Sweet Smells Success
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Sweet has wanted to stage I Sent a Letter to My Love ever since he came across the story in the late 70s. A journalist at the time, he’d been dispatched to the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Connecticut, to interview its artistic director, Arvin Brown. The theater was presenting Rubens’s own dramatic adaptation of her novel, and Sweet stayed for a performance. “About 15 minutes in, I began hearing where the songs should go,” he remembers. He spent the next decade pursuing the rights to the novel and another two years convincing Manchester to write the score.
Sweet and Manchester began developing I Sent a Letter to My Love in 1992. A 1995 production by Primary Stages in New York drew mixed reviews, but Sweet thinks the show turned a corner after being workshopped at the New Harmony Project in downstate Indiana. “Since then it’s been editing and shaping and cutting the pretty stuff that doesn’t serve the story.” The show also turned up for a reading at Prop Theatre’s new play festival last year. The New Tuners reading features television actress Mariette Hartley and Second City alum Meagan Fay; the director is noted Broadway choreographer Patricia Birch, who first worked with Sweet on What About Luv?, his musical adaptation of the Murray Schisgal play Luv.
Chicago Shakespeare Theater is enjoying one of the most impressive subscriber growth curves in the history of Chicago theater. The company’s 1998-’99 season drew about 5,000 subscribers, a number that skyrocketed to 17,000 last year, after CST moved into its swank new home at Navy Pier. This year’s drive has barely begun, and already CST has sold 19,000 subscriptions. A whopping 85 percent of last year’s subscribers have renewed this year, and by summer’s end CST could exceed its optimistic projection of 20,000, approaching such heavy hitters as Steppenwolf and the Goodman (both about 23,000). Much of the credit goes to artistic director Barbara Gaines, who’s scheduled a plum lineup for 2000-’01: in addition to King Lear and Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (the first non-Shakespearean classic to grace the main stage), the season includes Peter Brook’s staging of Hamlet as a special added attraction this spring.
