At any kind of entertainment show-a play, a musical concert or a dance recital-it’s the performers out front who bask in the applause of the audience. But look around and beyond the bright faces on stage: The folks overseeing the lights and sound and scenery and props all make the pleasure of live performance possible.
Within the closeted world of stagehands, Donald J. Garrity is one of the superstars. He ran lights and sound at one of the last “Tonight” shows hosted by Jack Parr in the early 1960s, dodged billy clubs while trying to cover the riots during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago for local television and was back manning the light board for the last public concert by Barbra Streisand in New York’s Central Park in 1972 before the singer quit public performing (only to re-emerge on stage in Las Vegas last New Year’s Eve).
For the last two decades Garrity, now 51, has been the president and owner of Production Associates Ltd. in Vernon Hills, one of the country’s leading organizers of corporate shows and special events. His clients include such heavyweights as McDonald’s Corp., Hyatt Corp. and IBM Corp.
His work typically involves far more than a humdrum vice president’s speech from a hotel ballroom lectern. Some productions rival the glitz and sophistication of a Las Vegas revue, with astonishing price tags of $500,000 or more and many of the biggest Hollywood stars performing. And then there are the smaller productions, too, such as the one-night Chicago Bar Association annual dinner and variety show.
The business also has brought the barrel-chested Garrity to the sites of the world’s most closely watched events. Both Production Associates and a Garrity-owned offshoot, Summit Productions Inc., will be much in evidence at the Winter Olympics that start in Lillehammer, Norway, on Feb. 12, supplying food and entertainment to hospitality tents erected by major U.S. companies hosting about 10,000 clients from around the world.
Garrity is right at home on such huge stages. He’s worked both Summer and Winter Olympics stretching back to 1980 and will be performing similar duties at all nine U.S. sites for the Super Bowl of soccer, the World Cup, that runs from June 17 to July 17 this summer, including games in Chicago.
At the Coca-Cola pavilion adjacent to Soldier Field, for instance, Production Associates will be erecting tents, supplying everything from food to flowers, water and air-conditioning, and commanding an army of hundreds of part-time employees. The work will be similar to assignments Production Associates has had at myriad national political conventions and professional golf tournaments.
Big events demand painstaking preparations from Production Associates’ staff of 24 full-time employees and long hours of travel for Garrity himself.
“There are times when I’ve had to be on the road 42 weeks a year,” Garrity said. “But it’s just part of the job.” He’s comforted by family kept close at hand. Son Dennis, 30, of Buffalo Grove, is a production manager and key assistant for the company, while brother James Garrity, 45, of Elk Grove Village, is operations manager. Daughter Debi Garrity, 29, of Chicago, is a frequent client; she recently began work as a meeting planner at Oak Brook-based McDonald’s after serving a stint as convention services manager at the Sheraton Towers Hotel in Chicago.
Garrity and his first wife, Nancy, were divorced in 1989, and he has embarked on a second family with wife Ann; together they have 2- and 3-year-old sons and live in Long Grove.
Young people grow up wanting to be stage stars, not stagehands, though Garrity’s youth was marked by shifting ambitions. He grew up on Chicago’s North Side, the son of the late John and Jeanette Garrity. His father was a Western Electric Co. executive who found him summer jobs while still in high school at the sprawling Western Electric manufacturing plant in Cicero.
Garrity commenced studies in electrical engineering at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, but his heart wasn’t in the work.
“I couldn’t see myself spending the rest of my life sitting at a drafting table,” Garrity recalled. “Besides, my work at Western Electric convinced me that I hated the corporate life. I felt you were little more than a number working at a big company.”
The bright footlights of the stage beckoned instead. The summer after his freshman year at Northern, Garrity landed a plum apprenticeship with the stagehands’ union, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Local 2 in Chicago. It was 1961 and Garrity was put right to work backstage at a salary of $126 a week on a touring production of “Bye Bye Birdie” at the old Erlanger Theatre in Chicago (the Daley Center sits on the site today).
The stars were Bill Hayes and Joan Blondell, but Garrity, who was charged with moving scenery for set changes, was enthralled by the teenage lead, Nancy Mitchell, whom he would marry six months after the show closed.
“What I really liked about the work was that I didn’t have to report for work until about 8 o’clock each night and I was off at 11,” Garrity said. “That gave me time to go to the beach during the day, which was very important to a freshman in college.”
College, in fact, didn’t last. Garrity quit after his sophomore year to work as a stagehand full time, traveling to New York for 18 months to work with Jack Paar and on a long-running production of “Camelot” with Robert Goulet. But his connections were better with union management in Chicago, so he was soon back in the Second City, dividing his time among such major venues as the Shubert Theatre, Lyric Opera and Blackstone Theatre.
By then he was a full-fledged journeyman, expert in anything from building scenery to devising elaborate overhead riggings and lights and sound.
Through most of the 1960s, Garrity worked a grueling schedule. He spent his mornings at WGN-TV, first with the “Farm Show” at 4 a.m. followed by the taping of “Bozo’s Circus.”
When Bob Bell as Bozo was pulling things out of a hat, it was Garrity positioned under the table handing him rabbits. Work on “Romper Room” typically followed.
Middays were given over to work with the news staff, and then it was on to one of the local theaters each night for a live performance that might last until midnight.
“I worked at least 12 hours a day seven days a week,” Garrity said. “But every minute of it was great fun.”
