Robert Perkins and Rocco Landesman have thrown down the gauntlet. Against the backdrop of an increasingly anemic off-Loop theater industry, Chicago producer Perkins and Landesman, president of New York’s Jujamcyn Theaters, announced plans last week to transform the Royal George Theatre into a busy venue for new work, commercial revivals, and the more challenging Broadway transfers.
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Topping the list is the Chicago premiere of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, a two-part, seven-hour dramatic epic that tells the story of three groups of characters whose lives intertwine and deals bluntly and at times graphically with the topics of Mormons, homosexuality, and AIDS. Angels begins previews September 6 with a ticket price of $45, a new off-Loop high. Jujamcyn is the lead producer of the Broadway production, which is rumored to have cost close to $4 million to mount. (Part one has been playing there for a year, part two for six months.) From the moment Jujamcyn became a partner in Perkins’s acquisition of the Royal George there was little doubt the play would wind up debuting in that space rather than at the Steppenwolf or the Goodman, two other early candidates. The Chicago production, with a price tag of just under $1 million, is expected to be cast almost entirely in Chicago. It will be directed by New York-based Michael Mayer under the supervision of the show’s Broadway director, George C. Wolfe; sources say the producers tried hard to schedule the production to accommodate Michael Maggio, but ultimately Maggio’s commitment to the Goodman’s summer production of A Little Night Music took him out of the running.
The rest of the Royal George lineup is less interesting. In June the two are producing the pre-Broadway world premiere of D.W. Washburn’s All-Dancin’, All-Singin’, Black & White, Jive-Ass Rock ‘n’ Roll Revue, spotlighting the music of songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. If Perkins and Landesman had any questions about how conservative the theater market in Chicago is, they only had to look at the first ads announcing their programming in the city’s two dailies. In both display ads the double s in “ass” was blanked out at the insistence of both papers’ ad departments. “We’re not going to change the show’s title to accommodate the newspapers,” says Perkins. Otis Sallid, a Los Angeles-based director who’s done some Prince videos, will stage and choreograph the $3.5-million show, which could go on to New York after an eight-week run on the Royal George main stage. In the cabaret space, which is to undergo 150,000 dollars’ worth of rehabbing to reconfigure the layout and increase seating capacity, Perkins and Landesman are reviving Forever Plaid. The light-as-a-feather musical tribute to the 50s and 60s begins an open-ended run in October.
