Her soothing, caramel-colored office overlooking a small canyon in the middle of the Loop has only one theater poster-and that was borrowed from a conference room down the hall.
But she’s quick to proclaim her passion. “I’ve been going to plays all my life,” says Marj (short for Marjorie) Halperin. “I was the only person I knew in high school whose idea of a hot date was going to the theater in downtown Detroit.”
That passion-and a lot more-will soon be put to the test. As newly named executive director of the League of Chicago Theatres, Halperin is in effect the city’s chief theater lobbyist. She takes over her organization after a year of turmoil involving fired staff, rehired staff and dismal morale. Moreover, the League, which played a major role in boosting the city’s hot young theater industry in the ’80s, faded as a force in the ’90s at the same time that industry itself began experiencing complex growing pains.
Halperin may not fix all that- no one person can. But her arrival is exquisitely timed, and many of the theater professionals who are her de facto bosses sent a strong signal just by hiring her. They offered her a three-year contract and a bigger salary than her predecessors’- and they expect bigger results.
“We need to push harder in three areas,” said one League board member. “We need better marketing, and she has a marketing background with the park district. We need more exposure from TV and other electronic media, and she has worked extensively in radio (as a reporter for WXRT-FM and National Public Radio). We need more political visibility, and she worked for City Hall (as deputy press secretary to the mayor). Important people return her phone calls.”
When told of that remark, Halperin flashes the disarming smile that’s part of her considerable charm arsenal. She is poised but determined, gentle but persuasive, engaging but tough. Even if she hadn’t worked in a string of impressive jobs crossing several fields over the years, she would be a force.
“I only joined the board about the time all this was happening, so I didn’t have a lot of experience,” says Kary Walker, Marriott’s Lincolnshire Theatre executive producer and a current League board member. “There was a dispute about the salary increase (to around $90,000 a year), and even I thought it was a lot of money. But then Marj walked in the room for her interview and had me in her palm in about five seconds.”
He adds, “I’m really excited about this, and if you told me a year ago I’d be excited about the League of Chicago Theatres, I’d have said, `Get serious.’ “
A long way to go
He’s talking about an organization that in its youth hosted well-attended summer getaways and helped a fledgling theater industry take a big box-office step by inaugurating a Hot Tix program like the one in New York City’s Times Square. But in recent years, nearly two dozen of the League’s 120 or so members fell on hard times or left the League, some of the older producers, actors and directors moved away and even Hot Tix has fallen into a listlessness: Last year Hot Tix, despite availability in six locations in the Chicago area, processed only 60,000 half-priced tickets, down from a high of 100,000 in 1990.
Halperin and producer Robert Perkins, co-owner of the Royal George Theatre and current League president, say that the League can both revive its old energy and come up with fresh, progressive ways to take the city’s theater industry to ever new heights.
Despite the loss in recent years of a few high-profile troupes — Remains and the Body Politic Theatres, for example–they argue that the theater industry here is as healthy as ever. Any perception of a malaise is just that–perception or lackluster p.r.
“It’s a little like the situation I met when I joined the park district,” says Halperin of her job as director of marketing and program support, where she worked before taking over the League. “There was practically a park in everyone’s back yard. Only we forgot to invite people to come and play in them.” During her tenure, the district inaugurated a slogan, “Come out and play.” Colleagues at the district joked, as she was leaving last December, that her new slogan will be “Come out and see a play.”
“We’re working on a three- to five-year plan to accomplish what we say the industry can achieve,” says Perkins. “You now have a town where the Chicago and Auditorium Theatres in some years average more than a million visitors each. The Goodman and Royal George average 250,000 to 300,000. Marriott’s Lincolnshire Theatre now has a record number of subscribers at 35,000.
“If you add it all up, given the number of theaters that there are, you’re talking about customers in the millions,” Perkins adds. “We want studies done to capture that in a comprehensive way so we can say to the media and others, `Look how big a business this really is and look at the wide range of demographics our audiences represent.’ “
“I think there has been a solid core to the industry for a long time, but it’s volatile,” says Roche Schulfer, executive director of the Goodman Theatre. “You have short-term peaks and short-term valleys, but in 25 years, I’d say the graph has essentially gone up. There are serious problems in the non-profit sector with some smaller and midsized companies unable to sustain themselves.
“But this is a good town for theater and it has been for a long time.”
Perkins and Halperin want to build on her city contacts to forge a new partnership that will thrust the theater into the civic limelight even more than in the past. They envision everything from an expanded Theatre Week (an annual promotion of events ranging from free high-school workshops to noontime performances downtown), possibly timed to occur with the annual Jeff Awards, to an “I Love Chicago” nationwide campaign, a higher profile for theater in all the large downtown parades and an open-house weekend inviting visitors backstage to theaters all around town, modeled after one in Cincinnati.
