Two short anecdotes tell you a lot about Eileen LaCario, a “force of nature,” as one producer calls her, and one of two vice presidents of Broadway in Chicago.
During her time at Candlelight Dinner Playhouse, LaCario, whose jobs included prop mistress, laundry maven, box office manager and marketing director, begged artistic head William Pullinsi to stage “Sweeney Todd” — and serve meat pies on the menu.
In 1997, Candlelight closed.
“I drove home thinking, ‘How do I tell my kids?'” LaCario remembers. “They were still in school, but they were all tied to that theater. My whole family was tied to it. My husband [Tony D’Angelo] was the producer. His father had recently moved in with us. Suddenly, neither my husband nor I had a paycheck.”
Like so many musicals on LaCario’s resume, the story has a happy ending. A sales and marketing tornado, LaCario continued in theater and is a major force in Broadway in Chicago’s transformation of commercial theater here. She is one of the most influential women in the industry nationwide.
But that earlier tenacity in the face of adversity, born of her Berwyn roots and nurtured by years in the shaky, uncertain world of theater, is a secret weapon. Wanting to serve meat pies during “Sweeney Todd” clues her show business calling.
“She’s as obsessively committed as anyone I’ve ever met,” says Mick Leavitt, a major Chicago-based Broadway producer and former head of Fox Theatricals, where LaCario worked. “Talk to her about a show, any show, and you’d swear she’d been involved with it for 20 years.”
“Eileen is one of the best team players you could ask for, imaginative, aggressive and sensitive,” says her current boss, Lou Rezin, Broadway in Chicago’s president. (Suzanne Bizer is the outfit’s other vice president.) “She never forgets that the theater is an art and a business, and she knows how to maintain that delicate balance.”
As part of her task overseeing media relations, LaCario is a ubiquitous presence at Broadway in Chicago opening nights, scurrying about the lobby and roaming the aisles like a proud parent hosting her child’s birthday party. Ebullient, beaming, the antithesis of a shrinking violet, she is Broadway in Chicago’s public face, schmoozing with one and all.
Her omnipresence, though, isn’t just limited to her own shows. LaCario is out and about in theater all over town, recently encountered leaving a preview at Steppenwolf Theatre, for instance. And she exudes the same proprietary air on view downtown — LaCario frets over and champions everyone’s show, not just her own.
She also regularly revisits shows after they open. “Audiences are all very different, and I have to know what moves people at different junctures during a run,” she says.
“Everything she does in business she did as a mother,” says her husband, D’Angelo. “She used to direct a yearly talent show when the kids were in school. When our church was struck by a tornado, she helped raise over $350,000 to repair the damage and remodel it.”
LaCario’s love of theater goes back to her childhood.
“I was 6 or 7, I think, and my mother would take me downtown to matinees,” she says. “We’d sit in the balcony at various theaters, and I saw lots of plays, some that were powerful, some that weren’t that brilliant. …
“But they changed my life,” she continues.
She is tough, famously tough. Yet, at 52, she’s still at times that little girl awed by the excitement of a live show.
“People say I approach things differently, and I think it’s that I always approach everything from the point of view of the production,” she says. LaCario grew up in an Italian-Bohemian household, ethnicities she credits for her work ethic and love of the arts. She attended Morton West High School, noteworthy for a string of arts graduates.
‘I can do that’
She started in dance, but, while watching auditions for the high school production of “Hello, Dolly!” thought, “I can do that.” She played Dolly. “Nice and loud,” she remembers.
After graduation, at 17, she was hired by Candlelight as prop mistress. She worked full time and attended college classes, staying up until dawn through “strike night,” when a theater dismantles a show’s set, and then attending class at 8 a.m.
“I was still auditioning,” she recalls, landing a part in a play directed by Frank Galati at Candlelight’s smaller space, the Forum, for instance, and working at a summer stock theater in Sullivan, Ill., adding costume sewing to her resume. “They sent me to the costume shop, where the designer said, here are six petticoats, put zippers on all of them. I thought I would pass out. But I went to the sewing machine, and the next thing you knew, I was the star of the costume shop.”
