`I know it’s probably politically incorrect, but I’m optimistic.”
Eileen Boevers, who runs the thriving little Apple Tree Theatre in Highland Park, is talking about prospects for the coming season, a time of sad endings and hopeful beginnings in the Chicago area’s radically altered theatrical landscape of 1996-97.
As the season gets under way with dozens of openings, big and small, in its first few weeks, names that once embodied the strength and honor of Chicago theater–Body Politic, Remains, Wisdom Bridge–are either gone or in deep hiatus. The Organic Theater, one of the proudest and oldest of the Off-Loop institutions, has been merged with the younger, ambitious Touchstone Theatre, and the National Jewish Theatre is either going out of business or being absorbed by Northlight Theatre.
The long-predicted shake-up of middle level, mid-size (250 to 300 seats) not-for-profit theaters has hit the area hard. There have been different reasons for each loss, but the cumulative effect has been to diminish what was once considered the heart of Chicago’s resident theater movement.
And yet, as Boevers indicates, the reigning emotion for the start of the new season is optimism. The veteran theaters that have weathered the changes and the relatively new troupes that have emerged in the last few years are charging ahead, and the season schedule, as you can tell from the listings of more than four dozen theaters in this issue, is chockablock with premieres and revivals on every front.
Victory Gardens Theatre, in its 23rd season as a not-for-profit institution, commands four stages since it absorbed the Body Politic, and has all of them filled with shows through May, either in its own subscription series or with outside rentals. “I see no shortage of people who want to produce plays,” says John Walker, the Gardens’ managing director.
Certainly this is true in the commercial theater. Producers such as Bob Perkins of the Royal George Theatre may worry about lack of product, but meanwhile, he’s going to have two phenomenal entertainments, “Forever Tango” and the amazing “Forever Plaid,” filling his theater into the new year.
“The thing about Chicago theater,” says Michael Leavitt of Fox Theatricals, which is backing a commercial return of Steve Martin’s “Picasso at the Lapin Agile” in the Briar Street Theatre, “is that it’s always changing, forever in flux, but there’s always a constant flow of activity.”
Megamusicals continue to dominate the downtown stages. “Show Boat,” good at least through the spring in the Auditorium Theatre, will be joined in April 1997 by a three-month run of “Sunset Boulevard” in the Civic Opera House. And in the coming holiday season, a time for theatergoing even among non-theatergoers, the Shubert Theatre’s new “That’s Christmas!” revue will be vying for Loop customers with the Donny Osmond “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” in the Chicago Theatre and the Goodman Theatre’s “A Christmas Carol.”
The Goodman, largest, oldest and biggest spender (with its $10 million budget) of Chicago’s not-for profit theaters, is expecting to bring in a record 23,000 subscribers this season, with two Broadway-bound shows, “Randy Newman’s Faust” and Horton Foote’s “The Young Man From Atlanta” on its schedule.
Meanwhile, Steppenwolf Theater, with a budget of $5.4 million, is coming off a highly successful 1995-96 season with hopes of setting its own record of more than 19,000 subscribers. (The area’s largest theater subscription list belongs, however, to a commercial venue, the all-musicals Marriott’s Lincolnshire Theatre, with 35,000 subscribers.)
Despite the departure of several long-time theaters from the scene, many veteran organizations are still going strong. ETA Creative Arts Foundation, a bulwark of black theater on the South Side, celebrates its 25th anniversary this season. At Victory Gardens, now undergoing a series of expensive physical renovations, Dennis Zacek, marking his 20th season as artistic director, says, “We’re still around because we’ve stayed here and stayed at it all these years.”
Northlight, looking to move into its new quarters in the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie next year, is rebounding from its three years without a permanent home into a time of “renewed commitment from the audience out there,” according to Richard Friedman, managing director.
Friedman calls last season in Chicago theater “a time of consolidation” (or what other theater directors here refer to as “the evolutionary process”), and he looks for stabilization and growth among the fittest theaters that have survived.
Ina Marlowe, whose Touchstone merged with the Organic, laments the passing of the old guard, but at the same time she’s delighted that her theater, wide-ranging in its choice of material, has had an easier time in getting rights to hit plays that once went to other troupes. All of a sudden, her theater, which operates on a $700,000 budget, has rights to Broadway and off-Broadway successes that it didn’t have a chance at attracting in earlier years.
Still, even among the hardiest and most hopeful theaters, there is awareness that times have changed in the push to attract funding and audiences. Even small, on-the-edge groups such as Strawdog Theatre are signing on marketing directors to help them explore different ways of attracting customers.
“The way we’re looking to do business will be changing,” says Arlene Crewdson, executive director of the community-oriented Pegasus Players. “The smaller theaters are going to have to find new resources.” Toward that end, Pegasus has joined forces with the Uptown Chamber of Commerce to form an arts and business committee that will promote joint marketing and advertising projects. Pegasus flyers, for example, will be inserted in mailings of the Uptown Bank. Trying to expand its core audience, Pegasus also is bringing in the Beacon Street Gallery and the Joel Hall Dancers as season attractions.
The old standby of trying to increase subscribers is still pursued diligently by the large Goodman and Steppenwolf organizations, but some smaller theaters are emphasizing other sales angles. Says Victory Gardens’ Walker, “We’re going to maintain our subscription list, naturally, but we’re also going to spend more marketing money on attracting single ticket sales.”
Co-productions by two or more theaters is also a cost-saving alternative, and of course, there’s always the hope that a little show, as with the Black Ensemble’s “Doo Wop Shoo Bop,” will turn into a long-run, cash-generating hit with commercial potential.
Steve Pickering, in his third year as artistic director of Next Theatre in Evanston, says, “This is the first year in which I’m not running really scared. In the process of evolution in Chicago, we’re in about the third wave of artists, and I feel now that we’re beginning to feel support from a generation that had yet to be asked when we first entered the scene. We’re just getting better at our jobs.”
Boevers, working out of her 177-seat Apple Tree space on the second floor of a small shopping mall, has been steering her theater toward a more adventurous, risk-taking line-up in the last few years, and she says it’s paying off. “We’re developing our own constituency. The people who would be happier with all musicals have left us, and we now have a strong, loyal audience we can call our own.”
Roche Schulfer, Goodman’s executive director, is in his 24th season of work in Chicago’s theater community, and his final judgment on the upcoming season is: “There’s a lot of activity here, with a lot to choose from. That makes it a tough marketplace. It also makes it the greatest city in the country for theater.”
