All Lit Up and Nothing to Show
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Michael Leavitt, president of the Cadillac Palace Theatre, claims that city officials have neither pressured him to keep his marquee lit nor picked up the tab. “We felt it was appropriate because this is basically a new theater,” he says, “and we wanted people to know it is here.” He also thinks a lit marquee creates a more inviting atmosphere for patrons approaching the box office to buy tickets for upcoming productions of The Civil War and Jekyll & Hyde. “At some point, if we’re dark for a long period, I’m sure we’ll start turning off the lights.” A spokesperson for SFX Entertainment, Inc., which owns and operates the Oriental, says its marquee is lit because the box office is selling tickets for the Chicago Music Awards on February 5. Around the corner, the marquee for the Chicago Theatre is lit every day until 10 PM, courtesy of Chicago taxpayers. The city took control of the theater in the early 1990s after the Chicago Theatre Restoration Associates defaulted on city loans used to purchase and renovate it. “We don’t pay any of the electrics,” says general manager Mike Rilley, whose employer, the Chicago Association for the Performing Arts, just signed a new multiyear lease at the theater. Rilley says that city officials like having the word Chicago in lights on State Street.
The Chicago Human Rhythm Project is back from the dead. The annual tap dance festival was poised for a breakthrough in 1998, following the phenomenal success of Tap Dogs and Riverdance, and founder Lane Alexander spent lavishly, hoping to make the CHRP bigger and flashier than ever. But a deal to produce a commercial videotape of the performances fizzled at the last minute, and the festival wound up more than $10,000 in the red. Last summer the CHRP failed to materialize for the first time since Alexander launched it in 1990. Now, following months of negotiation, Alexander has struck a deal with the dance department at Northwestern University to present a scaled-down and considerably more academic version of the festival from August 7 through 20.
La Gran Scena, a New York opera company whose cross-dressing singers spoof the pomposities of the form, will appear February 24 through 26 at the Athenaeum Theatre. But unlike the group’s last Chicago concert, presented in 1995 under the aegis of Performing Arts Chicago, next month’s three-night stand will benefit In All Things Charity, a local organization campaigning to change the Methodist church’s official position on homosexuality. Last summer the church’s judicial council suspended Reverend Gregory Dell as pastor of the Broadway United Methodist Church near Broadway and Roscoe; Dell had been performing same-sex unions for decades and continued to do so even after the council prohibited the practice in August 1998. Now Darrell Windle, a retired banking executive, and Dave Samber, owner of Polo Cafe & Catering in Bridgeport, are bankrolling the La Gran Scena engagement to raise funds for IATC, which Dell and his congregation started in 1997.