Halperin’s government resume is broad. She was a city hall reporter for WXRT-FM radio and an arts reporter for National Public Radio before becoming deputy press secretary for Richard M. Daley’s 1989 campaign. She worked in Daley’s City Hall press office for a while and moved to the Board of Education as press spokeswoman before going to the park district in 1993.
Employing her gift for diplomacy, she notes, however, “It’s not so much a matter of me and my contacts. It’s what the theater community already represents for the city and building on that. The appreciation from government officials is already there. We have a strong cultural affairs department, which has worked wonders for other arts and can for the theater, too. The mayor and his wife are theatergoers.”
The new League team also wants to boost the theater’s image in all kinds of other ways, beginning with what they see as a restoration of the neglected Hot Tix program.
“A new wrought iron fence just went up on State Street, so you can finally see the booth again. We’ve got another booth on Michigan Avenue, but it’s in the Chicago Place mall on the sixth floor. How many know it’s even there?” Halperin wonders. A new location or just more dramatic visiblity–say a banner out front–may boost that operation’s business. The League wants to heighten Hot Tix draw overall by making sure that all shows, including very, very hot tickets, are to some extent available–something not always true in the past.
“If there are some tickets to a `Phantom’ on sale, people will go and see some of the other offerings listed on the large board behind the ticket sellers,” says Halperin. “And if the person just in front of you maybe buys the last `Phantom’ ticket, you might be tempted to take a chance on something else.”
Conversely, the League Hot Tix hotline (312-977-1755) will soon expand from general information to messages announcing which shows are actually available for discounts–saving some unnecessary trips and encouraging use of the program as a convenience. The whole program will get a new visibility campaign, too. “How many people know there are stations at three Tower Record locations (Clark Street, Schaumburg and Bloomingdale)?” Halperin asks.
There will also be a new push for media coverage, including more television. Already, the League has begun a new program with the Tribune Co.’s CLTV News, blending reviews and an ad package as an experiment to take to other TV stations, if it works. Some ideas are simple: “Other industries send out video releases, just like paper press releases, and TV stations use them,” Halperin says. “We’d like to do that for plays–and it should work. After all, theater is a highly visual medium.”
A push from within
More than anything is a concentrated effort to boost the consciousness of the League’s members about their organization. Halperin says membership can be built back up if the members are given reason to think they have a lot to gain. The League is supported from membership dues (they vary depending on theater size, from $275 a year to $1,650), Hot Tix revenues, commissions from collective advertising and some grants from the city, arts councils, foundations and other such sources.
An initial, get-acquainted session held two weeks ago had its share of grumbles. Members were described as polite and enthusiastic, but some complained about some of the new plans. To boost the Hot Tix offerings, for instance, members are told they’ll now be required to provide a minimum of 12 pairs of tickets per week–not so easy when you run a 40-seat theater.
That underscores the Olympian task of the League, unusual in its variety of membership, from 3,000-seat theaters to tiny storefronts, from large, downtown commercial enterprises to non-Equity avant-garde experimentation. “I can’t think of another organization that serves such diverse members,” Schulfer said.
Another plan that caught some members by surprise is a new temporary 50-cent deduction to be taken from each hot ticket sold to support new marketing drives. “We sell a lot of tickets through Hot Tix, so it’s not such a small amount of money,” said one theater manager. “It wasn’t so much the idea as that they presented it as a done deal, suggesting they hadn’t really thought it through.
“And though all the marketing plans sound great, they’re very ambitious and we weren’t really presented with strategic details. How do they plan to carry this off?”
Time will tell. But Halperin has already impressed members with her efforts to be pro-active. “She called me up one day and said, `I just want to get your thoughts on something,’ ” says Walker. “We spent the next hour on the phone. That’s more service I got from the League than in the previous 18 years.”
Not only the director’s salary, but the overall League budget will grow from $600,000 last year to $700,000 this year and possibly to $1 million in a few years, Perkins predicts. And all of it will be watched very closely.
As one board member bluntly puts it, “This is our shot. Either we spend the money and make the League work, or we shut it down.”
DEFINING LEAGUE OF CHICAGO THEATRES
Established: 1979
Budget: $700,000
Staff: Seven full-time employees; six part-time ticket sellers
Membership: 107 theaters and theater companies (city and suburban), ranging from Auditorium Theatre (3,991 seats) to the Goodman Theatre (683 seats ) to Famous Door (99 seats) to Shattered Globe (52 seats)
Theater attendance: In 1994, the last time sales were calculated, the League estimated 4 million tickets were sold to all Chicago area professional and college theatrical productions
