Chris Jones: Chicago theater has a crisis of leadership — and it has to stop eating its own
CHICAGO — On Monday, Chicago’s theater and journalism communities were set to gather in celebration of the life of former Tribune critic Richard Christiansen in the theater space at the Biograph that bears his name. But the event, timed to what would have been the 91st birthday of the famously supportive and courtly critic, was postponed. Nobody involved wanted to get caught up in the mess that is Victory Gardens Theater.
That crisis, if you have not been keeping up, has rendered the Tony Award-winning theater, a 48-year-old bedrock of the city’s famous off-Loop scene and the caretaker of one of Chicago’s most important buildings, the historic Biograph Theatre, without an artistic director, an executive director, an announced season or any kind
