For the last 16 years, John Lazzara has spent his summers in a first-floor office at the Drury Lane Theatre-Martinique Restaurant and Banquet complex in Evergreen Park, coming up with possible show ideas for the fall and winter seasons.
He has kept up that routine this summer. Lazzara, who owns the Drury Lane with his brother Ray, was in his office early one August morning, smoking one cigarette after another and ruminating about the musicals and concerts he would present to his audience of mostly senior citizens.
But it’s the end of an era for the colorful Lazzara, whose nickname (“Johnny Lightning”) is in neon lights on the wall behind his desk.
In January, after his annual “Celebration on Ice” show closes in Drury Lane’s 800-seat theater-in-the-round, the complex will shut down for good. Soon after, wrecking crews will take center stage, leveling a venue that has been around in one form or another since 1946. By 2005, a Wal-Mart will stand in its place.
As expected, longtime patrons and employees are crushed at the prospect of losing this landmark on 95th Street near Western Avenue.
For years, a huge neon sign has beckoned to drivers on 95th.
Countless South Siders have had ceremonies in the Martinique’s Wedding Chapel or held their receptions in the Grand Ballroom. Countless others have thrilled at seeing an old-style Hollywood great like Mickey Rooney mingling with theatergoers in the lobby after a show.
`I will miss it terribly’
“It’s a very special place with a very family-oriented atmosphere,” said Patti Boyle, who has worked at Drury Lane as a hostess since 1964. “I will miss it terribly, but we’ll all be there until the end.”
“Customers are saying, How can they do this to me? How can they close up?” added Myron Barg, a longtime patron who also recently began providing travel promotions for the theater.
“It’s like the old Edgewater Beach Hotel. It’s a shame to see these places go. But I guess you have to go with the times.”
Lazzara started negotiations on leasing the land to Wal-Mart last March, even though his dinner theater has consistently done well with its core group of audiences. But the financial rewards of the deal–not disclosed by Lazzara–were too good for him to turn down.
So now, as Frank Sinatra-impersonator Bill Acosta (performing at Drury Lane in October) might say, the end is near. But Johnny Lightning’s going out doing it his way.
“Of course, I’m sad and it’s starting to hit me a little,” said Lazzara, who also is a producer for many of the shows at his theater. “I guess I’m a little lost because I’m always picking shows and concerts for next year at this time.
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“My concentration now is producing great shows for our customers who have always counted on us. They won’t be disappointed.”
That’s most probably true, since the final season at the theater will feature shows and concerts much like the fare featured at Drury Lane over the last 50-plus years.
“Sweet and Hot,” a revue featuring the songs Harold Arlen wrote in the 1930s and ’40s for Broadway and Hollywood, opens on Sept. 3; Drury Lane stalwart Debbie Reynolds makes her eighth appearance at the venue starting on Oct. 22.
Venues disappearing
As recently as the early 1980s, performers such as Reynolds had their choice of six dinner theaters in the Chicago area. But with the demise of the Drury Lane-Martinique complex and Summit’s Candlelight Playhouse in 1997, there is now only one such venue, the Drury Lane in Oakbrook Terrace, owned by Anthony De Santis, the founder of the Evergreen Park Drury Lane.
De Santis once operated five dinner theaters in the area. In addition to the Evergreen Park and Oakbrook Terrace sites, he also had Drury Lane East (in McCormick Place), Drury Lane North (now the Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire) and Drury Lane Water Tower Place.
The McCormick Place and Water Tower venues have long since closed, while the Marriott Theatre still has live plays but not dinner theater. The Pheasant Run theater in St. Charles has an arrangement with The Noble Fool theater to present productions, but it doesn’t do dinner packages anymore.
“They’re all just disappearing,” De Santis said about dinner theaters. “One time there were hundreds of them, but now there are only three to five left in the country.”
The Drury Lane-Martinique complex in Evergreen Park was perhaps the best-known of all the dinner theaters in the U.S. Seemingly every well-known, slightly past-his-prime Hollywood star and recording artist performed there over the last 50 years.
When reached at his office, the 89-year-old De Santis had no problem remembering the names of the people he hired to play in the pink stucco building on 95th Street.
“Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Tony Bennett, Cyd Charisse, Claudette Colbert, Phyllis Diller, Julie Newmar, Tony Randall, Mickey Rooney, Lana Turner,” he said, pausing between each name.
He continued: “Shelley Winters, Gloria Swanson, Ozzie and Harriet. We booked them all directly. The top price was $5,000 per star.”
In addition to the stars, the Martinique was the center for group events for the Southwest Side of Chicago and the southwest suburbs. The banquet hall, with its palatial dining room, its wood-paneled formal room and chandeliers hanging everywhere, is still solidly booked nearly every weekend. Police and fire groups, private parties, wedding events in the Martinique’s chapel, they’re all staples of the venerable banquet hall.
“While we were there, we had most of the South Side Irish weddings,” De Santis said.
Evergreen Park Mayor James Sexton was married at the Martinique’s chapel in 1974. Sexton, like most Evergreen Park residents, regrets the loss of the venue that was a cornerstone for the community. But he said the community will benefit greatly through the sales-tax revenue produced by Wal-Mart.
City officials said Wal-Mart will generate $6.9 million for Evergreen Park Elementary School District 124 over the next 24 years, while Evergreen Park High School District 231 will get $4.7 million.
