5-25-07
New Theatre Space on Halsted
Chicago’s newest theatre venue is the Hoover-Leppen Theater of the Center on Halsted, the LGBT community center at 3656 N. Halsted, scheduled to open June 8 after years of dreaming, planning, fundraising and construction. The little playhouse is a flexible blackbox space that can seat up to 154 (depending on configuration), and comes complete with lighting equipment, sound system and tech booth. When the Center on Halsted opens, it will have two resident theatre companies, or community partners as the Center staff prefer to call them. The two, GayCo and Hubris Productions, will have office space in the Center and will perform in the Hoover-Leppen Theater, along with various non-resident performing arts groups. The theatre also is available for bookings.
GayCo probably needs no introduction. The sketch comedy troupe has been around for some years, has toured extensively and has a dedicated local following from such hit shows as Whitney Houston, We Have a Problem and its Christmas show, Do You Fear What I Fear? Hubris Productions is a much newer venture which has produced just three shows since it was formed in 2005. Under executive director Anthony Guerrero and artistic director Jacob Christopher Green, Hubris now is planning a three-show season at the Center, opening with Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion!, July 5-Aug. 12. Hubris will continue in November with Five Women Wearing the Same Dress by Alan Ball, followed by a late-winter world premiere of Girls Will Be Girls, adapted by Green from the film of the same name.
Atlanta, Georgia’s Alliance Theatre has won the 2007 Antoinette Perry Award for Regional Theatre. The award will be presented in New York City June 10th during the annual Tony Award telecast. The artistic director of the Alliance is former Chicago producer and director Susan V. Booth, long associated with the Goodman Theatre, who has helmed the 39-year-old Alliance since 2001. Over the last decade, the Alliance has raised its national profile through its development of a number of shows that went on to Broadway success, among them Alfred Uhry’s The Last Night of Ballyhoo, Elton John’s Aida and The Color Purple. Booth also has commissioned new works from such familiar-to-Chicago authors as Regina Taylor, Rebecca Gilman and Keith Reddin. The regional theatre Tony Award is selected through a secret balloting process by members of the American Theatre Critics Association, whose selection is forwarded to the American Theatre Wing and the League of American Theatres in the form of a recommendation.
Neil Giuntoli’s Hizzoner, still selling out at Prop Thtr 15 months after opening, is going on summer hiatus and a short tour. Giuntoli and troupe performed at the Irish American Heritage Center May 7-17, then are back at Prop June 1-July 1, then at the Skokie Theater, July 19-29 and finally at the Beverly Arts Center, Sept. 15-23. That should give everyone some fishin’ time. I wish MY summer schedule was as sweet. Hizzoner will reopen at Prop Thtr Oct. 5.
Porchlight Music Theatre’s Ragtime is taking a short tour of it’s own—from Belmont to Lincoln Ave., as it transfers for a permanent run from Theatre Building Chicago (TBC) to the Apollo. The musical is transferring to a larger stage, with a larger house. They’ve been selling out the 150-seat TBC space. Now Porchlight’s Walters Stearns thinks he can sell out the 461-seat Apollo. And it looks like he’s right. Porchlight’s spokesperson Noreen Heron said that calls flooded into the TBC box office after the dailies ran news of the transfer last week. “They’re not too worried that they can fill those seats. Demand seems to be there,” said Heron. Porchlight is producing the show. The Appolo deal, according to Heron, is simply a space rental.
“Totally gone!” publicist Jill Evans said with a sigh of relief. She was referring to the Marco Polo narrator figure used last summer in the Cirque Shanghai spectacle at the Pepsi Skyline Stage, and universally condemned by critics as thoroughly dumb-ass, even though they liked the acrobatics. Cirque Shanghai will be back at Navy Pier this summer, June 6-Sept. 3, with a world premiere spectacle show entitled Bai Xi (By-She), meaning “100 stunning acts.” Bai Xi currently is in rehearsal in China, and promises to offer aerial acrobatics, feats of strength, contortion, plate spinning, balancing acts, hoop diving and more, all dressed in “dramatic costumes” and accompanied by an original musical score, some recorded and some played live. Last year, the Cirque drew 135,000, making it the most successful event at the Skyline Stage.
FYI: Dulcie Gilmore now is the director of Skyline Stage. She’s been director of the Arie Crown Theater for several years, and both facilities are operated by McPier—the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority.
Good gal actor/singer and American Theater Company member Suzanne Petri has released her first studio CD, Das Grand Tour. She launched it with a release party at Davenport’s on May 25, accompanied by her musical director Bob Moreen and friends. Petri self-produced the CD, cutting it at Red Brick Recording Studios. It features a number of her signature songs, meaning a healthy mix of Noel Coward and Kurt Weill, plus tunes made famous by Edith Piaf and Marlene Dietrich, plus several original numbers. Das Grand Tour is available through www.CDbaby.com, and iTunes.
The American Players Theatre in Spring Green, WI has hired Carol Fox & Associates, making it the first Wisconsin theatre company in decades to hire a Chicago publicist. American Players Theatre (APT) draws relatively few patrons from the Chicago area and, with the exception of the Tribune’s Chris Jones and myself, the local press doesn’t generally doesn’t give APT annual coverage. That might change with publicist Nick Harkin on the case, especially as three Chicago directors—William Brown, James Bohnen and Kate Buckley (yeah, the “B” list)—are working there this summer. Spring Green, about 30 miles west of Madison, is a three-and-a-half hour drive from Chicago.
In my last column, I wrote about the European Theatre Prize. I have more sentiments online, in an expanded Curtain. But let me just add this:
I attended my first international theatre conference in 1987, in East Berlin when the wall still was up. I attended my second in Lisbon in 1990, as the Soviet bloc was crumbling. My trip to the European Theatre Prize was my first international event in 17 years, and one thing that astonished me as much as anything else was this: everyone from Eastern Europe was someone new and younger, people I hadn’t met in Berlin or Lisbon. The old Communist-approved cultural apparatchiks had been swept away. But: all the leading Westerners were exactly the same, only 20 years older. No regime change had swept them away. I met no less than a dozen Brits, French, Portuguese, Italians, Spaniards and Turks whom I first met in 1987 and 1990.