Mercury Theater Chicago will open again on the Southport Corridor with a new artistic director
Its demise greatly exaggerated, Chicago’s briefly shuttered Mercury Theater is to rise again on the Southport Corridor.
In June, the building’s owner and main creative force, L. Walter Stearns, announced the closure of his jewelbox theater complex, which comprises of a roughly 300-seat mainstage, a flexible cabaret space and a restaurant space, citing fiscal fallout from the pandemic. He laid off all his staffers, put up a goodbye-and-thank you message on his marquee and said that the building, located at 3745 N. Southport Ave., was henceforth up for sale.
“I’m heartbroken mostly for the people who came to make this theater their home, both our audiences and the artists who worked here,” he told the Tribune at the time, saying that he planned to list the operation, which self-produced musicals, with a commercial real estate agent.
Ten months later, Stearns says he has changed his mind.
Instead of closing the theater, he has made plans instead to hire a new artistic director, Christopher Chase Carter.
“This has been a year of ups and downs,” Stearns said. “We announced our permanent closure because we had nowhere else to go at that moment. Our industry had been completely decimated.”
Since then, he said, some public funding has been made available to arts venues and, despite many parties interested in the building, an attractive and well-located property, Stearns has decided he wants to continue operations himself.
“We were going to have to sell things off in bits and pieces,” Stearns said. “But in the end, we did some refinancing, found access to some funding, and we’ve held on.”
Artistically, though, Stearns said he now plans to take “more of a supporting role.”
Carter, a 35-year-old dancer and choreographer with credits ranging from the Lyric Opera of Chicago to the Drury Lane Theatre and the Theo Unique Theatre to Porchlight Music Theatre said that he is “super-excited” to take over the artistic direction of Mercury and plans a new slate of new, inclusive programming. (Both Stearns and his professional and personal partner, Eugene Dizon, will remain co-executive producers).
“I want to work with a variety of other theaters,” Carter said. “We have the privilege of owning our own space. Right now, we all need to support each other.”
Carter, the latest is a string of new Black artistic directors in Chicago to be offered positions during the last few months, already has attracted enthusiastic critical notice for his choreography and direction. A native of Michigan and a graduate of Grand Valley State University, he’s been working in Chicago since 2009.
Given Carter’s background and relationships with choreographers, it seems likely that dance now will be more of a focus at the Mercury, notwithstanding the small stage. Carter said he expects his first production to be a burlesque-style, multi-choreographer benefit for the health support group Season of Concern, a one-off event modeled after the long-established Broadway Bares in New York City. Plans for performances thereafter remain a work in progress, Stearns and Carter both said, since the theater now has to start from scratch and reapplying for performance rights to viable titles.
But Carter said it was likely the theater would reopen with holiday programing later in the fall.
He also said that he hopes to turn the Venus cabaret, a space carved out of the former Cullen’s Bar and Grill, into a true cabaret, as distinct from the past practice of producing full musicals therein. “I want it to be the place in Chicago where people can be seen,” he said, saying he hoped he could model operations somewhat after the famed 54 Below venue in New York, presenting both local and national talent. The cabaret, which is ideal for one-person shows, is likely to open earlier than the main theater. No dates have been fixed as yet.
Meanwhile, Stearns said he has signed an agreement with an experienced restaurateur for a new eatery in the former Grassroots Grill space, directly to the north of the theater and internally connected to its lobbies. He declined to say who had taken over, but said an announcement was pending.
The intimate Mercury, first developed by Michael Cullen in 1996 in partnership with the restaurateur Joe Carlucci, already has had several iterations, culinary, managerial and artistic. Cullen, a longtime theater producer in Chicago, suffered a serious stroke in 2010, leading to the closure of his popular businesses and the sale of the theater to Stearns, who came with family funding and has operated the venue as a for-profit entity since that year.
Come fall, a pivotal live-entertainment fixture on the Southport Corridor comes back to life in shiny new clothes.
“We want this to be a safe and healing space for people,” Carter said. “I am a showman who likes to put on a show. And I like to be seen.”
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
