The old place hasn’t looked this good in years. Its stage area has undergone a face lift for the day and glows under a forest of portable lights. The lights throw a gentle, forgiving luminance on the vintage stage but leave the auditorium itself in discreet darkness, the better to hide the nicks of time.
Unlike Norma Desmond, the faded heroine of the movie and hit musical “Sunset Boulevard,” the Oriental Theater, once the glittering queen of Randolph Street but shuttered since 1980, is not yet ready for her closeup.
The stage is crowded with folding chairs and people. Formally-clad waiters bearing hors d’oeuvres trays wend their way through a sea of journalists and civic pooh-bahs waiting for the press conference to begin. Ald. Burton Natarus looks a bit peaked. “I overdid the NordicTrack this morning,” he tells an assemblage of pals. “I don’t feel good.”
“I hear this place has rats,” the creative director of one of Chicago’s leading nonprofit theater companies remarks sotto voce to a well-connected real estate developer. “Nah,” responds the developer. “Dave Kalish (longtime owner of the Oriental and the attached office building) says there haven’t been rats in here since 1986. There’s nothing for them to eat.”
A spotlight suddenly falls on a small table where the mayor of Chicago rises to introduce the featured guest, a man whose name is unfamiliar to most Chicagoans but who already has enormously influenced the cultural life of the United States and Canada and who has set for himself an epic task-nursing the once-robust art form of musical theater back to full health, under his own commercial aegis, of course.
His name is Garth H. Drabinsky, and the Toronto-based entrepreneur has, in the bargain, signed on to yet another prodigious task, namely giving a jump start to City Hall’s long-stalled effort to resuscitate the north end of the Loop.
Drabinsky’s commitment to buy the Oriental, restore it to its original splendor and run it as a showplace for big-budget legitimate theater is a key part of the city’s plan to transform the North Loop into a theater district comparable in quality, if not in size, to New York’s Great White Way and London’s West End.
Seasoned Richard M. Daley watchers have come to expect from him the same kind of delicious malapropisms that used to emanate from his father and the mayor does not disappoint, referring to the Drabinsky-produced musical that revived the fortunes of the struggling Chicago Theater as “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamboat.”
But Daley stumbles to the finish line in one piece. He outlines his administration’s game plan for the North Loop, which envisions, along with the Drabinsky project, the assumption by the Walt Disney Co. of the Chicago Theater’s operations, a relocation by the Goodman Theatre to the long-dormant Harris and Selwyn theaters at Dearborn and Lake Streets, the “demalling” of State Street and, ultimately, the redevelopment of Block 37, that vacant eyesore across the street from the Oriental that is a daily reminder of urban planning gone sour. Consummation of these steps, notes Daley, with parsimony of phrase, should make downtown Chicago once again “a good place to shop, work and visit.”
It is Drabinsky’s turn next, and neither does he disappoint. A consummate showman, he takes the wraps off the Oriental venture with a bravura performance in which, by turns, he (a) screens a film that spotlights his previous efforts at theater restoration, including the painstaking rehab of the historic Pantages in Toronto, (b) catalogues the musicals he has placed in production since 1989, from “Phantom of the Opera” and “Kiss of the Spider Woman” to “Joseph” “Sunset Boulevard” and “Showboat,” (c) extols Chicago as “one of the great cities of the world” and “the city that launched the careers of Tennessee Williams and David Mamet,” (d) quotes Edmund Bacon (“The form of a city is a pitiless indicator of its state of civilization”), Matthew Arnold (“Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit”) and Walt Whitman (“A great city is that which has the greatest men and women”) and (e) proclaims that the new Oriental will confer on the theater-going public “a grand sense of occasion” and “help reintroduce the grandeur of theater in Chicago’s North Loop area.”
A seated Daley nods tolerantly, as if to say, yeah, but what it’s gonna be when it’s all done is a good place to shop, work, and visit.
Mr. Yin meet Mr. Yang.
Redevelopment of the North Loop has been a long time coming. As far back as 1973, city planners were talking about “renewing” the Loop, which, owing to a variety of causes, ranging from white flight from the city, competition from suburban shopping malls and North Michigan Avenue retailers and the proliferation of triple-feature Kung Fu and “blaxploitation” films at downtown movie houses, had fallen on hard times.
