Front and Center
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“I’ll have to be part Mother Teresa and part Gandhi to keep peace among the natives,” says Higgins. As general manager she’ll answer not only to the village but to Professional Facilities Management, a theatrical administration company contracted by Skokie to manage and operate the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts. Luckily for her, the village has set up a separate foundation to handle fund-raising, but Higgins will have no shortage of headaches, including a poorly staffed box office, scattershot marketing, low attendance, and a dearth of summer bookings. Having operated three small spaces at the Theatre Building, she should have no trouble with the center’s studio theater, where the principal tenant is Northlight. But Higgins has never booked anything like the main stage, an 850-seat space that’s 1,200 seats too small to attract the sort of blockbusters that would bring people out in droves. Centre East and the Skokie Valley Symphony have used the main stage for one-shot concerts, but keeping it filled year-round will be Higgins’s biggest challenge.
Higgins opened the Theatre Building 20 years ago with her late husband Byron Schaffer Jr., and after her long tenure she’s decided to let someone else have a crack at managing the space. “Change is good,” she says. “I didn’t want the Theatre Building to succumb to ‘Founder’s Disease.’” Her departure leaves a large hole in the theater’s administrative staff. Managing director Joan Mazzonelli will assume most of Higgins’s responsibilities for now, and Warner Crocker, former artistic director of Pegasus Players, will handle some of the New Tuners business. Crocker was instrumental in pulling off the New Tuners workshop, which will be reprised next summer. For her part Higgins plans to remain on the Theatre Building’s board of directors and to continue producing shows under the New Tuners banner whenever possible.
Sony Music is trying to dig deeper into consumers’ pockets with a new option called the “doublepak,” a compact disc and cassette packaged together at a price slightly reduced from the combined cost of both. Sony’s first release to include the doublepak was Mariah Carey’s Butterfly in September. The second was Barbra Streisand’s Higher Ground, released last week, and the third is Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love, which hit record stores on Tuesday.
