Amateur Hour
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Around town Austrevich is best known for the Funny Firm, the comedy club he opened near Grand and Franklin in 1987, but his practice of distributing comp tickets through telemarketing made him unpopular with other club owners. “It really hurt the whole industry here,” says Richard Uchwat, owner of the Zanies comedy clubs. After leaving the Funny Firm in 1991 (it closed a year later), Austrevich spent time on the west coast writing for TV shows and selling material to stand-up comedians like Richard Jeni. A year ago, according to a review in the Chicago Tribune, Austrevich nearly stole the show from Jeni when he opened for him at the House of Blues. In February he showed up at Ka-Chung to do a voice-over gig, and Reetz, who’s been involved in real estate deals with partners who include Hair producer Michael Butler, was impressed by Austrevich’s show-business credentials. They struck a deal to produce Participlay with Austrevich directing.
But doing the show turned out not to be so simple either. “This was the first show I had ever done that I felt fully invested in,” says Rob Gaughan, who endured four audition calls before joining the four-person cast. But two of the actors quit, and instead of recruiting replacements Austrevich and fellow writer Phyllis Murphy decided to join the cast themselves. Austrevich began rehearsals with 220 pages of sketches and brought in at least a dozen video monitors and four video cameras. “The control booth looked like what you might find in a typical television studio,” he says. Reetz decided to buy the cameras and monitors outright instead of renting them, yet as Austrevich admits, they skimped on their tech crew. “They had $18,000 worth of sound equipment and $30,000 worth of lights,” says Gaughan, “and they hired what amounted to college interns to handle the technical stuff.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Dan Machnik.