A honky-tonk feel enveloped the area, particularly north of Washington Street, where sidewalks reverberated with megabass pouring from discount stereo stores and the shopping mix ran from gold chains and hip-hop clothes to caramel corn and cheap steak dinners.
Proposed makeovers involved everyone from Arthur Rubloff to Helmut Jahn, and sheaves of plans were considered and discarded. Then, in 1989, it finally looked like things were off the dime. Wrecking crews moved in to knock down the buildings on Block 37 which, situated between State, Randolph, Dearborn and Washington Streets, was the center of what was shaping up to be a 12-year, $900 million North Loop plan.
But when the dust settled on the now-cleared land, for which Chicago taxpayers had shelled out $24 million on behalf of private developers and whose demolition had spilled the blood of several revered landmarks, the city awoke to find that its buck had bought no bang. The office building glut had erased all incentive the developers had to build on the land, and for the last seven years the vacant lot has stood as a very visible white elephant.
Acutely embarrassed, the city in 1994 brought in the high-powered consulting help of realty giant U. S. Equities, whose boss, Robert Wislow, is tight with the Daley administration. Wislow assigned a well-regarded new man, Alan Schachtman, to work with the city commissioner of Planning and Development, Jeff Boyle, to reinvigorate the North Loop project, which, despite early successes in the late 1980s-notably construction of the Stouffer Renaissance Chicago Hotel at 1 W. Wacker Drive and the Leo Burnett Building next door at 35 W. Wacker-appeared dead in the water.
Schachtman, an architect turned marketer and project manager, got his feet wet by accelerating renovation work on the exterior of the landmark Reliance Building on the southern boundary of the redevelopment area. The Reliance, which the city had acquired to save it, “was in real need of physical help, and we jumped into that,” says Schachtman.
But Schachtman was meanwhile immersing himself in the larger problem of how to breathe life back into the North Loop plan. An inventory he ran of the neighborhood convinced him of its underlying strengths. “The more you look at it, the more you realize it’s an amazing area,” he says. “It’s unparalleled in terms of transportation, parking, cultural facilities and hotels, and it’s located near the lake. We concluded there should be no real barrier to getting people to come down and be a part of it.”
Nor did Schachtman see any need to deviate from the city’s desire to make the area a theater district, a goal that dated back to Mayor Daley’s father, the late Mayor Richard J. Daley. “Its history is entertainment,” says Schachtman of the neighborhood. “Randolph Street is traditionally where the live theaters and movie houses congregated. And there’s been a real resurgence in live theater in the past several years. When ‘Joseph’ was in Chicago, it grossed $58 million in 15 months. That opened a lot of people’s eyes.”
It was in July 1994 that Schachtman, during one of his periodic walking tours of the North Loop, happened on the Oriental, 20 W. Randolph, which had been closed for years, its lobby leased out much of that time to a beanery and an electronic store. Recalling the theater’s rich heritage-it had been a vaudeville house before it was a movie palace-he called owner David Kalish for a showing.
“I no sooner walked in than I realized it was a gold mine waiting to be tapped,” says Schachtman. “I had no idea so much of its original condition had survived.”
That same summer, U.S. Equities retained Theater Project Consultants, a Connecticut firm specializing in helping cities expand their theater base. Chicago wanted to know why a city like Minneapolis, only a fourth its size, had a more vigorous commercial theater industry.
The firm had a ready reply. Chicago, unlike Minneapolis, is short of first-class theaters. A city that once boasted such proud commercial houses as the Erlanger, Garrick, Studebaker, Blackstone, Harris, Selwyn and Bismarck was down, essentially, to three: the Shubert, the Auditorium and the Chicago.
The consultants also had a tip: In creating new theatrical venues, the city should seek out people who could consolidate all functions under one roof; in other words, not only own and operate the theater but produce all the shows featured therein. “Such people would have a vested interest in making sure the theaters weren’t dark,” says Schachtman. “It wasn’t rocket science, but it was something we needed to hear.”