LaCario also worked around that time with Stuart Oken and Robert Falls on an off-Loop production of “Moonchildren.” Those relationships would later be revived during her work in downtown commercial theater. The theater community then was tightknit, and Candlelight and Forum were key facilities, mounting long-run productions. One of those was the homegrown “Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?” which lasted 3 1/2 years and proved this area would support original theater — seeds, in some ways, of Broadway in Chicago today.
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After Candlelight, LaCario worked for Garth Drabinsky and Livent, and for Leavitt and Fox Theatricals, until the series of developments that led to the creation of Broadway in Chicago in 2000. Besides working on downtown shows, she had developed close ties to city officials during the restorations of the Oriental and Cadillac Palace Theatres.
‘This is it’
The long run of “Wicked,” slated to end in January, is the crown jewel of Broadway in Chicago’s achievements, rewriting commercial theater history here. LaCario employs a system she calls integrated marketing, and for “Wicked,” she drew concentric marketing circles, the innermost one around the Loop, the next around the suburbs, expanding into a larger Midwestern area. City folks flocked in the beginning; now the production attracts busloads from other states.
“I always told Lou you don’t pick your long run, it will pick you,” she says. “When ‘Wicked’ went on sale, I said to him, ‘This is it.’ [‘Wicked’ producer] David Stone didn’t want a long run here at first. Disney and everyone advised against it. But we begged and begged and begged.”
“Jersey Boys” is now in place at the Bank of America Theatre for another long venture. And, LaCario says, Broadway in Chicago now attracts tourists all by itself in addition to serving ones who come for other reasons. One aspect involves pooling resources for all the theaters and/or shows under the Broadway in Chicago umbrella. The telephone sales staff (whose personnel include two Candlelight alumna) sell all Broadway in Chicago shows, not just one, and can nudge patrons when “Wicked” is sold out to try something else — an advantage most New York shows lack.
That coordination and care don’t go unnoticed.
“Eileen’s the only person outside New York we trust with a show,” Stone says. “She takes care of it the same way we would ourselves.”
LaCario lobbies for Broadway tryouts and says that “The Producers” and even the less-celebrated “All Shook Up” proved Chicagoans’ passion for new work: Black patent leather shoes really do reflect up.
There have been grumbles that downtown theater success hurts smaller off-Loop endeavors, but LaCario disagrees. “I think we’ve brought more jobs for Chicago actors, and a lot of the people who work for us are involved in not-for-profit theater themselves,” she says. In conjunction with the League of Chicago Theatres, where she’s on the board of directors, Broadway in Chicago sponsors an annual $5,000 emerging theater award, bestowed so far on the House Theatre of Chicago and the Silk Road Theatre Project.
“They’ve made efforts, and the award is a positive step,” says Kevin Heckman, producing artistic director at Stage Left Theatre. “But there’s a debate going on about whether Broadway in Chicago is good, bad or neutral for theater in town as a whole, and I think it’s bad. Not because of anything they do. But because it turns theatergoing into this event thing. When you pay hundreds of dollars for tickets, and only go twice a year, you go to ‘Wicked’ because you want a known quantity.
“I worry it creates a mental barrier to going to small theater,” he adds.
‘Incredible advocate’
Broadway in Chicago and D’Angelo helped produce the remounting of the House’s “The Sparrow” at the Apollo Theatre. “Whether for downtown or for a storefront, she’s an incredible advocate,” says Nathan Allen, artistic director of the House.
In her office, LaCario shows off a gallery of photos of producers — not matinee idols or stars. “Are there tough producers? Absolutely. Are they hard to get along with? Some, sure. But my husband is a producer, and I know the stress they go through. There’s no ‘No’ in my life. It may take longer, we may have to be a little tougher because we’re in Chicago and New York is the center of the theatrical universe.
“But I got my start in an environment where people would look at us and say, ‘Oh, you’re just dinner theater.'”
You can’t just sit back and let it happen, right? “No,” she answers, “they would just mow you down.”
But then she softens. “I’ve had a charmed life, because I love what I do. I always want to do more. I don’t know what comes next. But I’m not done.”
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See also “LaCario perfected skills at Candlelight,” Arts & Entertainment section, Page 9