments in Elgin, St. Charles and West Dundee. In many ways, Koulis is an ideal savior for Shady Lane: he has run restaurants for more than two decades and has a sharp eye for changing tastes in dining, while he has been an active supporter of the arts in Rockford, where he lives, for years.
“A couple of years ago I drove along Route 20 on my way to our restaurant in Elgin and first saw the `For Sale’ sign,” says Koulis, 46, who owns Manor together with his brothers George, 50, and John, 52, both of whom are residents of Elgin and who spend most of their time overseeing Manor’s west suburban restaurants. “I kept thinking what a shame it was to see Shady Lane dying after all those good years.”
Koulis loves a challenge. “Turning around something that nobody else wants is a great ambition of mine,” he stresses. But most of his colleagues were skeptical after taking a close look at the peeled paint and rusty pipes in the big 350-seat dining hall.
“Shady Lane was literally falling apart. It had suffered greatly from deferred maintenance,” says Daniel Psaltis, a Rockford real estate broker who scouts new acquisitions for Manor Enterprises. “But Bill Koulis is a visionary. He decides something has to be done, and he goes out and gets it done. I knew if anybody could save the place, he could.”
It’s cost a fortune, but Koulis has indeed reclaimed the farm. He won’t confirm his exact investment, but sources say that he got Shady Lane for a bargain price of about $260,000 from the Bank of Wauconda in July of 1991, then spent well over $1 million over the next 18 months on remodeling before reopening late last year. He installed a new roof, new heating and air conditioning systems, an emergency sprinkler system, new insulation, new kitchen appliances, new restaurant seating, new carpeting, a new parking lot, lush landscaping and a collection of outdoor sculptures that catch the eyes of passing motorists (Shady Lane is located three miles west of downtown Marengo on U.S. Highway 20).
The barn housing the theater is across a courtyard from the restaurant, and Koulis has wisely contracted with a drama veteran, Mike Webb, managing director of theater at Rock Valley College in Rockford, to take over its operation. Webb is no stranger to barns-his Starlight Theatre on campus at Rock Valley has performed in a converted 108-year-old dairy barn with 166 seats since 1985. Shady Lane’s barn dates from about 1914 and seats about 350.
It has been an unchallenged maxim through most of Shady Lane’s 57 years that the complex, renamed Shady Lane Centre by Koulis, has to have the restaurant and theater functioning smoothly side by side-tasty, down-home fare in the dining room complemented by strong productions in the barn-if it is to flourish.
The entertainment half collapsed under the former owner, Dona Mers Zeffery, who finally yielded Shady Lane back to the mortgage holder, Bank of Wauconda, in mid-1990. The theater had closed several months before with no new producer in sight to rescue it.
“I had a producing team that was doing musical revues, and people were quickly tired of them. Our crowds were getting smaller all the time, and the restaurant suffered as a result, too,” says Zeffery, who is today writing a cookbook and seeking a new career in computers from her home in Marengo. “I had plenty of experience in restaurants and I knew how to make that work. But the dining room is so big you need a draw like the theater to fill it up. I didn’t know anything about the theater and I didn’t know what to do when it started to decline.”
Actually, at its very beginnings Shady Lane was envisioned merely as a roadside diner. According to local legend, a one-time Broadway actor of little fame, Frank Bryan, and his wife Dorothy were returning from a Wisconsin vacation along Route 20 one lazy summer day in 1936 when grazing sheep in the rolling fields caught their attention. As they stopped, they noticed a “For Sale” sign on 60 acres of farmland and buildings that had been owned by the Alexander Glass family since before World War I.
Frank had been acting at the Harris Theatre in Chicago with Frank Keenan, the father of comedian Ed Wynn, and Dorothy had been managing the Fort Dearborn Grill, later to become the London House. Vaguely unfulfilled working in the Loop, both had been looking for a rural hideaway promising a fresh future. Shady Lane was open for business late in 1936, with Dorothy serving up skillet-fried chicken to a dining room with all of four tables.
In 1938, a nephew, Brian Gilbert, showed up with four theater-minded friends from New York and converted the dairy barn in back into a playhouse, staging amateur productions. By 1941 Frank Bryan was actively involved and the theater had grown to professional status.
A July performance of Eugene O’Neill’s “Ah, Wilderness” featured in a small role one Ira Grossel, a friend of Brian’s who would later go on to fame under the name Jeff Chandler. Actual barn doors were rolled back and forth as a crude curtain for the stage in those early years.
Many improvements and expansions followed. Bryan added a new dining room finished in native walnut, and a tiny bar designed as a replica of the lounge of the fabled Palace Hotel in San Francisco. A new kitchen boasted one of the largest butane gas stoves in the Midwest, with 32 burners. Stage curtains acquired from the Palace Theatre in Rockford soon replaced the sliding barn doors in the barn.
Consistently good acting talent-Geraldine Page was in residence in 1949 and 1950-drew visitors from Chicago and its suburbs.
The Chicago Tribune’s theater critic rarely missed an opening night. Will Leonard wrote of Page’s performance as Sadie Thompson in Somerset Maugham’s “Rain”: “In Geraldine Page, one of the most exciting actresses to greet these orbs in many a summer season, Shady Lane has found itself a Sadie Thompson who makes the old play crackle with a feverish warmth and shine with human feeling.”