Over and over, whenever the subject of owner-producers was raised, the same name kept coming up, that of Garth Drabinsky, the larger-than-life figure who had built Cineplex Odeon into one of the largest motion picture house chains in North America before a forced exit into the world of legitimate theater. Boyle and Schachtman, already impressed by the positive cash flow generated by Drabinsky’s “Joseph,” decided to extend feelers to Drabinsky. Would he be interested in acquiring the Oriental?
Coincidentally, the Chicago architect Daniel P. Coffey, whose firm had restored the Chicago Theater, had independently concluded that Drabinsky and the Oriental were made for each other. In November 1994, he fired off a letter to that effect to the Canadian.
Meanwhile, Boyle’s office shrewdly contacted the Disney company about the Oriental, knowing of Disney’s plan to move in on the live theater industry in New York and other cities. Would the Disney people be interested, too?
They would. But for once the giant entertainment conglomerate got left at the starting gate. Within days of receiving Coffey’s letter, Drabinsky flew down from Toronto for a walk-through of the Oriental. Says Coffey, who helped conduct the tour, “He immediately fell in love with it.”
The deal was sealed before the Disney people knew what hit them. “Garth maybe moved a little faster and got an agreement with Kalish pretty early on,” says Schachtman. But, he says, things worked out for the best.
“It was right after that, that we started talking to Disney about the Chicago. It’s never been my impression that they felt they were aced out. They seem very pleased by how it’s worked out. It’s a synergistic thing. There’s plenty of market here for both of them.”
Disney has signed an agreement to run the Chicago Theater for three years with an option for a fourth. The company is also said to be considering opening a number of retail outlets along State Street to sell Disney merchandise, especially merchandise tying into Disney stage productions, such as “Beauty and the Beast,” projected as the Chicago’s first Disney offering.
While Disney executives will not confirm such rumors, they reportedly are eyeing the two-story building to the south of the Chicago, which now houses a Walgreens drugstore and 13 other businesses. Disney already owns, through its recent acquisition of Capitol Cities/ABC Inc., the building at State and Lake Streets that houses WLS-TV, and which has street-level retailing space open.
Other sites mentioned include two buildings on the west side of State Street that currently house a tavern, a pawnshop and two restaurants. The buildings are under condemnation proceedings instituted by the city, which is using its powers under the ordinance creating the North Loop tax increment financing (TIF) district. Under the TIF arrangement, the city can take control of a building and have the courts set the sale price if a financial agreement can’t be reached with an owner.
With Disney leasing rather than owning the Chicago Theater, sources think it unlikely that the firm will make the kind of commitment here that it’s making in New York, where it is not only renovating the New Amsterdam Theater but is spearheading a $303 million upgrading of seamy 42d Street. But whatever Disney brings to State Street will be viewed as an improvement.
On a third front, the respected Goodman Theater is closing in on its goal of acquiring and renovating the Harris and Selwyn as its future base of operations. “We have a little more fundraising to do, but it’s coming along well,” says Louis Manilow, a major figure in the effort who proposed a downtown “theater row” in 1981. “In the not too distant future we will be able to announce some things. It’s gonna happen.”
The cost of updating the twin theaters is estimated at $10 million. “This is not just a remodeling job,” notes Manilow, who says major work must be done to soundproof the Selwyn on the north because it is contiguous to the subway. The aim is to create two spaces, a 900-seat theater that will accommodate larger-scale productions and a 400-seat theater for more intimate plays of the kind that typify the off-Loop theaters along Halsted and Clark Streets.
“Right now,” says Manilow of the Goodman’s quarters adjacent to the Art Institute, “we have houses that seat 600 and 150, which limits what we can do. This project will give us a tremendous artistic boost.”
Disney and the Goodman will bring expertise and name value to the fledgling North Loop theater district. But the marquee figure has to be Drabinsky, who combines in one colorful persona a Daddy Warbucks-sized entrepreneurial imagination and a devotion to the soul of the arts seldom seen in hard-headed businessmen.
I’m not just a money guy,” Drabinsky said recently over an Italian meal of braised chicken. “I wouldn’t be in this business if it wasn’t to satisfy my artistic ambitions. I’m in love with the power of music to convey emotion and romance.”