“We’ll definitely miss the theater,” Sexton said. “But it’s been real tough economic times for us the past few years, so this is excellent for us from a dollar standpoint.”
Sexton hopes to bring another theater into Evergreen Park. But theater observers said the loss of the Drury Lane shouldn’t be considered a great negative, for Southwest Side residents or Chicago’s theater community as a whole.
“There aren’t a lot of theaters in that area, but people are pretty mobile in this town, and they can travel to any area where there’s great theater,” said Marj Halperin, president of the League of Chicago Theatres. “There are around 140 theaters in the area, so the closing of an individual theater doesn’t have any great meaning to the fabric of Chicago.”
A major landmark
But Drury Lane has played a big role in the history of Evergreen Park and the Southwest Side of Chicago.
It began in 1946 as an outdoor summer theater-in-a-tent, located at 97th Street and Western Avenue. De Santis, a South Side tavern owner, had bought land there and leased the property to two local theatrical entrepreneurs, who produced a musical revue called “Made in the Ozarks.”
That revue, done in a theater-in-the-round setting, lasted for three years.
De Santis decided to continue putting on shows at the site, during the summers only. He started by presenting non-jazz oriented big bands, led by musicians such as Tony Pastor, Eddy Howard and Art Kassel. Then, he began booking fading stars like Franchot Tone to appear in popular plays such as Sam Raphaelson’s “Jason.”
De Santis was helped by the demise of the Hollywood studio system, which had tethered its stars with long-term contracts. Television and a 1948 U.S. Supreme Court ruling requiring studios to give up their almost exclusive ownership of the nation’s movie theaters helped break up that system, which had been in place for decades.
With the death of old Hollywood, its stars began looking for new means of employment, including dinner theaters.
“There weren’t that many jobs in Hollywood,” De Santis said. “So most of the stars played the summer circuit of dinner theaters. We would select the play, produce it and build the sets.”
A hit with audiences
Drury Lane wasn’t initially popular with some of Chicago’s arts community.
In a 1953 review, the legendary Tribune theater critic Claudia Cassidy wrote that “it doesn’t take much summer theater to last me a lifetime” and called the traffic noise outside the Drury Lane “frightful.”
But the star-in-a-popular-play format was a hit with audiences. De Santis moved the tent operation to the Drury Lane’s current location in the mid-’50s.
After the tent collapsed during Marie Wilson’s performance in “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” in 1957, De Santis decided to build a theater/banquet hall at the Drury Lane’s present location at 2500 W. 95th St.
He expanded the operation in 1965 when he built the present 800-seat theater. The complex had a penthouse (“The Purple Passion Pit” was its nickname) where visiting stars stayed.
De Santis also housed his stars in a plush apartment at 1212 N. Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. He provided two cars–a Rolls-Royce and a Lincoln–for the stars who performed at his venue.
There were bad times, too.
There was a rash of robberies at the venue, including a 1954 heist in which $12,000 was stolen from the theater’s safe and a 1960 theft in which actresses Gypsy Rose Lee and Paulette Goddard reported the loss of $18,000 in jewels and a sable coat from the theater penthouse.
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Then there was the dynamite stick tossed into the Martinique in May 1962. It caused $10,000 in damage. De Santis didn’t want to comment on this incident but told Tribune arts reporter Chris Jones earlier this year: “It was one stick. That meant they were friendly. Four or five sticks meant that they were really mad at you.”
Star struck
The stars, De Santis said, were the highlight of his time in Evergreen Park.
“The most memorable star was Claudette Colbert,” De Santis said.
“I sent her a photograph of the theater down to Barbados, where she lived. She called me up and said, `I wouldn’t play in a boxing ring.’ I told her that people like Douglas Fairbanks played here, so she agreed and ended up loving it here.”
Old-timers who worked at the theater are still awed by the actors and actresses who performed there. Boyle has fond memories of Pat O’Brien, a Warner Bros. character actor best known for supporting roles with James Cagney and for his starring performance in “Knute Rockne, All-American.”
“He was a real professional,” Boyle said. “When he and his wife were here in the late 1960s, we had a terrible storm where we lost all the electricity. They still did the whole show by candlelight.”
De Santis owned the theater until 1988, when he sold to the Lazzara brothers. They continued his format but also began attracting more local talent to the theater.
Jefferson Award-winning director and choreographer Marc Robin got some of his early breaks at the Evergreen Park theater, and he continues to work with Lazzara. Most recently, they worked on the critically acclaimed spring performance of “Singin’ in the Rain.”
Lazzara introduced his annual Christmas ice shows in 1991 and began attracting musical talent such as Lou Rawls, The Platters, Bobby Vinton and The McGuire Sisters to the theater.
“When I first got here, I didn’t know who the McGuire Sisters were–I thought I was booking the Lennon Sisters,” he said. “But I’ve learned.”
What’s next?
The facility closes Jan. 18. Patrons who have booked events after that date will have the option of moving them to Applause, Applause, the Lazzaras’ Burbank restaurant and banquet hall.
Lazzara would like to continue producing for the theater, perhaps working again with Robin.
But he said any new theatrical experiences won’t replicate the ones he’s had at Drury Lane.
His relationship with his audience has been especially memorable.
“I go on stage before every concert and talk to them, and I’m going to miss that,” Lazzara said. “Because the seniors are very honest with you. They’re going to tell you how it is, and I honestly think that’s what makes us successful.
“They’ve told us what they wanted. I’ve tried to go out and get it for them.”
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic
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