A little past midnight on Jan. 27, the lights will go off in the Ivanhoe Theater and a significant stage of Chicago theater history will disappear.
The Ivanhoe, which opened in 1966 at 750 W. Wellington St. as the namesake of its adjoining parent restaurant, has had a varied and sometimes precarious existence, becoming, in the process, a commercial crossroads of trends and movements in theater here.
It has housed everything from Larry Kramer’s landmark AIDS drama “The Normal Heart” to a musical about “Theda Bara and the Frontier Rabbi.” It had its glory days a long time ago, in the late ’60s and early ’70s, when it was the hottest theater in town. It was briefly converted to a nightclub venue in the late ’70s, but it returned to and has been operated as a legitimate theater operation since 1982, anchoring a few small companies and serving as an important midsize haven for off-Loop productions looking for a rental space.
Future television stars such as Robert Urich and Bruce Boxleitner — not to mention Lee Bouvier, Jacqueline Kennedy’s sister — made their Chicago stage debuts at the Ivanhoe. Tony Award winners such as Rita Moreno and Sandy Dennis starred there. Playwrights such as Tennessee Williams and Lillian Hellman received major revivals there. Chicago area theaters such as Lookingglass, Next, Pegasus and Famous Door mounted important productions there.
“We’ve been very happy at the Ivanhoe,” says Susan Gaspar, artistic director of The Free Associates, which on Friday will mount a weekend retrospective of its shows there. “It’s very friendly, and it’s a great location.”
But the location, according to Douglas Bragan, the theater’s owner, is too great for the Ivanhoe’s good. On-street parking in the busy residential and commercial area is almost non-existent; and, Bragan says, the chief reason he decided to close operations there is that his lease on space in the parking lot of the liquor and specialty foods store that has taken over the old restaurant space is due to expire. “Without any guaranteed on-site parking,” Bragan says, “it’s impractical to run the theater.”
Gold Standard Enterprises, which acquired the failed restaurant in 1978 and converted it into the Binny’s Beverage Depot retail store, bought the theater from Bragan last year and will now gut the theater and turn it into retail and storage space for Binny’s. Bragan, who says he’s “not ready to sail off into the sunset yet,” will take lighting and other technical equipment, but everything else, including the seats, will be left behind to make way for the bigger Binny’s.
In the immediate future, the two long-running shows that have had a home in the Ivanhoe are provided for. “Hellcab,” Famous Door’s hit, will transfer immediately from its 150-seat Ivanhoe space to a 150-seat space in the Theatre Building, 1225 W. Belmont Ave., and on Feb. 2, “B.S.,” The Free Associates’ spoof of the TV hospital drama “ER,” will move the scenery and props from its 44-seat Ivanhoe room to a 75-seat room at the Royal George Theatre, 1641 N. Halsted St. (The Ivanhoe’s 500-seat mainstage currently is unoccupied.)
“We’ve been there since 1994,” Gaspar says. “We’ll be fine in our new home, I know, but it’s always sad to see an old theater go.”
Especially, one might add, a theater like the Ivanhoe, which in its 35 years has become almost a time capsule of Chicago theater history.
In the beginning . . .
The Ivanhoe Theater originally was set up as a companion to the Ivanhoe Restaurant, 3000 N. Clark St., which was opened in 1920 and had been operating there, first as a speakeasy during Prohibition days, ever since. Richard Jansen, the restaurant’s owner, patterned his operation after that of the successful ’60s formula of the Drury Lane dinner-theater complex of producer Tony De Santis in Evergreen Park. Like Drury Lane, the $275,000, 600-seat Ivanhoe had an arena-style theater next to a restaurant dining area; and its first offerings stayed close to Drury Lane’s proven routine of hiring familiar, durable guest stars in the light fare of comedies and mysteries.
Its first production was “The Late Christopher Bean,” by Sidney Howard, starring movie character actress Thelma Ritter.
The Ivanhoe at that time helped provide steady work for Chicago’s small core of professional actors. It also scored a few hits, such as movie actor Tom Ewell in “Life with Father.” And in 1967, it made national news when Lee Bouvier Radziwill came to town, with an entourage that included Truman Capote, to star in a revival of Philip Barry’s 1939 society comedy, “The Philadelphia Story.”
Bob Thompson, the Chicago actor who portrayed her father in the play, remembers Bouvier and the famous, awful production well. “She came to the first rehearsal with every line memorized,” Thompson recalls. “The problem was she never changed a thing from the first reading.
“But I liked her. I told her if she really wanted to become an actress she should either enroll in one of my classes at Rosary College or go to East Cupcake, Iowa, and start over using a different name.”
Thompson, along with such Chicago acting stalwarts as Geraldine Kay, George Womack, Edgar Meyer, Donald Marston and Marji Banks, formed the backbone of those early, faltering attempts at popular entertainment; and in 1968, they got a chance to show how good they really could be in a top-level production when Jansen, looking to take his sagging theater away from its trite, tired fare, hired George Keathley, a bright, aggressive director with Broadway connections who had staged Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge” for the old Studebaker Theatre Company in 1957.
