The drama began behind closed doors in 2001. Chairman J. Michael McGuire lay down the gauntlet at a joint meeting of Charlotte Repertory Theater's board of trustees and the company's top administrative staff. The Rep's new goal was to win the Tony Award for best regional theater within the next five years.
Convulsive shakeups -- in personnel, production practices, and repertoire--began within months. Charlotte native Michael Bush became the new producing artistic director after a 20-year stint at Manhattan Theater Club. The march on Broadway and to national prominence had begun.
Two years later, the Rep's trustees have driven away two artistic directors, two managing directors, two literary managers, and the first full-time development director in the company's 27-year history. In the wake of Bush's sudden resignation last month, there is no permanent artistic leadership at Charlotte Rep, and the company is further from realizing its ambition than it was when McGuire announced it.
Subscribers, local actors, Broadway notables, and a companion LORT company are among those alienated by the Rep's abrupt shifts in style and direction. Compounding the damage, the tensions that once existed behind the Rep's closed doors have been played out in public, laid bare and debated in Charlotte's daily newspaper.
Two central questions remain unresolved: What can a regional theater be with limited resources at its disposal? What should a regional theater be to best serve its community?
The controversy boiled over onto the front page of the Charlotte Observer arts section last May - and lingered in the public eye for three successive Sundays. Just seven weeks earlier, a highly publicized revival of The Miracle Worker, starring Hilary Swank, had been drop-kicked by producers Fran and Barry Weissler. Two nights before its final preview in Charlotte, the Weisslers whipped "The Miracle," pulling the plug on its scheduled transfer to Broadway.
While reviews were lukewarm, the Charlotte previews consistently played to enthusiastic, sold-out houses. The same theater writer who had questioned the Rep's commitment to Charlotte stalked Swank on a shopping spree to Wal-Mart and breathlessly disclosed how she fixed her coffee. New patrons who had never before seen a Rep presentation flocked to the box office, awed by the Hollywood tinsel.
WAR & REMEMBRANCE
"If we had not gone to war in Iraq," said Bush after his resignation, "we wouldn't be having this conversation. The economy took a downturn, and we're on stage with The Miracle Worker as we're going to war. That's really the reason why the Broadway production was canceled. Audiences were dwindling because people were hesitant to come and spend time in a designated terrorist zone, otherwise known as Broadway." But when the Rep juggernaut didn't continue on its path to Broadway, the grumblings of subscribers and actors fallen by the wayside began to be heard. Subscribers who had tickets for Jar the Floor were told mid-season that the Broadway-bound Miracle Worker would replace it, not at all a horrific development. Then, after cutting a week from the run, Swank pulled out of two more performances to attend the Oscars and a Hollywood premiere, crowding and jostling the faithful again and again. Local actors and designers felt they'd been totally ignored in every phase of the process. Swank's final furlough sealed the perception that the Rep wasn't in control of its product. Audiences filling Booth Playhouse to see The Miracle Worker, many argued, were seeing an import -- a touring show auditioned and rehearsed in New York, with designers from Broadway and a director, Marianne Elliott, from Britain. The Rep had abandoned the community to go commercial.
"Community or commercial?" blared the first Observer headline on May 18: "Rep wrestles with its identity."
Bush definitely wrestled with the Observer, firing back a lengthy response, published May 25, 2003, titled "Rep's goal is world-class theater," forcefully asserting that there was no confusion whatsoever about the Rep's identity. Nor was he trying to freeze out Charlotte actors. "I have received feedback that many of them have felt somewhat excluded from roles in previous seasons. I'm pleased to say that I have already cast some of the best of them in roles for next season," he said at the time.
If that was a jab at Bush's predecessor, company founder Steve Umberger, it was ignored in Umberger's June 1 rejoinder. Instead, he attacked the simplification that the "old Charlotte Rep" was local and the "new" one national. Before Bush paraded Penny Fuller, Andre De Shields, Gretha Boston and Marla Schaffel onto the Booth Playhouse stage, Umberger reminded readers he had brought in Olympia Dukakis, Bonnie Franklin, and Beth Henley. Clearly, Umberger's founding vision -- "to build a strong recurring ensemble of actors distinguished not by ZIP codes or national reputations but by ability and similarity of artistic values" -- had been tossed aside. But after the outcry sparked by The Miracle Worker, it was equally clear that the Rep would need to pursue its Tony Award aspirations with stronger community connections.
To Bush and the board, the Rep's 20th anniversary revival of Pump Boys and Dinettes had exactly the right balance of big-name talent and down-home appeal. Carolina icon Jim Wann, who largely created and starred in the original Broadway production, would team up with charismatic Tony Award winner Emily Skinner and ignite a wildfire of 2003-04 subscription sales.
Despite Skinner's sizzle, the Observer didn't warm to the revival. Neither did the public. When the final numbers from Pump Boys hit the Rep's spreadsheet, the heralded season-opener had earned nearly $40,000 below budgetary projection. McGuire and his board hit the panic button. Hard.
KNEE-JERK RESPONSES
Counter-intuitive moves included ditching the New Year's Eve fundraiser, canceling a much-anticipated co-production of Hamlet, and cutting a full week from all remaining subscription productions.
The timing was horrendous, likely short-circuiting the Rep's pursuit of the regional Tony for years to come. Gretha Boston, in her first straight comedy role, had to be told on the night before previews began that the run of Jar the Floor had been shortened by a week. Bush would have to tell all future Broadway luminaries that Charlotte Rep star packages now demanded four weeks of rehearsal and just two weeks of performance. The only way to lengthen artist involvement was to link engagements together via co-productions with other companies. But the Rep had scuttled that option by pulling out of the co-production of Hamlet with Syracuse Stage when auditions had already begun. In fact, the board's decision was made while Bush was driving to New York.
"We created a problem in their budget!" Bush fumes. "That's just something I won't do to another theater."
Why the panic? On paper, The Miracle Worker had actually earned slightly more than Pump Boys had lost. But the revival had been expected to torpedo the Rep's lingering deficit. Bush, Umberger and McGuire all agree that between the time Bush interviewed for the Rep's top post and the time he brought Penny Fuller to Charlotte in The Glass Menagerie, the surplus had vanished, and the company was some $250,000 in the red.
Arts organizations nationwide can recite the sequence: Sept. 11 happened, the economy skidded, state budgets tightened, and the money stream from endowments dried up. Afterwards, war in Iraq. A "Miracle" run on Broadway might have yielded the income to melt the Rep's mountain of debt away. Then the Pump Boys disappointment wouldn't have mattered.
"We felt like we bought a Porsche," says McGuire, "and we thought we were going to go down the autobahn in Germany and make some rapid progress. In the meantime, before the Porsche was delivered, they put a 55 speed limit on the autobahn."
Bush vividly remembers McGuire telling him that The Rep couldn't supply the gas anymore. "I said, 'Well, then I think the Porsche has got to move to another driveway.'"
The search for Bush's replacement has already begun, haunted by two new questions: Where does Charlotte Rep go from here? And how can it get there?
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