What’s the second biggest city in Illinois?
It’s Aurora, with about 200,000 residents, a truth duly noted at a Chicago Tribune event last weekend by a staffer from the Aurora Beacon-News, a Tribune-owned publication with a small but mighty team of reporters who labor to cover a city far bigger than most Chicagoans think.
Rockford and Joliet, by way of comparison, have less than 150,000 people each. Springfield, the state capital, is little more than half the size of Aurora; Champaign a little less than half. Bloomington-Normal don’t compare, even if you add their populations together. And Aurora is far more diverse than the state of Illinois as a whole.
And in the city of Aurora, some 40 miles west of Chicago, the renaissance of the historic Paramount Theatre has been transformative.
With the exception of Cleveland, which has benefited immeasurably from the Playhouse Square Center, I’d argue that no Midwestern downtown has been more changed by a single arts organization.
Back in the early 1990s, it was argued that casinos were the answer to blighted downtowns like Aurora’s collection of buildings on the banks of the Fox River. The Hollywood Casino is still there (I remember the days when it still cruised the Fox) but there has been little new investment and the place now looks down at heel, at least as compared with the 1990s. When it comes to attracting new businesses and filling the streets with people, the non-profit Paramount has been far more effective in a much shorter time.
Here are the facts. In less than 10 years, following its decision to produce its own musicals using the talent found in northern Illinois, the Paramount has acquired a subscription base of 41,000 patrons, one of the largest in the nation. This success, combined with its ongoing comedy and concert series, has allowed the theater to expand its base into a performing arts school for area residents and, beginning next season, a second subscription season of shows in a smaller theater across the street, this one devoted to plays. Other businesses have seen all the people now walking around downtown and decided to go west and join the party: recent arrivals include the restaurateur Amy Morton, who has opened Stolp Island Social, the kind of buzzy establishment more usually associated with Midtown Manhattan.
When the current president, Tim Rater, came to the Paramount, he started with some advantages: a restoration took place in the 1970s, and again in 2006, meaning that this Rapp and Rapp theater was not allowed to languish like the Uptown Theatre, with renovation costs forever rising into the stratosphere. That money was already spent; it did not become part of a stultifying debt.
The theater has a large capacity; its post-renovation 1,885 seats allow the theater to keep prices low but the theater is not a barn. Many of the old movie palaces used for performances in old downtowns are less than ideal for live shows. But the Paramount has a relatively big stage, scaled to the size of the auditorium. And, perhaps most important of all, it had never really gone dark. People in Aurora all knew it was there. They’d seen comics, movies, musical acts.
But none of this would have worked without the theater’s determination to offer mainstream, family-friendly entertainment. Its bread and butter these last nine years or so have been the likes of “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Little Mermaid,” “The Wizard of Oz” and “Mamma Mia!” These are not titles that necessarily thrill a critic, but that’s not the point. They sell like crazy, especially when the lower cost structure in Aurora, as compared with New York and Chicago, allows for spectacular productions.
There’s another point worth making here that theater people often fail to acknowledge. Family entertainment with familiar titles often attracts a far more diverse audience than socio-political drama foregrounding race. All Americans like to have a good time out with the people they love and the Paramount is very welcoming. High ticket prices are perhaps the single biggest factor in the way of attracting a diverse audience. The Paramount’s model has made real inroads — no subscriber pays more than $37 a ticket, even in the best seats. Just go and see “Cinderella” later this year. You might be surprised at the diversity in the room.
Since they’ve earned the trust of all those audience members, the Paramount now is able to introduce new work. On Friday, the theater will open “The Secret of My Success,” a collaboration with Universal Studios, the original producer of the 1987 caper movie about corporate ambition, starring Michael J. Fox.
This is, of course, a pre-Broadway tryout that just happens to be taking place 40 miles west of the traditional Broadway in Chicago theaters.
“The Secret of My Success” comes with a skilled Broadway director in Gordon Greenberg, the same man responsible for the excellent updating of Studs Terkel’s “Working” some years ago. Greenberg, who told me recently how happy he was to be working in Aurora, has penned the book alongside Steve Rosen, both a writer and a Broadway performer and a very funny guy. But the music in the show — described to me as a pop Broadway score — is by Michael Mahler and Alan Schmuckler, both composer-writer-performers with a long history in Chicago. And there are Chicago stars in the cast, too: Heidi Kettenring and Barbara Robertson, among others, are working alongside Broadway actors like Billy Harrigan Tighe, who plays the role of the bifurcated corporate climber, as played by Fox.
“It is a joyous room,” says Jim Corti, Paramount’s artistic director.
That’s how they roll in Aurora.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