It is that itch that has driven him, in the span of just eight years, to become one of the leading players in North American theater, a man with enough money to afford private planes wherever he goes but who still gets a childlike rush at the thought that he is hobnobbing artistically with such cultural icons as theatrical legend Harold Prince, the megabucks composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and the bestselling author E.L. Doctorow.
“Doctorow is one of the most magnificent men I’ve ever met,” he marvels of the man who wrote the novel “Ragtime,” which Drabinsky is adapting to the stage in hopes that it will be his next blockbuster musical. “He has a superb mind and an ability to create images in words that just leap off the page.”
But Drabinsky’s true hero appears to be Daedalus, the figure from Greek mythology who made wings so he could soar away from his earthly prison. “Never be afraid to fly closer to the sun,” Drabinsky writes in his autobiography.
It is a philosophy that has carried him from a difficult childhood to the top of not one, but two, show business empires before he was 50 years old.
Drabinsky was born in Toronto in 1949 to parents of modest means. At 3 he was stricken with polio, which left his left leg paralyzed and caused him to spend much of his childhood in hospitals enduring painful operations.
Educated as a lawyer, he developed an entertainment-based law practice before co-founding Cineplex Odeon in 1979. As its CEO and chairman, he built the corporation from a tiny player with 18 screens to a sprawling chain with 1,800 screens in 500 locations. As a film producer in those years, he also turned out six award-winning films, including “Tribute,” for which Jack Lemmon received an Oscar nomination in 1981.
But in 1989, Drabinsky was forced out of his own company by his business partners, the far-reaching entertainment colossus MCA and Montreal’s Bronfman family. At issue, in part, were Drabinsky’s high-flying corporate spending habits. Deciding to pursue a lifelong fascination with the theater, Drabinsky salved his wounds by purchasing Cineplex Odeon’s live entertainment division, now known as Livent, and has used it as the stepping-stone to a second career of arguably greater stature than his first.
Livent now has a major presence in four North American theatrical markets-Toronto, New York, Vancouver and Chicago-and is a key reason why Toronto has emerged as the second leading theater center in the Western hemisphere, behind New York.
The company has not only restored the 1920s-vintage Pantages and runs the Ford Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto, but also built an 1,800-seat Ford Centre in Vancouver, and has announced plans to restore and lease as a single theater two historic Broadway houses, the Lyric and the Apollo.
Drabinsky’s forays into theatrical production have led him to mount many of the top-grossing stage musicals of the last five years, including the gigantic production of “Showboat” that won critical raves on Broadway and opens here, in the city of Edna Ferber, author of the novel on which the show is based, March 24 at the Auditorium.
Owning the theatrical venues and producing most, if not all, of the shows they play puts Drabinsky and Livent in the enviable position of a self-contained entity, beholden to no one.
“I make my own software,” he crows.
Among the upcoming shows he expects to produce, besides “Ragtime,” are a musical adaptation of “The Sweet Smell of Success,” the 1957 film noir starring Burt Lancaster that was a thinly-veiled slam of Walter Winchell; a revival of “Pal Joey,” for which he has acquired the rights; and “I Love a Parade,” a new musical, directed by Hal Prince, written by Alfred Uhry, the author of “Driving Miss Daisy,” and scored by the highly touted young composer Jason Robert Brown. “(Stephen) Sondheim thinks Jason is going to be the next Gershwin,” says Drabinsky.
Drabinsky foresees a new golden era for the musical and wants to be there in the vanguard. “It’s an incredibly powerful medium,” he says. “It can leave indelible impressions, far more so than film. Ask 100 people to describe the first musical they ever saw and they can tell you precisely. Try the same with a film.”
The medium also has the ability to convey social messages, an attribute Drabinsky says he finds very important. ” ‘Showboat’ deals with themes like racism, alcoholism and miscegenation,” he says. ” ‘Cabaret’ treated the subject of Nazism and ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ dealt with pogroms. The issues of homosexuality and totalitarianism are aired in ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman.’ It’s reality at its most powerful.”
One of the things that drew him to the “Ragtime” project, he says, is the chance to deal with racism on another level. “In a way, it’s a sequel to ‘Showboat,’ ” he says. “I can get even more serious about racism and America at the turn of the century but deal with it in a manner that will make you cry and laugh. It will entertain you in a way that movies can’t come close to.”
