Loop Holes
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Christopher Hill, the mayor’s commissioner of the Department of Planning, sounded mighty nervous on the phone last week when asked about the future of the Ford Center, which received $17 million from the city and is scheduled to open in October. After Drabinsky was escorted from Livent’s Toronto headquarters, investigators from the Ontario Securities Commission began examining the company’s financial records while furious stockholders filed lawsuits almost hourly; the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission will launch a separate probe. An August 11 letter to Hill from Livent’s current chairman and CEO, Roy Furman, stated that “all monies needed to finish construction [of the Ford Center] have been previously set aside, and the production of Ragtime continues to be scheduled to open as planned….We believe Livent has sufficient cash flows to fund our continued operations.” Yet Furman’s equivocal language is hard to ignore, and the Globe and Mail reported late last week that Furman and his new second-in-command, David Maisel, are “reevaluating everything about the company.”
Meanwhile Fox Theatricals and Magicworks Entertainment say they’re moving forward with plans to reopen the 2,400-seat Palace Theater in the second or third quarter of 1999–about a year later than its projected opening of fall 1998. “We’ve finished all the major structural work and are beginning the rest of the renovation work now,” says Fox producer Michael Leavitt. The theater has no firm bookings because until recently no one was sure when it would open. “We’re seriously beginning to look at our options now,” says Leavitt. But two weeks ago Magicworks was acquired by SFX Entertainment, Inc., an aggressive New York-based entertainment company that’s been gobbling up promoters and presenting organizations all over the country. “They just want to buy them up so they can sell them off again,” speculates Doug Kridler, president of CAPA. Leavitt denied that the Magicworks sale would have any impact on the Palace.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/J.B. Spector (Oriental Theater); Randy Tunnell (Chicago Theatre and Bismark Palace).
