The Joffrey Shuffle
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Alpaugh has spent the last 20 years in the nonprofit performing arts, but he lasted only 18 months as executive director of the Joffrey–about as long as his predecessor, Arnold Breman–and apparently he had trouble keeping people. “There has been a lot of turnover directly under him,” says one staffer. Sources inside and close to the company also report considerable tension between Alpaugh and Gerald Arpino, the troupe’s founder and artistic leader. The two men supposedly locked horns over Alpaugh’s decision to cut the number of dancers from 34 to 28. (Bruce Sagan, acting president of the Joffrey’s board, now says the company will add 4 dancers, bringing the total back up to 32.) But Alpaugh dismisses the stories. “There is a built-in tension between executive director and artistic director,” he says. “Gerry was extremely cooperative.”
In addition to replacing Alpaugh, the Joffrey organization has other important issues to resolve, and it’s called in some big guns to help out: arts consultant Larry Ter Molen was a vice president in charge of development at the Art Institute, and Gene Brandt is a veteran of the Museum of Science and Industry. With their input the board will choose a headhunting firm to find a new executive director and will establish what Sagan calls “an effective fund-raising mechanism” that can win new grants from untapped sources and larger grants from existing benefactors. The Joffrey also needs to find a new board president to replace David Kipper, who stepped down in May (Sagan isn’t interested). Last of all, the composition of the board itself will be reevaluated. “A lot of people wanted to join the board when the company moved to Chicago,” says Sagan, “but now we’re looking at who should really be there.”
With no track record, DRMC left most details of the Pump Room reopening to Brooker and his staff, who have hired French chef Martial Noguier to run the kitchen. Noguier, most recently the head chef at Citronelle, in Washington, D.C., trained in France. The cuisine at the new Pump Room isn’t French, says Brooker, but “French-inspired American.”
