You know how real estate salesmen are always blabbing about “location, location, location.” Well, they’re right, but in ways they never knew. The new Goodman Theatre, which officially opened its first season Monday night, is a case in point.
Because the low-slung theater sits right at the foot of the skyscrapers of the bustling North Loop, it represents a huge departure from the old Goodman, which, as part of the Art Institute’s sprawling lakefront complex, was far removed from Chicago’s urban core.
A downtown theater has a twin set of responsibilities that a more isolated theater does not: It has to provide a superb environment for live performances. Yet it also is obliged to engage and enliven the city around it — relating to nearby buildings and enhancing the unrehearsed theater of city life that plays out every day along the sidewalk.
Achieving such a balancing act isn’t easy, especially because cash-poor theaters invariably pour what little money they have into the interior of their buildings; the concrete hulk on North Halsted Street that is home to Steppenwolf Theatre shows how such architectural afterthoughts can scar the cityscape.
But the $46 million Goodman, located just north of the Richard J. Daley Center at 170 N. Dearborn St., plays a more enlightened role in the ongoing drama of downtown Chicago. And that is good news for those seeking to breathe life into the city’s moribund theater district.
Outside, the Goodman imaginatively pairs the old (the restored facades of the twin Harris and Selwyn Theaters) with the new. Inside, its two new stages — one an 856-seat proscenium theater, the other a flexible courtyard theater that can seat up to 460 people — offer audience members better acoustics and, in the case of the big mainstage, a far more intimate experience than at the old Goodman. As a bonus, the courtyard theater promises to become one of the city’s hidden architectural gems.
Yet this is Chicago, where no good design deed goes unpunished by meddling from City Hall or its allies, so there’s a catch.
The new Goodman makes up just one part of a much larger building that holds down the northwest corner of Dearborn and Randolph Streets with a big elliptical rotunda and is expected to house restaurants and offices by March. Ultimately, the two parts of the project must be judged as a single building. And already there are signs — involving awkward departures from the original plan — that the end result will be less than satisfying.
Designed by two firms, Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg (KPMB) Architects of Toronto and DLK Architecture of Chicago, the new Goodman occupies a site that is equally rich in theater history and architectural tragedy.
In 1960, developers demolished Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler’s Schiller Building skyscraper at 60 W. Randolph, including the masterful Garrick Theater, where soaring arches emanated from the stage.
The richly decorated, terra cotta-clad Harris and Selwyn theaters at 170 and 186 N. Dearborn St. were respectable playhouses when they opened in 1923, but, by the 1970s, had turned into porn movie houses featuring the likes of “Deep Throat.”
In the same decade, the Woods Theater at 54 W. Randolph, where “Gone With the Wind” had its Chicago premier on a reserved seat basis in 1940, also slid downhill, showing violence-filled “action” films. The Woods closed in 1989, the last of the Loop movie theaters to go dark.
City Hall’s attitude toward promoting downtown entertainment and preserving historic buildings has come a long way since then, and the new Goodman shows how.
The city contributed $18.8 million to the project while insisting that the new Goodman incorporate portions of the landmarked Harris and Selwyn. That proviso created the problem of how to shut out the vibrations and the racket from the Lake Street elevated, which runs just to the north of the site, and the State Street subway, which tunnels below it. The engineers on the job seem to have solved the problem, in part by borrowing construction techniques from earthquake-prone California.
The new Goodman lines up like this along Dearborn Street: Within the walls of the old Selwyn is a new, three-level courtyard theater. Just to the south, behind the facade of the old Harris, are new administrative offices, rehearsal spaces and the heart of the main lobby for both theaters. Finally, a few steps farther to the south, are an entirely new structure that holds a two-level mainstage theater and has a limestone and glass facade. A narrow, serpentine lobby with curving walls runs parallel to Dearborn, uniting all three sections of the theater.
As a work of urban design, the project is a strong success. It breaks its long block into clearly discernible — and often delightful — parts, like the handsomely revamped Harris and Selwyn facades, which offer passersby such grace notes as sculptures symbolizing the ancient muses of comedy and song.
The idea, as the Goodman’s executive director Roche Schulfer explains, was to re-create the human scale of theater-lined 45th Street off Broadway in New York City.
But to the credit of its architects, the new Goodman is no Disneyesque exercise in make-believe. While the new limestone and glass facade perfectly matches the scale of the Harris and Selwyn theaters, it plays a game of counterpoint with them. Its wall of limestone seems to levitate while their walls of terra cotta are anchored to the ground. Its pronounced horizontals contrast with their sharply defined verticals.
There is true artistry in the beautifully composed bands of stone that run across the facade; the chief designer, Tom Payne of KPMB, compares the facade to the face of a quarry, with its suggestion of geological strata.
The best stroke, however, is the one that contradicts all the stone and its sense of massiveness: New and refurbished windows that open the lobby to the city and allow its vibrancy to spill out onto the sidewalk. There’s even a big oak bench behind that long second-floor window where people can sit and watch the passing parade. That, too, is a nice change from the old Goodman, where the theater lobby offered patrons handsome classical proportions and a skylit ceiling, but no place to sit.
Still, the exterior is no triumph. Uplights placed on the Harris and Selwyn facades to cast a warm nighttime glow are clunky-looking, their white casing as out of place as white shoes on a man wearing a tuxedo.
The 73-foot marquee, its blocky letters meant to provide a modern contrast with the more ornate marquee of the nearby Oriental and Palace theaters, looks out of place in a facade that it is largely classical. Worse, some of the architects’ key ideas have been trashed — victims of the age-old conflict between aesthetics and economics.