Business was still flush when the Bryans, by then in their 80s, were ready to retire in 1960. Ray Curnow, who had grown up in a family grocery business in Stockton, Calif., had been part-owner of the Milk Pail Restaurant in East Dundee when a feud with his landlord suddenly prompted him to sell out his interest. He soon acquired Shady Lane from the Bryans, and asked Frank Bryan to stay on for a season to help with the theater.
Curnow added air conditioning to the theater, but maintained the Actor’s Equity casts and the signature fried chicken and country ham dishes. He steered the selection of plays to frothier fare.
“I didn’t know the theater business, but I learned it as fast as I could,” says the retired Curnow, today 75 years old and living in a Marengo apartment. “One thing I learned was that anything serious on stage would kill your business. People wanted to laugh. Musicals required an orchestra and a music director and that cost too much money. We stayed away from them.”
Curnow was a tireless promoter, visiting local chambers of commerce and soliciting group ticket sales. “This far out, I knew I couldn’t depend on individual ticket sales,” Curnow says. “I had a mailing list of 13,000 names, many of them tour operators, and for some shows we’d get seven buses a day pull up filled with people. I kept my prices reasonable because I was after volume.”
The formula worked to a point, but by the 1980s business was in decline, reviewers were ignoring Shady Lane’s plays, and Actor’s Equity was asking for more pay for its actors. Curnow sold out to Zeffery in 1988, and isn’t surprised that the difficulties continued under her.
“There are a lot more theater alternatives around Chicago now,” he observes. “If the new owners are going to succeed, in fact, they’re going to have to get out and promote Shady Lane again. Its image has suffered in recent years, and it’s not going to be easy to rebuild its reputation.”
Bill Koulis has no illusions. He’s added 30 seats to the theater and begun marketing Shady Lane to tour groups. A revival of the gentle comedy-drama “Driving Miss Daisy” earlier this summer attracted paltry audiences averaging 10 percent of capacity. The average was closer to 40 percent for the early performances of “Godspell.” Koulis figures that just one-third of his restaurant patrons now are also seeing the play. He hopes to get that ratio to 50 percent or better soon as both the restaurant and theater seek to strengthen their bases.
Where are the crowds going to come from? The executive calculates that 60 percent of his audiences are from Chicago and its suburbs, while 40 percent or so are from the Rockford-Belvidere region.
“The tour operators are beginning to discover us again. We know a good share of our business is going to comprise tours,” Koulis says.
Swiftly paced musicals (see accompanying story) will be part of the attraction. Unlike earlier experiences at Shady Lane with musicals, today’s efforts should be more financially viable because of the use of non-Equity casts and the fact that improvements in electronics have made it possible to use taped and synthesized music.
The food will certainly help, too, in attracting larger crowds.
Koulis has opened the restaurant for breakfast and greatly expanded the menu to include an array of pastas, seafood and salads, along with many familiar dishes featuring beef and chicken (Athenian style, befitting his Greek heritage). The skillet-fried chicken, at $8.95, is a survivor from former regimes, as is the baked ham, at $9.95. More adventurous fare include a juicy duck in raspberry sauce, osso buco (roasted shank of lamb) and stuffed trout.
The food presentations come off flawlessly, not surprising considering the Koulis family’s background. The son of a Hammond, Ind., steelworker, Bill Koulis graduated from Indiana University in 1970 with a marketing degree. He had been with Oscar Mayer Co. for only a few months as a sales representative before his brothers persuaded him to help open a restaurant on the west side of Elgin, though they had no restaurant background. Called Manor Pancake House, it cost just $85,000. The brothers added new dining rooms and tripled its revenues within three years. An acquisition binge that followed had the brothers at one time owning 10 restaurants. It’s back down to a more manageable six currently, plus the small Mulford Village Mall in Rockford, which was 30 percent occupied in 1988 when Manor took it over. It’s 95 percent leased today.
Koulis’ firm also recently aquired the old Dino’s Steak House, about a mile east of Shady Lane. He intends to subdivide it into shops and lease a small space to another restaurant operator as a sports bar. Meantime, he also hopes to bring shops to a mini-mall that he envisions at Shady Lane Centre. He keeps bringing up the subject of an inn in conversation, too.
“A country inn with 50 or 60 rooms is possible,” asserts Koulis, who is in the process of converting a former gift shop into a new 300-seat banquet room with an eye to landing more wedding receptions and corporate events at Shady Lane. “We get lots of requests from visitors here who need someplace to stay. There’s not much around this area.”
Maybe not, but Koulis is steadily building Shady Lane into a tourist attraction all by itself. He is the benefactor of an ingenious Greek sculptor, George Kapotas, who can be spied out back most days turning dead tree trunks into stunningly detailed pieces of art-ranging from eagles in flight to Indian chieftains-with a chain saw, hammer and chisel. His creations dot the Shady Lane landscape, and several smaller pieces are for sale in the restaurant’s lobby, albeit at prices approaching $7,000.
“This far out in the country, we have to turn Shady Lane into a major destination and give people a strong reason to drive out here,” concludes Koulis. “The theater and the restaurant are the focus, and we’ll continue to build on that. Our biggest challenge now is to get the word out and let people know there is a new Shady Lane back in operation again. Once they see what’s here, I’m confident they’ll keep coming back.”