The best part was the easy proximity to the biggest stars. Garrity worked with Carol Channing when she appeared in “Hello, Dolly!” at the Shubert and with Sammy Davis Jr. in “Golden Boy” at the Auditorium Theatre. (See accompanying story.) He spent an entire year in the late 1960s running the sound board for “Hair,” a groundbreaking show for its use of body microphones on the principal actors.
Producer Michael Butler treated the entire cast and crew of “Hair” to a night out every Friday at the Playboy Mansion, where Garrity schmoozed with the likes of Paul Newman, Bill Cosby and, of course, Hugh Hefner.
In the late ’60s and early ’70s, Garrity filled his summers with work at the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, where he ran lights and sound for concerts by Janis Joplin, Barry Manilow and Kris Kristofferson. He also did a detour to Hollywood for a year to help out on Glen Campbell’s television variety show.
Meantime, he was moonlighting more and more with local television news crews, though that work came to a hasty halt one day in 1972 when Garrity got caught in a South Side riot while covering a Jesse Jackson appearance.
“I decided the work was too dangerous,” he explained.
That same year, the switch to corporate work-and the creation of Production Associates-occurred. “By the 1970s, corporations were becoming very serious and sophisticated about the kinds of entertaining they were doing, and they were hiring the biggest stars to work for them,” Garrity said. “I liked the variety of working for Ford one day and McDonald’s the next. And I also liked the beautiful resort locations in places like Florida, California and Las Vegas, where I was sent to put on shows. This is a very prestigious part of the industry.”
Garrity was still doing some outside work, such as Ravinia, when he first launched his company with a handful of employees. But thanks to a lack of competition and his vast array of personnel contacts within the union and sure eye for detail, the new company rose rapidly to the top ranks. Today, by common assent, Production Associates is one of the top three corporate event producers in the United States, along with Jerry Harris & Associates in New York City and Tom Mendenhall & Associates in San Francisco.
“Don’s firm is the Cadillac of the industry,” asserted Barbara Lee Cohen, president of Chicago-based Productions USA Inc., also a producer of corporate meetings, who has hired Production Associates for work on several events. One was a memorable dinner three years ago at Navy Pier for 1,200 guests of the Airport Operators Council International. Garrity staged a laser and light show that was topped off by a full-size, remote-controlled flying saucer.
Cohen also remembered a large banquet at the Westin Hotel in Chicago a couple of years ago when power was lost in the entire hotel just as a post-dinner stage show was ready to commence. Organizers improvised a candlelight sing-along for half an hour until power was restored, when the show went on without a hitch.
Production Associates’ sheer size is also seen as a distinct advantage by competitors, most of whom can’t match its resources.
For many projects, Production isn’t the low bidder at all but still wins the assignment because of its experience and multi-million-dollar inventory of lights, scenery, sound equipment and even semi-trailer trucks to ship equipment to distant sites.
“They’re a very successful company,” said Burton Rubenstein, sales director for rival Renowned Productions Inc. in Chicago. “When you think of really big events like the World Cup, you tend to think of Production Associates. Not many companies have all the equipment and capital required to do events of that size.”
Production Associates moved from its longtime base in Elk Grove Village to a new 25,000-square-foot headquarters facility in Vernon Hills in 1992. It turned out to be an inopportune time for expansion because the 1990-91 recession had cut deeply into business after contracts were signed to construct the new facilities. The firm’s revenues peaked at $5.3 million in 1988, then dipped, and Garrity was forced to lay off 25 percent of his staff three years later. Yet 1993 revenues rebounded 10 percent to $4.5 million and allowed bringing the staff to its current 24 full-time employees, which is still below the peak. Garrity predicts that the World Cup will drive up 1994 revenues by close to 50 percent to a new record.
“When the economy turned bad in 1990, a lot of companies wanted to either cancel or scale back events. It was a rough time in the industry,” said Michael Burkovskis, owner of the Show Department Inc. in Chicago, a competitor that is nearly as large as Garrity’s firm. “Business is coming back again, but at the same time there are a lot of small, new firms in the corporate event business now that you have to bid against.”
The competition doesn’t seem to have hurt Production Associates. Garrity is cheered by the presence of his son Dennis, who signed on not long after getting an undergraduate business degree from Northwestern University in Evanston nine years ago. Dennis has never regretted the career choice.
“The teamwork involved in putting up a big event is very exciting,” he said. “Everybody in a large show plays a role. The adrenaline really gets flowing, which is what I love about this work.”
The Garritys have a corps of 70 freelancers around the country to help with shows at far-flung sites, at labor rates that run from $30 to $66 an hour. But Don Garrity has a special feeling for his full-time staff.
Several of his vice presidents have remained with him since the company’s start more than 20 years ago.
“We’ve got several associates here who are like brothers to me,” Garrity said. “It’s like one big happy family.”
John Dalton, a vice president and employee since 1975 when the company consisted of just four people, agreed about the work atmosphere. “We started like a family and we’ve all stayed close through the years,” he said. “Everybody gets along. There’s never any friction. We all have a good time here. Don has always been easy to get along with. He’s very good at judging the abilities of each of his workers. He knows how to give people the confidence to do the jobs they have to do.”
Dalton noted that when Garrity had to lay off workers during tough economic times, he tried to cushion the shock. “Everybody understood it at the time. Don made sure everbody who was laid off had other union jobs to go to,” Dalton said.
