One perennial gripe about the Chicago theater scene is that when nonprofit companies get lucky enough to hatch a box-office hit, they almost always have to shut it down while folks are still lining up to buy tickets. Locked into their season schedules, small and midsize nonprofits have to move on to the next show, no matter how much demand might remain for the one that everybody decided to love.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
This was on Loevner’s mind when he attended a one-day Commercial Theater Institute training seminar for producers in 2011, and there met Aurelia Cohen, who’d just left her job as producing director at About Face Theatre. Cohen, a Yale MFA who’s also worked for the Metropolitan Opera, had likewise been wondering about the lack of small and midsize off-Broadway-style commercial theater in Chicago. “We started a conversation that continued for the next few months,” Loevner recalls. “What we came up with is that we need producers in this town.”
That is, producers who would snag some of that local capital and invest it here at home. “We felt like if we could prove that taking a show from a nonprofit, just like they do in New York, capitalizing it, enhancing it, bringing it to a larger space—if we could prove that you can do that and make money, maybe we could start that kind of community here in Chicago. And since nobody was doing it, it felt like a really good opportunity,”
TimeLine artistic director P.J. Powers says that “it’s been an amazing thing for us. In two weeks of performances at the Broadway Playhouse, as many people will see it as saw it in an eight-week sold-out run here.” Chicago Dramatists artistic director Russ Tutterow is equally sanguine: “We were all thrilled to have new audiences; they packed the house. It’s just what Chicago has needed.”
Loevner has produced more than 100 shows in the last 20 years, and says he still goes into each one with an absolute belief in its success. “But the reality is that in our business you will have great successes, and you will have great failures, and everything in between.”
Through 10/20: Broadway Playhouse, Water Tower Place 175 E. Chestnut 800-775-2000broadwayinchicago.com $25-$75
