DOWNTOWN — After a 19-month hiatus, Lookingglass Theatre is making a triumphant return to its dwelling alongside the Magnificent Mile with a renovated foyer, bar and cafe space — and its first present since summer season 2023.
The Tony Award-winning theater’s first manufacturing in its up to date house, “Circus Quixote,” kicks off with previews Thursday at its dwelling within the city-owned Water Tower Pumping Station, 163 E. Pearson St.
The present formally opens Feb. 8 and runs by March 30. Study extra and purchase tickets beginning at $30 right here.
The revamped theater, accomplished with about $2 million in state funding, contains instructional and workshop areas, a video wall and signage dedicating the efficiency house to longtime supporters Joan and Paul Rubschlager.
Lookingglass celebrated its reopening with a ribbon chopping Monday. Friends packed the venue, becoming a member of creative director Kasey Foster, managing director Jamey Lundblad and ensemble members Jane Nicole Brooks and David Schwimmer, who co-founded the corporate in 1988.
Gov. JB Pritzker, Ald. Brian Hopkins (2nd), Philip Smith and Kenya Ok. Merritt, deputy mayor of enterprise and neighborhood improvement, had been additionally in attendance.
Initially an itinerant theater firm performing in church basements, storefronts and warehouses from Pilsen to Evanston, Lookingglass settled within the historic Water Tower constructing in 2003, Schwimmer stated on the occasion.
The celebrated theater hit a wall in 2020 with the COVID-19 outbreak. The pandemic pressured Lookingglass to shut its doorways and let the vast majority of its employees go, he stated.
“However that is Chicago, the Metropolis of Huge Shoulders,” Schwimmer stated. “Its energy, resilience and work ethic impressed us. We determined to regroup, rebuild and at the moment reopen.”
Lookingglass’ new circus-inspired present, based mostly on Miguel de Cervantes’ “Don Quixote of La Mancha,” additionally tells a narrative of dreaming large irrespective of the obstacles, co-writer and co-director David Catlin instructed Block Membership.
It follows Don Quixote on a folly- and acrobatics-filled quest as he tries “to convey good-deed doing again into the world” — and finally ends up dragging his pals, neighbors and family members on the journey.
The present “is a few man who has learn so many tales of chivalry that his mind dries up, and he needs to exit into the world and turn out to be a knight,” stated Catlin, who created the present along with his spouse, Kerry. “In some methods, he’s fully ridiculous … and but, there’s nonetheless one thing so lovely. He simply is continually failing, making an attempt to do one thing and failing. However he will get up once more and he tries time and again.”
In basic Lookingglass vogue, the actors have been coaching with Evanston’s The Actor’s Gymnasium to be taught stunts and “defy gravity,” together with for a scene on Quixote’s legendary windmills, Catlin stated.
“You’re experiencing it in a kinesthetic method,” he stated. “You’re feeling it in your muscle mass. … Because the actors are spinning round and round and round, you’re feeling your individual abdomen fluttering as they’re doing that.”
For Catlin, the present hits near dwelling in a post-pandemic world, the place it may possibly typically really feel simpler to remain dwelling and watch Netflix than present up for each other.
Lookingglass Theatre will hit the bottom operating this 12 months with writers workshops, out of doors summer season applications, a brand new works competition, Sundown 1919 and extra on deck, creative director Foster instructed Block Membership Friday.
The theater can also be cutting down to 2 productions a 12 months relatively than three to 5. Its subsequent present, “Iraq, However Humorous” by ensemble member Atra Asdou, will run Could 29-July 20.
The theater’s new foyer is the proper “on-ramp” for every little thing Lookingglass has in retailer, Foster stated.
It’s “going to permit us to open our doorways to Chicagoans and guests in a method that we’ve by no means executed earlier than,” she stated. “We’re going to be presenting different kinds of cultural programming, courses, performances, possibly music, possibly puppetry. … We’re actually enthusiastic about widening our viewers in that method.
“We’re additionally actually enthusiastic about how our reopening is, we hope, going to assist revitalize the Magazine Mile neighborhood. We predict that arts could be a part of that comeback story.”
Schwimmer, a newly inducted Lookingglass board member, can also be “doubling down” on the theater, as he instructed the Chicago Tribune.
“Just like the pumping station subsequent door, we think about Lookingglass to be a public utility offering important service to this neighborhood, and we take that duty significantly,” Schwimmer instructed the gang Monday. “We imagine storytelling is as very important to the well being of town because the water flowing by it. It’s life-sustaining, feeding town’s spirit, soul and creativeness.”
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