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A Roundabout Way to Success
| Article
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10470 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1993 |
1,824 Words |
| Author
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William Ruhlmann
William Ruhlmann is a critic based in New York. His seventh
book, The Rolling Stones, was published last September. |
Although we refer to a group of New York theaters of a certain size and location as "Broadway" theaters, in fact, only a few of them actually are located on the Great White Way. Most are tucked away on side streets leading off Times Square. The most recently opened theater with a real Broadway address is in a building called the Criterion Center at Forty-fifth Street, a building that once housed the giant Bond's clothing store and then, in the 1980s, was a disco. Completely redesigned inside, the building reopened in the spring of 1989 housing two theaters, one of which, at 499 seats, was large enough to be designated a Broadway house.
Charles Moss, who owned the building, produced several shows there from 1989 to 1991. Then he leased it to the Roundabout Theater Company, an off Broadway repertory theater that began using it for the 1991-92 season (and so became a Broadway company). A year later, the Roundabout is a notable success, and its approach says much about the direction that institutional, not-for-profit theater may take and about the future of Broadway itself.
Basement Beginnings
The Roundabout was founded in 1966 by Gene Feist and spent the next decade producing revivals of the world's greatest plays works by Shakespeare, Chekhov, Moliere, Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, Wilde, Brecht, Odets, Pinter, Miller, and Williams in a small basement theater in New York's Chelsea neighborhood. The work may have been great, but the financial rewards were not: By 1977 the Roundabout was in Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
It struggled on for another half-dozen years, in that time producing such memorable plays as a revival of Look Back in Anger that starred Malcolm McDowell and a version of A Taste of Honey with Amanda Plummer that transferred to Broadway, but financially things didn't improve until a young man named Todd Haimes was brought in as producing director.
"When I got here in '83, the Roundabout was in as bad shape as any theater has ever been in that's survived," Haimes recalls, sitting in his office at the Criterion Center. "It had a $2 million deficit on a budget of $2 million! It's like a bad dream to even think about it. It took us a number of years to work through that, but fortunately we did."
One of Haimes' major steps was to move the theater into a converted union hall owned by the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) on
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