Following an 18-month hiatus, Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre plans to reopen on January 30 with new leadership, a new business model, and a newly renovated lobby. The 36-year-old company, which won the 2011 Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre, will reduce its mainstage season from four to two productions, while expanding its educational programs and pursuing co-producing and touring opportunities.
Located on the Magnificent Mile, Chicago’s busiest retail district, Lookingglass is housed in a picturesque, turreted building owned by the city, which it shares with a functioning water utility. The ensemble-based theater is best known for literary adaptations with a strong visual aesthetic; notable world premieres include Mary Zimmerman’s Tony Award-winning Metamorphoses, David Schwimmer’s adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and David Catlin’s circus-inspired take on Lewis Carroll, Lookingglass Alice.
When Chicago theatres began to reopen after the pandemic shutdown, Lookingglass remounted previous hits such as Lookingglass Alice and Zimmerman’s adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen tale, The Steadfast Tin Soldier. In 2023, the company produced two world premieres: an adaptation of an underrated Charlotte Brontë novel, Villette, and Lucy & Charlie’s Honeymoon, a musical by ensemble member Matthew C. Yee.
Despite this combination of perennial favorites and critically acclaimed new works, ticket sales and donations didn’t return to 2019 levels, and Lookingglass threw a hail-Mary fundraiser hosted by Stephen Colbert on June 16, 2023. Two weeks later, the company announced its plan to pause operations and reduce its full-time staff. As then-artistic director Heidi Stillman told the Chicago Tribune, “None of our recent shows have hit our box-office goals, even after we have reduced our goals.” Stillman also said that surveys had revealed that some audience members were reluctant to come downtown in recent seasons.
These financial struggles were not unique to Lookingglass. Audience behaviors have drastically changed since 2020, and many nonprofit theatres in Chicago and across the U.S. have permanently closed. “We had a business model that has been the same for many, many years, and it was already not very sustainable,” current artistic director Kasey Foster shared in a recent Playbill interview. “But when [we came back from] COVID, we were expecting to return to what was, and it was much worse. So, in a situation where we were already struggling, COVID really [put a] magnifying lens on that problem.”
Now, Lookingglass seems poised for a successful comeback. After serving on a four-member interim leadership team for six months, Foster became artistic director in late February. She was elected by the ensemble, which typically rotates the role among its members. In the fall, the company announced the appointments of Jamey Lundblad as managing director, Richard Chapman as board chair, and two new board members: founding ensemble member David Schwimmer and attorney James (Jimmy) Oh. After meeting its 2023–24 fundraising goal of $2.5 million dollars, the theatre’s budget for fiscal year 2025 is $4.36 million, and it currently employs 16 full-time staff.
During the hiatus, the Lookingglass ensemble, staff, and board of directors worked with Amplify Leadership Advisors, a consulting firm for arts organizations, to identify the company’s priorities and determine which combination of programs work financially. The new model includes producing two shows per year, building co-production relationships with other theatres, launching a new works festival to complement existing artist residencies, offering more educational programs for youth and adults, and sending more productions on tour. The company’s scene shop is also expanding, not only building sets for Lookingglass shows, but also hiring out its services to other theaters and local organizations.
“The scene shop has this great opportunity to serve the industry and the community, but also might be a new source of revenue,” notes Lundblad. “We’re looking at all corners.”
When audiences return in January, they will enter a renovated lobby with a new bar and café, funded by a 2019 grant from the State of Illinois. The space will feature work by local artists and products from local vendors, and Lookingglass hopes to make it a creative hub for arts organizations across the city. “It will be a way for us to throw our doors open to Chicago in a way we haven’t done before,” says Lundblad.
To open the 2025 season, members of the Lookingglass Alice creative team reunited for the world premiere of Circus Quixote, an acrobatic retelling of the Cervantes novel, written and directed by Kerry and David Catlin. Sylvia Hernandez-DiStasi is the circus designer, and the show is produced in association with Actors Gymnasium, a circus school and theatre company based in Evanston, a Chicago suburb. The creators were inspired by the novel’s humor, themes of friendship and following one’s dreams, and blurred lines between the real and the fantastic. “We are drawn to works that have elements of what feel like should be impossible to stage,” relates David Catlin. “But in a theatre, the audience brings with them this imagination that allows for us to do impossible things.”
The season continues in May with the world premiere of Iraq, But Funny, a satire about five generations of Assyrian women reclaiming their stories, written by ensemble member Atra Asdou and directed by Dalia Ashurina. Lookingglass plans to continue its focus on new work in upcoming seasons, a priority that “came out loud and resounding in our strategic planning,” shares Foster. “We’re hoping to tour some of the productions that are well known so that they can continue, while here at home, we’re creating more new pieces that eventually will also go out to tour.” Lookingglass shows have been produced in more than a dozen U.S. cities to date, and PBS streamed the most recent revival of Lookinglass Alice to national audiences in December 2023. Now, if all goes well, theatre lovers across the country can look forward to more opportunities to experience the company’s special creativity.
