Big House on the Prairie

Forty years ago this month, curious theatergoers drove the little two-lane highway past cows, fields and trees to reach Herb Bloomberg's new playhouse on the prairie. The Chanhassen Frontier promised a prepackaged dinner and a production of "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying."

Thus was born Bloomberg's dream of bringing theater to Chanhassen, a town he was certain would grow into a major Twin Cities suburb. "The Chan" has become a venerable institution while hundreds of other dinner theaters nationwide have died. Bloomberg was 55 and a successful developer -- he built the Old Log Theatre in 1960 -- when he put his neck on the line for his love of the stage.

ACT I, SCENE 1:Will this thing fly?

Time: The 1960s

Don Stolz, owner, Old Log Theatre: Herb and I went to several dinner theaters around the country and he became more and more interested. The original design had a sign over it that said Stolz Dinner Theater, and he expected, as did I somewhat, that I would be running it as well as the Old Log. He went with someone else, and it was a good thing he did.

Britta Bloomberg: My dad was a dreamer, always spinning ideas. He'd be drawing sketches, waving his arms, saying, "Just imagine, the stage will be there and people will come from all over." And here you are out in this open piece of land and, as a child, you're listening to this and it feels magical.

Allan Lotsberg, actor: When we first started rehearsing, the theater was not built. We were rehearsing in a warehouse. [Founding artistic director Gary Gisselman] and I would stand out in the parking lot area, and Gary said, "Come over here, Allan. You see where that backhoe is over there? That's where the stage is going to be."

John Command, dancer: They opened the downstairs first. We went upstairs and you could sit in the theater and it was open to the fields, through the proscenium arch.

David Anders, actor: Randy Maddox, the general manager, thought it would be a fabulous idea to cut down kitchen expense if we brought in prepared dinners and just heated them. That was a disaster.

Lotsberg: The critic gave us a review that said "TV dinners served at Chanhassen." He happened to get one that was still partially frozen.

Gisselman: Two of the things we talked a lot about in the first five months was that we had to change shows frequently, and that we could not let the total price get above $10. We ran "How to Succeed" for three weeks, then "Arsenic and Old Lace" for two weeks and then "The Fantasticks." And then I got fired.

Anders: Gary's firing came as a huge shock. I had no idea what the reasons were. I just know that Gary Schultz came in, and he did "The Boyfriend" and then he got fired. And then Allan Lotsberg directed a couple of things. Then Gisselman came back with "Carousel." That first year was nothing but turmoil. We had a whole bunch of people who had never done this before and they were learning as they went.

Gisselman: Herb called all the people he owed money to for the building of the theater -- electricians, carpenters, vendors. This was maybe a year after we opened. And he essentially said, "You all know me, you know I'm a man of my word, and we're going to make this thing go. So I just ask you to please hang with me and I'll see that you get paid."

Command: We used to talk about in the second or third year, "Oh, my God, I hope this keeps going." There were so many dinner theaters in the early '70s, and so many were closing.

SCENE 2:We're a hit!

Time: 1971

Gisselman: The show that saved us was "A Flea in Her Ear." It was a big show, a gamble. We had a great cast -- Jon Cranney, Richard Ramos, Katie Ferrand and Linda Kelsey, a lot of really good people.

Linda Kelsey: It was just one of those shows where everything came together. It was extremely funny, a French farce, it had a fantastic cast. I was planning to go to L.A., and I was going to do the show for a month and it kept getting held over.

Pat Proft, actor: I was at Dudley Riggs and I was having fun, but after a while it was kind of tiring, so I went to Chanhassen. I was making $65 or $75 a week at Dudley's and I think the Equity minimum at Chan was $150. I could get an apartment in Hopkins. I had a wife and my son, so we finally had a little settled-down place.

Peter Michael Goetz, actor: In those days, we were contracted by season at the Guthrie and there was a period of about three months in the spring when the theater was down, so I went out to Chanhassen. I played Tevye in "Fiddler."

Gisselman: "Fiddler" was the turning point in that it was the first musical to run for a long time. We planned for 12 weeks and it ran for 53.

Loni Anderson, actor: I did "Fiddler on the Roof" for 53 weeks and I never missed a performance. I once went on with a fever of 104 and Gary was massaging me, filling me full of tea, because I had no understudy.

Goetz: I always remember the frontier feeling. You expected the buffalo to roam right there in the courtyard. It seemed like a small frontier town with a saloon and you were trying to keep the cowboys quiet while you performed for them.

Anderson: We had a costume dress rehearsal and Gary said to me, "OK, you look like you're modeling peasant clothes. This is not the way milkmaids walk." So he took the whole cast, in costume, to a real farm and he made us clump around in the field and carry the milk pails. I remember that I got a review that said I was so natural and believable. Going to the farm worked.

Goetz: A lot of us came out from the Guthrie. Paul Ballantyne and I did "Sleuth" in the Courtyard and then Cranney and several others did "Chemin de Fer," a Feydeau farce. I quite liked the selections.

Gisselman: I would decide what I thought we should do and then go talk to Herb and Carol [Bloomberg] at their house. And I really did come to feel that if I couldn't convince him, then we shouldn't do it.

