3-2-07
Making It Permanent
After years of flacking for numerous fly-by-night theatrical operators – the League, Apple Tree, Court, Northlight – veteran publicist Jay Kelly finally has decided to take an honest job and guarantee his kids’ college education. He’s been appointed director of marketing and public relations for Tony Award-winning Victory Gardens Theater, effective in April; a fact that Kelly announced in a press release he himself issued. Hey, that’s why they pay him the big bucks. Kelly succeeds VG’s long-serving marketing director Carrie Gleason, who has chosen to scale back full-time work to care for her 18-month old daughter. Gleason will continue to work with VG part-time from home.
Kelly has been VG’s outside PR representative for 11 years, and knows his way around Chicago’s theatre and media industries. VG is a full-time job, so Kelly will relinquish his other theatre clients: Lookingglass, Emerald City Theatre and the Metropolis Theatre Centre. However, Kelly will continue to work with the annual International Home and Housewares Show, so he can receive free pots and pans and not just free pans from the critics.
About Face Theatre and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) have produced their first original cast album: a CD of Loving Repeating: A Musical of Gertrude Stein, their jointly-produced 2006 hit about Stein and Alice B. Toklas, composed by Stephen Flaherty to Stein’s words as adapted by director Frank Galati. The album may be purchased at the MCA Store or at www.amazon.com for $19. If purchased at the MCA, all proceeds will go to benefit MCA programs.
The 80-minute disc, divided into 30 tracks, showcases the entire through-scored work, and was produced by John Yap and Flaherty with the original cast: Cindy Gold (Stein), Jenny Powers (Toklas), Christine Mild (Young Gertrude) and an ensemble of Zach Ford, Cristen Paige, Harriet Nzinga Plumpp, Travis Turner and Bernie Yvon.
EP Theatre reports that they’ve completed a “spare no expense” remodeling of their venue at 1820 S. Halsted in the Pilsen neighborhood. When next you attend EP, you may expect to encounter French wallpaper, German style wood paneling, a grand entry way, custom made curtains, a mural by artist Joseph Reich, new floors, chandeliers and a full bar/concession stand and box office. Gosh, it kinda’ sounds like a whorehouse. And it’s not all that far from Chicago’s turn-of-the-last-century tenderloin neighborhood along south Dearborn and Clark streets, as I recall from my misspent youth when “Bath House” John Coughlin and “Hinky-Dink” Kenna ruled the First Ward roost. In any case, EP’s first show in the refurbished space is David Steen’s Avenue A, playing through April 15.
David Rush is a very sensible playwright who understands that artistic integrity and deep pockets are not always traveling companions. Soon after Stage Left Theatre – with which Rush has a long association – announced they would produce Rush’s new play, Any Day Now, they heard from representatives of that theatrical giant, Bob Dylan. Word of the play reached their lofty offices, and they were concerned that Chicago’s theatre-going public was so slavishly devoted to Dylan’s repertory that they would confuse the play – about a professor fighting free speech issues – with an album of Dylan songs recorded by Joan Baez and released in 1969, and also called Any Day Now. In fact, Rush’s play incorporates segments of a few Dylan songs which Rush wanted to remain in the show. So he discretely agreed to change the title of his play to One Fine Day while still keeping the Dylan songs as part of the play’s content. Smart. One Fine Day continues at Stage Left through April 7.
We should all be as productive as playwright/actor John Green. His play Twilight Serenade (produced in 2003 by Red Hen Productions) recently was published by Dramatic Publishing Company and optioned by Top Dog films in Los Angeles, who also bit on Green’s own screen adaptation. Meanwhile, Green has two new plays in the works, Doubting Thomas, scheduled for a fall premiere at Virginia’s Barter Theatre, and an autobiographical show with original songs called Gangsters and Gurus (a search for something sacred in America), which Green will perform March 2-April 7 at the No Exit Cafe, with always-busy Steve Scott directing.
The man we love to hate – with plenty of good reasons why – has done it again: President George Bush has proposed small increases in the budgets for most Federal cultural agencies and programs for Fiscal 2008. In his recent budget proposal to Congress, Bush requested $128.4 million for the National Endowment for the Arts, an increase of $4 million over the last approved budget. Congress still hasn’t gotten around to approving the 2007 budget, so government is running on a series of interim funding measures (so-called Continuing Resolutions) that maintain funding at the levels of the last budget signed into law, which was Fiscal 2006. Under that budget, the NEA was funded at just under $125 million. In fact, Bush’s Fiscal 2007 budget proposed $135 million for the NEA, but it’s anyone’s guess as to when – or if – a Fiscal 2007 budget ever will be approved. As for the Prez’s 2008 proposal, members of both parties have declared it DOA, so we will continue to continue for the foreseeable future.
The Bush budget for 2008 also increases the budgets for the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian Institute and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (yeah, I never heard of it either, but it’s slated for $271.9 million). By the way, the total proposed Fed budget is $2.9 trillion, of which the proposed NEA budget is less than 1/200th of 1 percent. As has been pointed out in the past, the Department of Defense appropriates far more for military bands. Still, the NEA has received small increases in each budget proposal of the Bush administration. But $128.4 million in devalued 2008 dollars is a far cry from the $175 million NEA budgets of the late Reagan and first George Bush years, when Democrats controlled Congress and Illinois Representative Sidney R. Yates skillfully shepherded arts funding.