NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- It was a closing night at the Westchester Broadway Theater unlike any other.
The theater marquee still read “All Shook Up.” But the stage was stripped, except for piles of lights, and the audience was sparse — 100 or so, many of them former actors, crew members and fans. They carted off spotlights, posters, tablecloths and printers at a sale last week that lasted more than 10 hours. Everything had to go.
Bill Bateman, who had appeared in 10 shows at the 46-year-old dinner theater, came from Manhattan to reminisce, joining others at what was at once a family reunion and a funeral. “I wanted to say thank you,” he said later. “This was a great place to work for so many years. You got to do what you loved, all while getting to earn health insurance, pay your rent and sleep in your own bed at night. It’s a very sad day.”
This was not the happy ending that typically filled the theater’s stages, where musicals from “Show Boat” to “42nd Street” to “Newsies” had entertained grandparents and grandchildren alike.
Early this month the pandemic lowered the curtain on the 450-seat Westchester theater — a venue that helped jump-start the careers of the Tony Award winners Susan Stroman, John Lloyd Young and Faith Prince — and now one of the largest theaters in the country to close permanently. Some 100 employees were out of jobs.
And, after a blunt auction announcement that proclaimed a sale “to the bare walls,” there is no hope for a revival. The space would be gutted and turned into a warehouse.
Bill Stutler, one of the theater’s two co-founders, once dreamed of being a movie director.
A colleague remembers him fondly recalling a dinner theater excursion while visiting his parents back in West Virginia one Christmas. After being fired from his job as an advertising executive, he decided to open his own venue in Elmsford, a northern suburb of New York City, that would combine food and entertainment at a price not just stockbrokers could afford.
Never mind that in 1974 the country was in the middle of a recession, at the time the most severe since World War II. Or that startup costs would run at least $400,000. Or that locals would try to shutter the theater before it got off the ground because they feared Stutler was building a strip club (William Hammerstein, the son of lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, helped set them straight when he joined the theater’s board).
Together with his friend Robert J. Funking, a chef, he built An Evening Dinner Theater — later renamed the Westchester Broadway Theater — an institution that would not just survive, but thrive, employing thousands of actors, servers, stagehands and producers across more than 200 musicals and plays, generating as much as $8 million in annual revenue.
It became the longest-running year-round theater in New York to employ members of Actors’ Equity Association, the labor union that represents 51,000 theater actors and stage managers. Rob Marshall, who went on to direct the Oscar-winning film adaptation of “Chicago,” worked there. So did Estelle Harris (“Seinfeld”) and Will Swenson (“Hair”). Nights without shows featured comedians like Wanda Sykes and Lewis Black early in their careers.
But then came a pandemic — and a state-mandated closure in March. In a note to customers announcing the initial shutdown, Funking and Stutler promised ticket holders a credit for a future performance and a free drink, anticipating a time when “together we’ll all toast a return to normalcy.”
But it became clear that normalcy would not return any time soon.
“We cannot be a profitable business while being closed and it looks dim for any live theater to be open for the foreseeable future,” the three owners, Stutler, Funking and Stutler’s wife, Von Ann, wrote in a Nov. 3 email to patrons announcing the permanent closing.
Dinner theaters would be among the last venues to reopen, they reasoned. With their landlord, Robert Martin Co., unwilling to postpone payments on their lease and employees who had not been paid since March, they said they had no choice but to hang it up.
All three owners declined to be interviewed; Funking retired in January. A spokesman for Robert Martin, which took over the theater’s lease about a year ago, said the venue’s financial struggles predated the pandemic.
According to Pia Haas, the theater’s former director of press and public relations, Stutler had already been searching for a successor, and had an offer from Todd Gershwin, the Broadway producer and great-nephew of George and Ira Gershwin. (Haas provided information about the theater’s history, but said she was not speaking on the owners’ behalf.)
“He was on track to take over the theater before the landlords refused the offer he set forth,” she added.
Every American theater is suffering, but dinner theaters face a particularly grim prognosis.
The Westchester Broadway Theater was among the last dozen dinner theaters in the country to employ union actors. But Denise Trupe, the president of the National Dinner Theater Association, an organization of 22 professional venues formed in 1978, still said she was surprised to hear of the closure. While there are fewer dinner theaters now than during the 1970s peak, the dozens that remain tend to have loyal subscriber bases.
Though many of the Westchester theater’s former stars had lost touch with the institution, the response to its closing was surprise — and sadness.
Stroman choreographed “Gypsy” and “Sugar Babies” at the theater in the late 1980s, before going on to a career that includes five Tonys, for “The Producers” and other shows. She said that the generosity of Stutler and Funking sticks with her nearly four decades later.
“They were so open to giving me that chance back when I was a young choreographer with no name and no credits,” she said. “I’m forever grateful.”
Swenson made his Westchester debut in the title role of the theater’s 2001 production of “Jekyll & Hyde.” He played the part at matinees, his first professional acting job after more than six months of auditions.
“It was such a load off,” he said. “I got insurance, and a paycheck every week, which helped me not feel like a failure.”
Actors who worked there say the place was more than a steppingstone. It served as an artistic home for actors with Broadway credits who wanted to work without leaving town, enabling them to earn their Equity cards and qualify for health insurance.
Robert Cuccioli, who made his Westchester debut in Maury Yeston and Arthur Kopit’s “Phantom,” said the family environment was one reason he continued to work there throughout a career that has brought him to Broadway often. Stutler and Funking, he said, were unswervingly loyal, delaying that production of “Phantom” for a month after he broke his foot in previews.
“The fact that they waited for me to get well before they opened meant a lot,” he said. “They treated me like a son or a brother. It was very special.”
Many of the nearly 5,000 people employed at the theater over its nearly five decades were not in the spotlight, including stagehands and servers. And the connection lasted for generations.
Steve Calleran, the 72-year-old emcee and evening manager, worked at the theater for nearly 35 years. He met his wife there in 1975, and his two daughters worked there as servers.
In the note announcing the closing, the owners estimated that more than 6 million audience members had attended shows, nearly 200 of whom wrote fond farewell messages on the theater’s Facebook page.
Patricia McDyer Smyth, a Westchester resident who had seen at least three shows a year for the past decade, fondly recalls organizing an outing to see “Saturday Night Fever” with 42 of her country-line-dancing friends.
But she was disappointed that the theater did not offer refunds when it closed. She had purchased 20 tickets for shows in the upcoming season, leaving her out $1,400. “I am also struggling during this pandemic,” she said. “I need that money back.” (White Plains Performing Arts Center, another Equity theater, will allow customers to exchange tickets for shows there once it reopens.)
But Calleran, who is now out of work for the first time in decades, does not blame Stutler and Funking for the closure. “I know they would have stuck it out for as long as they could have,” he said.
And Cuccioli said he feared the theater was only the first domino to fall. “I know other theaters are struggling,” he said. “I just hope something can be done to stop the bleeding.”
© 2020 The New York Times Company