If Daedalus is Drabinsky’s role model, there are critics who think that Icarus would be a more appropriate hero, in reference to the son of Daedalus who flew so close to the sun that the wax that fastened his wings to his body melted and he fell to death. Detractors accuse Drabinsky of being a wanton spendthrift who lavishes money on his restorations and throws huge amounts into advertising, to wit, the millions he has spent on a year-long campaign to publicize the Chicago run of “Showboat.”
The accusation drives Drabinsky up the wall. “It’s bull that I overspend. I run a very responsible and enormously accountable public company, and I have to show a growing bottom line every year. If I’m spending so flagrantly, why do these numbers keep improving? I had to borrow $80 million to get into this business back in ’89 and I’ve paid it all back, all of it. How could we do that if we didn’t have incredible concern about the dollars we spend?
“You have to spend money on advertising these days,” he insists. “But when a show is bringing in $950,000 a week, like the New York company of ‘Showboat’ is, is it unreasonable that the show spend 10 percent of it on advertising?”
A more telling criticism might be that of longtime New Republic theater critic Robert Brustein, who dislikes the musical mode that has enabled producers
like Drabinsky to prosper.
“It could be argued,” Brustein writes in his book, “Reimagining American Theater,” “that we no longer have theater on Broadway, we have only Events. . . . Anything that promises big sales through advance publicity receives massive pre-opening and post-opening coverage until we are smothered under an avalanche of information we have no desire to know.
“The critic-proof Event has resulted in a whole new theater genre which I call the ‘Shlepic,”‘ says Brustein. “Often originating in England, and always costing millions, it takes New York by storm and runs for centuries to standing ovations. The earliest of these Shlepics was ‘Cats,’ followed hard upon by ‘Les Miserables’ and ‘Starlight Express.’
. . . The latest, and by far most successful, in this series is ‘The Phantom of the Opera.’ “
It is a charge Drabinsky can shrug off, all the way to the bank.
“I’m in love with this city,” Drabinsky says of Chicago. “I’m confident it will be an unbelievable market for major musicals. It has always been undersold. Tour companies come in here with shows that run two weeks that could have played two years.
“You don’t understand the power of the Chicago market. There are 8.5 million people in the six-county area alone. Then draw a circle around the area described by Indianapolis, St. Louis, Madison and Milwaukee. Now you’re talking about 25 million people. Where will they go for theater? New York? Get real.”
In restoring the Oriental, Drabinsky is establishing himself as a Chicago presence for years to come. He is sinking a considerable piece of change, $15 million, of his own funds into the $28.5 million dollar project, to be matched by upwards of $13.5 million from the city in North Loop Redevelopment Funds, which also will cover the cost, yet to be determined, of acquiring the adjacent Oliver Building. Buying the Oliver will permit the deepening of the Oriental’s stage by some 60 feet to accommodate the needs of today’s high-tech theater.
The design work is being done by Dan Coffey and Drabinsky’s point man on restoration projects, Peter Kofman of Toronto. Recently the two men stood on the stage of the old theater, which, when built in 1925, represented some of the finest work by the Michelangelos of American movie palace design, Rapp and Rapp. In what has evidently become a Where’s Waldo game for adults, Kofman and Coffey squinted at the towering ceiling overhead, scrutinizing the intricacy of the Southeast Asian motif, with its carved griffons and elephants and dancers.
“Every time we look up there we see something we never noticed before,” said Kofman.
It is ironic that Garth Drabinsky, a man who, as head of Cineplex Odeon, did as much as anyone to draw entertainment consumers away from downtown Chicago by dotting the suburbs with dozens of new movie houses, should now be trying to win them back to the Loop.
But Drabinsky sees no inconsistency. Only a bright future.
“Imagine the synergy you will have here when all three of these projects, the Oriental, the Chicago and the Goodman are working together,” he says. “You’ll have half a dozen marquees lit up at night within six or seven blocks of each other, and three within two blocks. What will ultimately flow from that, I can’t tell. But it’s going to be exciting.”
