Washington or Bust: Kennedy Center Chicagofest Fizzling?
Chicago’s long-planned big moment in the national cultural spotlight may fizzle for lack of funds. As of late last week, arts executives here and in Washington, D.C., were feverishly rushing to raise much of the whopping $3 million needed to take nearly a dozen Chicago arts organizations to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in late spring. In the planning stages for months, the “Chicago Festival at the Kennedy Center,” scheduled for June 12 through 24, would feature the Goodman Theatre, Free Street Theater, the Windy City Gay Chorus, the Hubbard Street Dance Company, the Joseph Holmes Chicago Dance Company, Second City, Center Theater, and the Chicago Repertory Dance Ensemble, among others. Festival organizers have set a February 5 date to make the go/no go determination; sources at the Kennedy Center struck a distinctly uncertain note last week about the festival’s chances of happening.
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Funding clearly is giving the festival organizers problems. “We’re still missing a sizable chunk of the money,” says spokesperson Connie Zonka. Furthermore the planned festival comes at a bad moment for the Kennedy Center, which is seeking a new board chairman to replace former Time, Inc. executive Ralph Davidson, who had been criticized for his poor fund-raising record. The Kennedy Center also is reeling from the $7.5 million debacle that was the musical Annie 2; the center was listed as an associate producer of the new musical, which aborted its planned move to Broadway and closed–perhaps for good–in Washington last weekend.
Times have been tough for the folk clubs on this stretch of North Lincoln. Holsteins, “the premier folk music venue in the country,” according to Baer, closed two years ago just up the street from Orphans, and Baer says he has been forced in recent years to book more rock acts to make ends meet at Orphans. “That is what the market demands,” he says, adding that the older crowds drawn to other forms of music do not tend to drink in sufficiently large quantities. Though he is giving up Orphans, Baer is moving on (without partner Kent) to open a new spot later this year, Beat Kitchen at 2100 W. Belmont. Baer says his new place will have a larger music room than Orphans and a limited food menu as well.
