For years the Chicago Park District’s Theatre on the Lake was a wasting asset, used only by community theater groups based in the neighborhood parks for annual productions of Brigadoon or The Mousetrap. That changed in 1996, when staff led by Marj Halperin, then director of the Park District’s marketing and program support, made it into the theatrical equivalent of the Grant Park Music Festival: a publicly underwritten venue that made professional performances available to people who might not otherwise see them. Presenters benefited as well: Theatre on the Lake became a sort of nirvana for off-Loop theaters, a place where their best shows could have a weeklong afterlife and capture the attention of new audiences. Now, after seven years of presenting the cream of the Chicago theater crop to sellout crowds, Theatre on the Lake is losing its $130,000 operating subsidy.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
But instead of reacting with gloom and doom, the parties involved seem to be taking the cut in stride, happy to be keeping the theater alive in a period of straitened local-government finances, including a $20 million shortfall at the Park District. The good news, says Park District cultural arts manager Jean de St. Aubin, is that the loss isn’t really the financial disaster it might appear to be.
Notes Theatre on the Lake artistic director Curt Columbus, “[The Park District is] still going to put up banners and put up lights and do janitoring. The big capital project is still in the works. In a year when 900 people are not going to have jobs at the Park District, they’re not asking us to cut people–just pay for our programming.”