In a time when Chicago’s emerging off-Loop movement was beginning to focus attention on resident (rather than touring) productions, Keathley was the right man at the right time. Keeping his eye on the for-profit theater’s box office, he continued to hire TV and movie stars as guest artists, but he employed stars who also were actors, and he supported them with a solid core of local talent in dramas and comedies of substance.
His virtues came together splendidly in his third production for the Ivanhoe. He staged “The Rose Tattoo,” by Tennessee Williams, a play he loved by a playwright he knew, with Moreno as its radiant star and fine supporting performances from Chicago actors. A box-office smash, it also received the production, guest star and director prizes in the first Joseph Jefferson Awards of 1969.
For the next three years, as the city’s burgeoning theater scene began to command attention, Keathley’s direction made the Ivanhoe the key commercial theater in Chicago. “He was doing,” Thompson says, “what we thought the city’s best resident theater should be doing.” In early 1971, he even made a valiant but eventually futile stab at getting Williams out of his then personal and professional depression by staging the playwright’s two-character play, “Out Cry,” with Eileen Herlie and Donald Madden.
Ironically, the theater’s biggest hit, and one not directed by Keathley, turned out to be a prime factor in its downfall. Writer-director Donald Driver’s social comedy “Status Quo Vadis” ran a total of 58 weeks in 1971-72, providing an immediate box-office fix but disrupting the theater’s format and subscription schedule. Moved to Broadway in 1973 (with Boxleitner as its star) by overly optimistic investors, it was a one-night flop.
After that, the glitter began to fade. There were some high-profile shows — Sandy Dennis in “A Streetcar Named Desire” — and in 1974 Jansen talked of building a larger, proscenium theater. But that — as well as a possible discotheque in the basement — never materialized. In 1975, Driver’s prophetically titled new comedy “The Last Straw” was a resounding failure, and that April both theater and restaurant shut down and were put up for auction. Keathley, after an ill-fated stretch as artistic director at the old Drury Lane Theatre in Water Tower Place, left Chicago (“with some bitterness,” Thompson believes), later landing for a long, happy term as artistic director of the Missouri Repertory Theatre.
For a while, the Ivanhoe, reconfigured and renamed as The Wellington, was run by Bob Briggs, operator of the then-popular Ratso’s nightclub on Lincoln Avenue. Comedian David Steinberg and singer Peter Allen, the opening double bill, ushered in a string of pop music and comedy acts. But in 1977, after a fire had destroyed the restaurant portion of the building, the debt-ridden Wellington failed too.
With Gold Standard liquor and cheese shop already installed in the restaurant part in 1979, the management of St. Nicholas Theatre, then a leading off-Loop theater, announced plans to move into and renovate the theater; but it later aborted the plans because of financial problems that eventually led to its own closing.
New owner, new theater
Finally, in 1982, Bragan, a commodities trader and devoted theater buff, bought the Ivanhoe and reopened it with a revival of “Funeral March for a One-Man Band,” a play with music that had been a great hit for St. Nicholas but did not repeat its success. Thereafter, Bragan stuck pretty much to renting out the house to productions that needed a good mid-size theater. In addition to reworking the mainstage space once more, this time into a 500-seat house, Bragan added a 150-seat studio in what had been the theater’s courtyard and a 44-seat room in the basement, which in the long gone days had been the Catacombs, a kind of mini-fun house attraction of the old restaurant.
Bragan himself was pretty much a one-man band. Customers who have jammed into the theater’s cramped box-office area before a show may remember a small man dispensing tickets and arranging parking space via anxious calls to the crowded lot. That was Bragan.
It was also Bragan who, when he learned that Lookingglass Theatre’s 1998 production of director Mary Zimmerman’s “Metamorphoses” would be performed without intermission, tacked on an extra 50 cents to the ticket price to make up for the potential loss in refreshment sales.
A maverick in theater here, looking more like a clerk than a producer, he could be prickly in his dealings. Under his management, the Ivanhoe was “moderately profitable,’ he says, and he sold it for “a modest profit.” Still, he adds, “If I had stuck with my old job as a commodities trader, I would have made 25 times more than I did at the Ivanhoe. Working in the theater was what made it worthwhile.”
Theater people who used the Ivanhoe’s facilities make no great complaints about Bragan, his staff or his house. Laura Eason, Lookingglass’ artistic director, says, “We had a little trouble heating the swimming pool we used in `Metamorphoses,’ but I suppose that would have been the case in any theater. We had a good experience there.” Director William Pullinsi, who staged a full production of the old George Gershwin musical “Strike Up the Band” for Pegasus Players at the Ivanhoe in 1994, remembers, ” I fell down the stairs when I first walked in, because there was only a work light on and I didn’t know where I was going. Other than that, I had a good time.”
“It was really like family over there,” says Karen Kessler, Famous Door’s artistic director. “Doug was very good to us, and he’s going to be involved in producing `Hellcab’ when we move it to the Theatre Building. We were at the Ivanhoe six years with `Hellcab,’ and it seemed like everybody in the neighborhood got to know the actors. Now they’ll have to build a new neighborhood for themselves.”
“It’s so hard to find a house the Ivanhoe’s size these days,” says Eason. “It filled a need for a lot of theaters who wanted more than a tiny room and less than a big palace.
“It will be missed.”
