LOW Blow
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In fact Kraus fell victim to an ideological rift that isolated him from McDonough and the board. Kraus considered LOW “a purveyor of serious art” committed to operettas no one else in Chicago would touch. “I am proud of the fact we dusted off a piece like The Duchess of Chicago,” he says, referring to the forgotten relic by Austrian expatriate Emmerich Kalman that was presented last fall. McDonough, back from vacation, insisted that LOW will continue to present operettas, but according to one former board member she often complained that her friends didn’t even know what an operetta was. An internal memorandum from 1995 states that LOW began trying to “freshen the company’s image” in the early 90s by using terms like “Broadway, musicals, music theater, and musical theater” in its marketing materials and grant proposals. The memo suggests that McDonough took these steps on her own, feeling the company “needed renewal and rejuvenation,” and that “much of this was done over the artistic director’s objections and often without his knowledge.”
Kraus’s track record as a director did nothing to endear him to the board; his operettas were hobbled by clumsy staging and ham-handed comedy that drew mixed reviews and failed to attract the younger audience McDonough coveted. But the past season may have sealed his fate: after the New Year’s blizzard forced LOW to cancel one performance of its final production, The Desert Song, it had to dip heavily into its reserve fund to cover the resulting $30,000 deficit and still went $15,000 into the red. McDonough says LOW will conduct a national search for Kraus’s replacement, which could take several months. (One local director who’s angling for the job is Bill Pullinsi, a musical-comedy veteran of the Candlelight Dinner Playhouse who directed LOW’s poorly reviewed The Desert Song.) Kraus says he has a contract to serve as a consultant on next season’s first production, La Belle Helene, and a verbal commitment to perform in The Mikado. But apparently that’s up in the air. Comments McDonough: “No contract has been signed for that.”
