Ravinia Festival has a new leader and a bold plan to bring you back this summer

On a gorgeous spring day, the grounds of the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park hover in a weird limbo, not unlike a dystopian movie wherein all the places and things are still there but the people have disappeared.

The gates stand open but the parking lot is empty. Flowers are well tended. Blossoms abound. Unsullied by picnickers, the lawn is greener than memory suggests.

The 3,350 seats in the storied pavilion — long a locus of an idyllic North Shore summer spent listening to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra or singing along with Peter, Paul & Mary — are both newly varnished and caked in dust. And just outside the box office, a poster hangs announcing the kind of A-list acts that long have filled oft-raucous Metra trains from the city with concertgoers and bottles of wine: Queen Latifah and Common on Aug. 31.

Actually, that was Aug. 31, 2019.

The summer of 2020 at Ravinia just didn’t happen; it was a victim of a pandemic that spawned shutdowns and canceled tours. It was a season of laid-off employees and shattered summer dreams of dates and reunions, of corporate schmoozes nixed and family reunions reduced to Zoom, of nights not spent lying in the grass, staring at the stars to a soundtrack of strings. Especially on Chicago’s North Shore, the loss was acutely felt: Without Ravinia, nothing about the summer was normal.

You couldn’t even walk through the grounds; the only way to get even a touch of the feeling was to play around the fountain outside the gate. By the time September came around, there was local gossip that the festival may not ever be coming back; at least one person contacted a newspaper to say that she feared its valuable land would be developed for luxury homes.

Just as the season that never happened would have been drawing to a close, a quiet, likable man named Jeffrey P. Haydon arrived. Luxury homes were not part of his plan.

He would be only the fourth president and CEO in the festival’s 117-year history, a replacement for the departing Welz Kauffman, an enigmatic old-school maestro. Haydon, 46, had arrived with his wife Kathryn and son from the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, in Westchester County, New York, a beloved, primarily classical venue.

That part of his resume is likely to prove helpful in coming weeks: Caramoor did have a summer of 2020, hardly a normal one but live music played there al fresco, nonetheless.

That experience, Haydon said in a wide-ranging recent conversation, has given him confidence to reopen Ravinia this summer in a much bigger way than many of its usual customers are likely to be expecting.

Much, much bigger.

“The park is aching for people,” he says. “The soul is yearning for music.”

He waves at one of the gardeners shoveling dirt. “Music,” Haydon says, grinning, “is the fertilizer of Ravinia.”

Ravinia has suffered plenty over the last year, although Haydon says it would have been far worse had the shutdown taken place later than March, a month when seasonal contracts mostly had not yet been signed, and hard costs like union crews and travel had still to be incurred. Still, it was a summer without box office revenue and the festival chose not to apply for payroll protection plan loans (although it does hope to get some funding from the recently active federal program to support shuttered venues). Instead, Haydon says, the Festival decided to ask its donors for help and, for the most part, it was successful.

And now? Those philanthropists, Haydon says, are like everyone else: “They want to get out.”

He details the Ravinia plan for 2021. The festival will open, slightly later than normal, on July 1, but the first week will offer free tickets only to first responders, healthcare workers and the other heroes of the pandemic. The first paid public concert will be July 5.

The seasonal philosophy? “To offer the full Ravinia experience,” Haydon says.

That means the CSO will have a residency, although the typical 100 or musicians on the stage will be reduced to about 50 for any given concert (musicians will rotate) and, although there will be vocal soloists, there will be no choral singing. The Joffrey Ballet will be present. There will be blues and jazz (Haydon has a standing relationship with Jazz at Lincoln Center and he is a big fan of Kurt Elling). Chamber music will have a banner year, for obvious reasons. And there will be rock and pop headliners, although fewer than in a typical year, a function more of the touring industry as a whole this summer than of Ravinia itself; this is not a year for semi-trucks and epic tours.

And, of course, travel restrictions mean there can be no visiting international artists.

All in all, you’ll likely be able to count the A-listers on the fingers of your hands, but there will be some. And, if circumstances allow, there may eventually be more of them; deals are still being made.

That’s because the slate of 2021 Ravinia attractions will be announced in two halves, one covering dates from July 1 through Aug. 15 and the other from Aug. 16 through Sept. 30 (the festival is running later into the fall then typical, although it ends per its longstanding agreement with the City of Highland Park to cease outdoor concerts by Sept. 30). The strategy, Haydon says, is designed to allow the festival to recalibrate mid-season in the event that some acts only decide to tour in the second half of the summer. And the break also might allow Ravinia to increase ticketing capacity in line with the likely easing of state restrictions. All being well.

At press time, state regulations allow Ravinia to open at 25% of its full capacity, meaning that it can (and will) accommodate around 4,500 people (about 3,500 people on the lawn and 1,000 spaced through the pavilion). Haydon has decided to divide the storied lawn into two sections: one area will be a kind of reserved spot of grass, replete with demarcation lines, but another section will be the typical unreserved experience of yore, albeit with self-regulated social distancing. Masks will be required except when patrons are actively eating or drinking, which will be permitted. Patrons will be asked to attest to their good health but there will be no vaccination requirements nor temperature checks at the door. The restaurants will operate according to the regulations for indoor and outdoor dining, which means they will be buzzing, although the concessions stands mostly will move outside.

And some of the shows will move outside of the pavilion.

Haydon says the festival plans to re-purpose one of its famed carousels (typically concession areas) as a performance space, allowing the festival to offer a more intimate experience using just one section of the lawn. The idea appears to have promise: for one thing, you can actually see the stage of the carousel from the lawn, which is not true of the pavilion from most grassy vantage points and, for another, that stage will allow for viewing from the dining areas at the main restaurant. It is a compartmentalization without walls, you might say, and Haydon argues it will benefit chamber music performances and other acts that might not be able to fill the entire place.

“Our goal is not so much to operate at full capacity,” he said, “as to provide a comfortable experience for everyone. And I think we have an opportunity here to really help people get to know chamber music.”

Clearly, Haydon has a quieter personality than did Kauffman; the newcomer was a business major and a music minor, perhaps a notable hierarchy of youth at the University of Puget Sound. He’s frank and self-effacing, crediting his new staff with many of these ideas for the crucial summer of 2021. And it’s clear that he already knows the Ravinia truism that he must keep in with the neighbors; there are plans to expand Metra service, probably because the festival is worried that many more people will want to drive there this year, potentially creating what Haydon worries will be seen as “needless clustering” on the surrounding streets. That is something he want to prevent.

But he speaks passionately about the healing role of music in recovery: “This summer will feature far more local artists than has been typical at Ravinia,” he says. “The arts community has suffered a lot and we wanted to try and help. All of us here did.”

So, of course, have many in the audience suffered. “People keep saying to me, ‘I need to be at Ravinia with my friends, I need to be at Ravinia with my family,” Haydon says.

What do they say most?

“‘I really hope you are open.’”

“So I have learned that Ravinia is the signal that things are getting back to some kind of normal.”

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com