Stage Fight
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
At this point the Auditorium Theatre’s longest-running melodrama isn’t Les Miserables, Miss Saigon, or Phantom of the Opera–it’s the three-and-a-half-year battle between Roosevelt University and its renegade Auditorium Theatre Council. Roosevelt bought the Louis Sullivan-designed Auditorium Building in 1946 and created the council as a fund-raising and administrative body; now the ATC, incorporated as a nonprofit, argues that it has a public responsibility to control the revenues and operation of the historic theater. Four weeks ago attorneys began presenting evidence before Judge Aaron Jaffe of the Cook County Circuit Court in a suit filed against Roosevelt by ATC members Fred Eychaner and Betty Lou Weiss. The final gavel has yet to fall, but so far the evidence seems to undercut council members’ claims that they were blindsided by Roosevelt president and ATC chairman Theodore Gross when he came to the council in December 1994 demanding $1.5 million from the theater’s $3 million reserve fund to help bankroll a new campus in Schaumburg. In fact, the struggle behind the scenes began long before that meeting.
When Gilmore took the witness stand last week, attorneys for Roosevelt made much of the fact that her paychecks and bonuses were drawn from the university payroll and that her various employment contracts and bonuses were negotiated with Roosevelt, not the ATC. But the November 1994 memo leaves little doubt where her loyalties lay: “I want you to know that I am prepared to do anything within my power to support you in defending the Auditorium Theatre from this vicious attack.” Six weeks later Gross attended a meeting of the ATC’s executive committee. According to the minutes of that meeting, he asked the committee to join him in a resolution to transfer the funds; if it balked, he said, “we will just have to transfer the funds, period.” When Gross asked Gilmore if she thought the transfer would affect the spring 1996 opening of Show Boat, Gilmore hedged: “It’s an old building, but we have operated on $1 million before.” She then added that she hadn’t done a cash flow analysis yet. Eychaner asked for the meeting to be adjourned so the ATC could seek a legal ruling on the transaction, and within days he and Weiss had filed suit against Roosevelt to block the transfer of funds.
