Aides to a beleaguered mayor of Chicago devise a gimmick to deflect public criticism of their boss, one that involves, as a staffer puts its, “a concept everybody supports but no one knows anything about — philanthropy.” The mayor is initially suspicious (“It sounds suburban”) but OKs a big-prize competition to pick the best foundation in the city.
That’s the premise behind “Annie Get Your Fund,” the fifth edition of The Philanthropic Phollies, a non-taxing musical spoof performed by a large cast of area grantors and grantees. Their colleagues packed the Pegasus Players theater at Chicago’s Truman College for a recent night off from altruism and lightly uncharitable ribbing of their field (“There’s no business like dough business”). Forgive them, Irving Berlin.
The competition pits Frank Butler (played by Jim Price, the one professional actor in the cast), the power-besotted head (“I am the sun in the morning and the moon at night”) of a giant foundation, against Annie Oakley (Elba Aranda-Suh of Spanish Coalition for Jobs), leader of a little philanthropy funding the more wanting and weird (“MacArthur builds a center/That we’d all like to enter/But why try, we would all be shunned”). The two opposites (“Anything you can fund I can fund better”) soon attract.
The night ended with a salute to the Phollies’ Ziegfeld, Jill Darrow Seltzer, who has directed all the biennial shows. She recently stepped down as executive director of the Lloyd A. Fry Foundation and is moving to California. Her departure leaves the Phollies’ future in doubt.
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“I’m hoping a seed got planted” and the show goes on, she said in an interview. “I think it is such a healthy thing.”
Brainpower: The Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis adds two board members: University of Chicago philosopher and law professor Martha Nussbaum; and filmmaker Harold Ramis. The institute trains mental health professionals and provides low-fee clinical services.
Next level: The Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois is searching for an executive director to lead efforts to build and endow a large museum and education center in Skokie. Howard Swibel, the foundation’s vice president, said his organization and the search firm Kittleman & Associates LLC hope to have a finalist within the next six months.
Lillian Gerstner, who has been executive director for 13 years, acknowledged that she doesn’t have the experience needed in a capital fundraising campaign and construction project. Her focus will continue to be educational programming.
In September, the foundation dedicated the site of the planned 46,000-square-foot museum, north of Golf Road and west of the Edens Expressway in Skokie. Swibel said the foundation has raised about $8 million of the $15 million needed for construction and will seek another $10 million for an endowment. Groundbreaking will be tied to progress of the campaign.
The foundation has operated a storefront museum in Skokie for some 20 years.
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Charles Storch is at [email protected].