The recent, abrupt news of the closing of Candlelight Dinner Playhouse in Summit not only unsettled customers but sent a chill through the Chicago area’s small, tightknit theater world.
Though Candlelight’s forte was musical comedy, its extraordinary 36-year reign under the helm of director-producer William Pullinsi and his producing partner, Tony D’Angelo, was epic. And the theater’s sudden shutdown June 5 is the stuff of grand tragedy.
Lou Conte, whose Hubbard Street Dance Chicago is about to turn 20, and Frank Galati, expected to take Broadway by storm next season with his direction of “Ragtime,” are among the legions who worked there early in their careers.
“I grew up there,” says Paula Scrofano, a raven-haired actress who is one of the area’s brightest performers and most gifted singers. “I spent the first 10 years of my career there. I haven’t worked there much in recent years, but it’s like hearing your hometown lost its major employer. Everyone in the business is terribly upset. When you eliminate that many jobs, it has a huge impact.”
Pullinsi’s vast output and his longevity rival Joseph Papp’s command of New York’s Public Theatre. In the transient theater community, we are not likely to see his kind again.
Not that Pullinsi is dead, mind you. Far from it. He and D’Angelo are in a series of meetings with Harris Bank in an effort to find a way out of their financial morass and reopen the theater in some form, even as a not-for-profit endeavor. He declines to discuss financial details while the talks continue, but he does say, “We’ve had a good relationship with the bank all these years, and they are behind us.”
As expected, the shutdown has brought turmoil for all concerned. Customers who paid cash complained they were having trouble getting their money back, although many area theaters have offered to honor Candlelight tickets, including the Marriott Lincolnshire, the Apollo, the Steppenwolf, the Royal George and the Drury Lane theaters in Evergreen Park and Oakbrook Terrace. One patron reported she had sent in a hefty check for subscription tickets and never received any tickets to exchange.
Pullinsi himself talks of some past decisions with regret, especially a plan to relocate to Niles in the early 1970s that never came off.
But he speaks volumes when he concludes, “Frankly, the years went by so fast, I never had time to worry.” That sums up the attitude of many colleagues, patrons and employees, some of whom volunteered to work for free if it would help. Candlelight charmed many more people over the years than it annoyed in closing, and besides shock and dismay there was sadness and respect for this remarkable, fun-loving, once bedrock enterprise.
Playhouse pioneer
Interestingly, everyone had told Pullinsi he was crazy when in 1961 he and his partner decided to relocate their two-year-old theater from Washington, D.C. Long runs with local actors would never work, he was warned. “The idea was so novel,” he says — the Washington Candlelight is credited as the first dinner theater in America — that “we spent the first six months explaining what we were.”
Pullinsi turned to his grandfather for help in financing the theater. “I said to him maybe we should be downtown. He said, `Maybe we can’t afford it.’ That’s how we ended up in Summit, and we stayed there.”
The list of shows staged by Candlelight is numbing in its breadth and depth. Pullinsi remembers bold experiments like “Macbird” and “The National Health” the most, but his deep passion for musicals also led the theater to play host to long-running productions of “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Man of La Mancha” and, in the smaller Forum Theatre, the phenomenal world-premiere run of “Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?”
Speculation abounds about what the closing will mean, especially to the area’s pool of talent, which Candlelight nourished and supported with wages and high standards. But reasons aplenty can be found for its demise, including tough times in the theater’s neighborhood, declining Broadway product, an aging theater audience, a diminishing interest in musicals and even the rise of gambling boats. “We’re only 30 minutes each from five of them,” Pullinsi notes.
“It was surprising,” says the Goodman Theatre’s executive director, Roche Schulfer. “You look at what Bill and Tony have achieved, and it seems remarkable they’ve sustained Candlelight for this long, amidst changing neighborhoods, changing tastes and a musical industry so different than the one in which they started.
“By most accounts, Candlelight should have gone by the boards years ago,” he adds. “It’s tempting when something like this happens to see larger portents of doom in the industry as a whole and gloss over the particulars of one operation. I think sustaining it as long as they did was remarkable, and I have a hunch they’ll be back.”
Marj Halperin, executive director of the League of Chicago Theatres, seconds Schulfer’s cautious optimism. “I’m disappointed to see them close — they’ve been good members of the theater community as well as great contributors to its art. But I wouldn’t read it as an omen. You could come up with a list of theaters that have closed in recent years, but you could also come up with a list of brand-new ones. Like any business, this one has its cycles.”
“I don’t think it reflects the general tone of business right now,” says Kathryn Lamkey, central regional director of Actors’ Equity Association, the actors union. “Though shocking, it isn’t necessarily frightening. Actors here still stand a better chance of employment in the central region than those on either coast. There’s high unemployment, and no one can make a living by stage work alone. But the work weeks in general have been holding steady. They’ve just shifted from dinner theater into other categories.”
Candlelight annually accounted for some 800 to 1,000 work weeks, a figure Equity determines by multiplying the number of actors employed by the weeks that they work. Theaters also operate on a tiered system of contracts with Equity, and Candlelight’s contract fell into one of the higher tiers. “That’s one big problem,” Lamkey says. “The jobs may be replaced, but not with contracts at an equal value.”
The artists themselves seem saddened not only by the loss of wages and benefits but a loss in what Candlelight meant in terms of standards and competition.
“You go to dinner theater around the country, and the quality isn’t what it is here,” says Gary Griffin, artistic director at Drury Lane Oakbrook Terrace and a frequent contributor to Apple Tree Theatre and Pegasus Players. “Bill and Tony took chances. They were an example. They took shows that were marginal and turned them into hits.”
“There was always this sense of fabulous competition,” Scrofano says. “The big musical theaters fueled each other. I never felt I had to go to New York to be in a show of Broadway caliber. We’re becoming an area of sports arenas and gambling casinos. Why wouldn’t the people keep coming to Candlelight in droves? How do you bring them back?
“I wish I had the answer.”
