Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [32]
Take the legitimate theater. With the rise of TV, with constantly tightening cost squeezes, it has had hard going, even on Broadway. In Chicago, almost everything possible has worked against its survival: Monopoly management for years by the Shubert Theater empire; dingy and uncomfortable theaters; arrogant ticket sellers; a notorious racket in ticket-scalping (which I’m happy to have had a hand in breaking with the “Better Box-office Break” campaign that got me removed from the Shuberts’ opening-night-tickets lists); and, in some cases, road-show productions far below the quality of the Broadway originals. Yet Chicago remains the number two theater center in the nation. It has even served as the launching pad for such plays as Chicagoan Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie.
Williams also chose Chicago for the pre-Broadway tryout of his latest play, The Night of the Iguana. In contrast to the enthusiasm with which Chicago critics had received his earlier plays, they were lukewarm about this one. Claudia Cassidy of the Tribune, who had been one of the first critics to recognize Williams’ talent, referred to it as “a bankrupt play.” By strenuous rewriting, Williams turned the play into a Broadway hit. But Miss Cassidy’s criticism continued to rankle him, as he indicated in some pointed comments about her, and about critics in general, one night on my At Random TV show.
My Fair Lady opened in Chicago with a $650,000 advance ticket sale and then broke the Chicago record for a run by a musical (sixty-seven weeks, set by South Pacific in 1951-52). My Fair Lady ran seventy-four weeks. Music Man played here for fifty-six weeks, Guys and Dolls for thirty-seven, The King and I for twenty-five, and Pajama Game for twenty-two – all after long Broadway runs had removed them from the “new” or “fresh” category. And Fiorello! opened with a larger advance sale in Chicago than it had had on Broadway!
And Chicago has been as warm in its welcome to the more serious plays – The Miracle Worker, for example, opened with a $100,000 advance; and A Raisin in the Sun played to SRO audiences during its entire pre-Broadway run in Chicago.
Of the once-impressive line-up of Loop playhouses, only the Blackstone, the Shubert, the McVickers, and the seldom-used Studebaker remain, augmented by the Arie Crown Theater at McCormick Place and the Civic Theater in the Civic Opera House Building. But in response to this problem – common to other large cities – Chicago has been a pioneer in establishing professional theaters outside the crowded high-rent district, in the city’s environs and suburbs. Chicagoan Tony DeSantis, who operates the Martinique Restaurant in suburban Evergreen Park, is a leader in this field: his Drury Lane “summer theater” now presents outstanding stars and plays the year around.
We have established some of the most successful intimate cabarets as worthy successors to the large-capacity, high-overhead supper clubs, which had been killed by TV and rising costs. But perhaps most far-reaching of all has been Chicago’s spawning of that sensational new stage trend, improvisational theater. Its most noted exponents: Shelley Berman, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and the troupe that has been so successful in New York recently, the Second City Players.
The hilarious – the often devastating – Nichols and May, after meeting at the University of Chicago, first appeared on the same stage with the Compass Players – the improvisational troupe that also produced Second City director Paul Sills and Barbara Harris, the new Broadway sensation. Barbara was “discovered” by Richard Rodgers while she was appearing in From the Second City at the Royale Theater