In their concept plan, for example, the architects envisioned the elliptical rotunda at Dearborn and Randolph as a high-ceilinged room that would lead patrons directly into the adjacent theater lobby and lend a generosity of space to its tightly pinched interior. But the well-connected developer that the Goodman brought on to handle the commercial portion of the project, Albert Friedman, says the plan did not provide him with enough rentable floor space. Voila! He has opted instead to extend office floors right into the rotunda, slicing and dicing what could have been a magnificent, monumental space.
Within the Goodman, however, such battles did not arise — and the results, for the most part, are visually and functionally appealing.
The lobby, though weakened by the compromised rotunda, is nonetheless comfortable and commodious, especially in a two-story elliptical space found behind the old Harris facade. Here, the architects again play a game of counterpoint, contrasting the static lines of the old theater with fluid, curving forms. Among them are an oval skylight with a canted, yellow disk found just under its top and a glass-wrapped, black granite staircase that verges on the lyrical.
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For all the dynamism of this space, it never goes over the top with heavy-metal, Frank Gehryesque Deconstructivism. Nor does it lose sight of the past, alluding to the destroyed Garrick Theatre in a handsome carpet that borrows the legendary theater’s Prairie style palette of light greens and golds. Creature comforts are not forgotten, either; there are oak ledges where you can park your drink at intermission.
The theaters themselves, which are entered through the narrow lobby spaces that branch out from the centrally located elliptical hub, are also quite effective, though the mainstage is not without a design kink or two.
In contrast to the old Goodman mainstage, a single seating bowl with 683 seats, the new, two-level theater has 856 seats. Yet it feels much cozier than its predecessor, and there are several reasons why.
A cantilevered balcony brings theatergoers closer to the stage. Private boxes on each side of the theater create a sense of enclosure. And the seating bowl is raked a touch more steeply than before — enough to improve sightlines without inducing vertigo.
Most important, the Goodman has departed somewhat from the continental seating of the old theater, which offered extra-wide rows of seats, no center aisle, and lots of legroom. That arrangement pushed the seats back from the stage, creating a no man’s land between performers and audience.
The new mainstage, in contrast, retains some continental seating, but its rows are less wide than before and the outcome, if my balcony seat at a recent preview offers any indication, is a model of intimacy, better than the best upper-deck seats at Wrigley Field.
Acoustics seem well handled, in part the result of curving ceilings and walls that allow sound to reverberate effectively. But the oak slats that cover these walls fall flat visually, resembling the planks of a barrel or the walls of a 1950s basement rec room. Still, they bring welcome warmth into the space, recalling the old Goodman’s oak-paneled walls.
Wood truly is centerstage in the Goodman’s new courtyard theater, where a three-level U-shaped seating area is undergirded by Douglas fir columns, beams and trusses. The seats wrap around a floor that can assume a variety of stage configurations, including a theater-in-the-round.
In a sense, the courtyard theater looks backward, recalling that the Goodman family fortune was made in the lumber business. But it also looks forward, its cantilevered, metal-clad balconies hanging from steel rods. As a result of this innovative structural system, the wood columns can be set back from the front of the balconies, improving sightlines.
This space cannot be fully judged because no performances have occurred in it, yet architecturally, it is a stunner — the latest in a long line of skin and bones design that is the hallmark of the Chicago style.
This little theater is the unexpected highlight of Act I of the Goodman Theatre saga. We’ll know, come March, with the completion of the building’s restaurant and office space, whether Act II of this real-life play has a happy ending or goes down as another botched episode of Chicago’s building boom.
DEATH SENTENCE FOR OLD GOODMAN?
As the old Goodman Theatre was being finished in the mid-1920s, some observers likened it to a mausoleum.
Maybe they were on to something. The theater’s architect, Howard Van Doren Shaw, also designed the Goodman family tomb in Graceland Cemetery.
Even though most of the Goodman was built underground to comply with a city law restricting the height of buildings near the lakefront, Shaw graced the theater with memorable features: a classical entry pavilion, a barrel-vaulted staircase, a skylit theater lobby and an oak-walled mainstage theater. The Goodman even sported a “cyclorama,” a curved rear stage wall on which light could be projected to create the illusion of great height or depth.
But now, with the Goodman Theatre having relocated to its new North Loop home, the old Goodman appears to have entered its last act. The Art Institute of Chicago is planning a major addition and the aging, functionally obsolete theater, which occupies the northeast corner of the museum’s sprawling lakefront complex at Monroe and Columbus Drives, sits in the way.
“They have no intention of saving the old Goodman,” said David Bahlman, executive director of the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois, which met last month with museum President James Wood to discuss the Art Institute’s plans.
A museum spokeswoman, Eileen Harakal, declined to comment. The Art Institute, she said, expects to make its intentions public in late spring or early summer of 2001.
But Bahlman and other people familiar with the museum’s plans, said the Art Institute, which originally thought about putting an addition along the south end of its complex, has shifted the expansion to the north, along Monroe Street.
Such a move has tantalizing architectural possibilities because it would place the museum’s addition, being designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, across Monroe from California architect Frank Gehry’s bandshell and concert area in Millennium Park.
The addition thus would create a face-off between Gehry and Piano, two winners of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the field’s highest honor. Yet the move also promises to place the expansion, which is to house office and exhibition spaces, right where the old Goodman now stands.
City officials seem unlikely to heed the Preservation Council’s call to protect the old Goodman from demolition, Bahlman said. “Barring unforeseen circumstances,” he added, “it seems like the Goodman is going to go.”
Blair Kamin