Talk about earning your salary! Veteran director (and scourge of dramaturgs everywhere) Terry McCabe has joined City Lit Theater Company as artistic director, and he's brought a $43,000 gift with him. An unsolicited donation from playwright and film author John Logan retires City Lit's long-term debt, hovering over the company since 1999, and allows McCabe and new business manager Brian Pastor to begin with a clean slate.

The hiring of McCabe and Pastor allows City Lit to split artistic and financial functions for the first time in four years. Pastor's job is part-time at present, but the plan is to make him a full-time managing director down the road. Programming will expand as well, increasing from three to five shows a year as City Lit broadens its audience and financial base, Pastor reports. McCabe officially begins July 1 at the start of City Lit's 2006 fiscal year, but he's at work now pro bono producing City Lit's season-closer, Pigs Have Wings, adapted by Page Hearn from the P. G. Wodehouse novel. It runs April 28-June 12.

Theatrical senior citizens such as me know that McCabe and Logan had a fruitful early-career partnership in the 1980s. McCabe staged the world premieres of the plays that established Logan in Chicago (and New York and London): Never the Sinner and Hauptmann. At that time, McCabe helmed the long-defunct Stormfield Theatre. (FYI: both plays starred Denis O'Hare, a friend of Logan's from their student days at Northwestern.) Logan also wrote Snow, Music from a Locked Room and Riverview, produced at Pegasus Players, Victory Gardens and Goodman before going Hollywood.

Now relocated to Malibu, Logan is the author or co-author of Any Given Sunday, The Last Samurai, Gladiator and The Aviator, among others. He earned Oscar nominations for the last two. Sure, Logan can afford the $43,000 gift, but it's still a magnanimous gesture of loyalty to the friend and theatre community that nurtured him. An even better gift would be a new Logan play for McCabe to direct. Logan, officially a member of the Victory Gardens Playwrights Ensemble, donated a similar gift—$40,000—to Victory Gardens several years ago.

As reported in our April 15 column, the city soon will introduce a new, streamlined Public Place of Amusement (PPA) license specifically for Off-Loop theatres, the result of over a year of work by a Mayoral task force in which the League of Chicago Theatres was a key participant. League folk report that one final issue still remains to be settled before the new PPA is done, but it's far enough along for a preview at the next Theatre Dish, Monday, May 16, 5:30 – 7:30 p.m. at the Claudia Cassidy Theatre in the Cultural Center (77 E. Randolph). League CEO Marj Halperin, architect Gary Ruderman, Julie Burros from the Department of Cultural Affairs and other City representatives will discuss "The New Performing Arts Venue License – What Does it Mean for Your Theatre." As usual, the event is free and offers food and plenty of purposeful talk. Theatre Dish is sponsored by the League, with co-sponsorship from PerformInk.

In our last column, we also reported that enforcement authority for PPA licenses will shift from the Department of Revenue to a new city Department of Business Affairs and Licensing, under commissioner Scott Bruner. This new department is an expanded version of the Mayor's Local Liquor Control Commission and Licensing Commission. Revenue spokesperson Efrat Dallal has confirmed that "the investigation unit from the Department of Revenue is being moved to the new department."

It's not utopia but it's the Big Apple: T.U.T.A. is bringing its production of Rules for Good Manners in Modern Society to New York, complete with the original Chicago costumes and cast. The play by Jean-Luc Lagarce was a surprise hit of last autumn's Playing French Festival, organized by the French Cultural Services among several dozen Chicago institutions. A New York edition of Playing French is being organized for next fall, and T.U.T.A.'s show may be a part of it (plans will be announced in June). However, with or without French sponsorship, T.U.T.A. will present Rules at the Castillo Theatre (42nd St. at Broadway) for two weeks in September. T.U.T.A. last played New York seven years ago with a well-received production of Heiner Muller's Quartet. T.U.T.A. was based in Washington, D.C. then.

The League of Chicago Theatres holds its annual gala Monday, May 9 at the Goodman Theatre. The League will present the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation with its 2005 Tribute Award, Chicago Dramatists founder and artistic director Russ Tutterow with the 2005 Leadership Award, and Marj Halperin will receive an award in special recognition of her service to the League as she prepares to step down in June. Last year's gala raised $219,000 for the League of Chicago Theatres Foundation.

The same night, Chicago's most singular and ingenious contribution to the theatre industry, The Saints, will hold its 25th anniversary gala at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre. Not all readers may know that this wonderful organization of volunteers began as a service adjunct to the long-defunct St. Nicholas Theatre Company (thus, the name). At the very first meeting in 1980, there were 54 people. Today, The Saints have 1,571 members who actually pay to be in the group and work for nothing at more than 40 theatres throughout metro Chicago. As far as anyone knows, The Saints are sui generis not only in Chicago, but in all the United States and Texas, and the world.

Stage combat meisters Richard Gilbert and David Gregory, collectively R&D Choreography, are celebrating their 100th production as fight-makers with a May 22 benefit for their West Randolph Street training center, The Fightshop ($10, food and drink but no guarantee of a good dust-up). Gilbert and Gregory teamed in 1996. Their 100th show is the Piven Theatre production of Great Expectations, May 19-June 26.

Cabaret mainstay Elaine Dame will release her first CD in June on the Bluejazz label, Comes Love! featuring Jeremy Kahn (piano), Rob Amster (bass) and Tim Davis (drums). She'll celebrate the event—and sell the CD—at Davenport's on Mondays in July.

Actor, director and teacher Dale Calandra has kept a low profile since his life-threatening illness two years ago, but he's back in view currently as director of Is There Anything Going On Upstairs?, an expanded version of Denise La Grassa's one-woman show, now in an open run Fridays at Kitty Moon, 6237 N. Clark. Welcome back, Dale!

Happy birthday to Will Shakespeare, who turned a spry 441 on April 23.

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