Trouble With a Capital T
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The Music Man’s top box-office price of $64.50 is lower than Equity shows like Kiss Me Kate, which has a top ticket price of $75, says Chicago Theatre manager Jim Hirsch. “Last year the Chicago Theatre paid out over $1 million to union employees,” Hirsch says. “This was the only Music Man offered to us, and we felt the people of Chicago would want to see it.” The big-cast musical is an unusual booking for the 3,600-seat theater, which because of its shallow stage is usually “positioned more as a special-event house.”
Sher says this production–traveling with 38 actors, 16 musicians, 14 crew hands, 3 moms, and a tutor–isn’t feasible at union scale. Cast in New York as a non-Equity show, “based on” Susan Stroman’s direction of the Broadway production, and rehearsed on a University of Wisconsin stage in Whitewater to save money, The Music Man is paying what Sher calls reasonable wages “for chorus kids who are doing what they love to do.” Rebekah Allan, who got her featured role in the show because she can sing, dance, and twirl two batons, says the decision to join the cast was “a personal choice” and “unions tend to slow down a fast-moving machine. [In some theaters] I can’t touch my batons without someone from the union being paid their hourly wage to come in and hand them to me.”
The advertising campaign that’s been using words like “dynamic,” “playful,” and “powerful” to describe the Chicago Symphony Orchestra might have to add “shameless” to the lineup. In an effort to cut costs, CSO management has eliminated all rest breaks and paid sick days for its maintenance staff and reduced their lunch hour to 20 minutes. A letter to the company that provides janitors for the CSO notes that the orchestra expects to lose $4 million this year and says “no one and nothing has been spared” in the cutbacks. A CSO spokesperson says, “We did some research and found we were extending benefits beyond the contract and beyond other buildings in this area.”