Bloomberg: To someone who didn't know Gary and Herb, it might have sounded like fighting like cats and dogs. They are both colorful, large personalities.

Gisselman: Neither of us would back down if we really believed in something. I wanted to do "Our Town." Carol just hated it because she was raised in a small town and that was a bad experience. But they were pretty adventurous.

Susan Long, actor: "A Little Night Music" was just an extraordinary production. Gary would use all the talents a person had. Katherine Ferrand knew how to fence, so he used that, and it was a fabulous convention for expressing her suppressed emotions. As time passed, grass-roots theater developed in the Twin Cities so that you could see plays, classic plays. And different theaters had different missions. Chanhassen took on the mission of musicals, because musicals are very expensive to do.

SCENE 3:How a little show became an institution

Time: The early 1970s

Susan Goeppinger, actor: I had done the national tour of "Fiddler" and was living in New York when Gary hired me to do the second production of "How to Succeed." I was going to go back to New York afterward and he asked if I'd stay and do "I Do, I Do."

Gisselman: We decided to run it for eight weeks. And then David [Anders] and Susan were so wildly popular, so we said we'd better hold it over for another four weeks. And then we said let's try for another eight weeks and it was like that for the first year.

Goeppinger: At that time, we were doing two shows on Saturday night -- 5 o'clock and 10 o'clock. The second show was a challenge because that little theater would be filled with smoke. It was always packed, though.

Michael Brindisi, current artistic director: There were a lot of years when it didn't do well, but it didn't hurt us. It was incredibly well-presented by Susan and David, but it was getting to be a bit of a freak show: "Come see the Guinness Book of World Records couple who started the show, fell in love, got married, raised a family and still are doing it." I closed it in 1993. And Susan and David were happy; they wanted to do some other plays.

Clyde Lund, actor, managing director: In the '70s, we were expanding up to four theaters. Herb kept saying: "Find more spaces."

Bloomberg: The Courtyard was originally an open area. My dad was itching to do more designing and saw this as an opportunity to turn it into a theater. We turned the Bronco Bar into the Fireside in 1978. The Bronco was a pretty hopping spot. I remember being on a bus down by the university and hearing students talking about going out to the Bronco and I thought, "Hmm, I know that spot."

Gisselman: The Bronco clientele clashed with the dinner theater crowd. I think Herb saw a guy urinating on a car one night and decided he was going to close the bar.

Lund: The Fireside and Courtyard let us do "theater theater," like "Equus." So Chanhassen had a reputation as being a theater as well as a dinner theater.

Warren Frost, actor: I did "Equus" there, which is about the strangest play you could ever think of doing in a dinner theater. But Gary had a lot of guts and he wanted to take it away from the "Let's all dance together and sing and have funny balloons." And I did "On Golden Pond" for 700 performances. I had a feeling that if I wanted to do it, I could do it forever. It was a lovely play and we had wonderful audiences.

ACT II, SCENE 1:

Gisselman exits, stage left

Time: The 1980s

Gisselman: I knew I could stay at Chanhassen a long time, but I wondered, "Do I want to be buried in the parking lot, or do I want to try something else?" David Hawkanson would call me from Arizona -- always in January -- and he'd say, "We were just sitting around the pool and we were wondering if you'd like to come out and direct something?" When the job [artistic director at the Arizona Theatre Company] opened in 1980, I decided it was time to go.

Molly Sue McDonald, actor: Howard Dallin came on board as artistic director and everybody was experiencing a kind of grief with Gary leaving. Howard was trying to mix it up and people were resistant to change.

Bloomberg: When Howard left, we went through a series of guest directors and Clyde [Lund] became the person on-site. Gary did some directing. Warren Frost directed one show. Richard Ramos did a number, Jon Cranney did a couple.

McDonald: I was doing "Hello Dolly" in 1983. I started my monologue and I looked down and there was this guy gurgling, right at my feet. All of a sudden he fell backward in his chair and his head hit the floor and he was out. So I stopped and said, "People, this is not part of the monologue: We have an emergency here!" Finally, Joe Morrissey, who was principal trumpet player, jumped out of the pit and started giving this man CPR. The show stopped for 40 minutes, the paramedics got there and took the guy out. Two weeks later, we got two dozen roses backstage from this man, who had survived.

Lund: Eventually, we needed an artistic director. I talked with Britta Bloomberg and she said, "We're thinking of Michael Brindisi." And I said, "Great choice."

Brindisi: When I got hired [in 1987], just about everybody quit. It was such a ridiculous idea to so many people, that this actor would become the artistic director. And in some respects, they were right. But that's show business. The first thing I did was "Private Lives" in the Fireside and it was a great success. Then they asked what I wanted to do on the main stage. And I said, "I heard about this show that just closed off-Broadway, 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood,' it sounds really fun." And it tanked. No one came to see it and I thought, "That's it for me."

Bloomberg: Not long after Michael came into that position, we were making a decision on whether to operate this as a family business. We had grown up in this environment and loved the theater. But when my parents were getting ready to step down, it seemed like the most necessary thing to do, to sell the operation.

SCENE 2:

From Herb, with love

Time: Circa 1990

Thomas Scallen, current owner: The Bloombergs approached us in the late 1980s through their accounting firm. I had been a vice president at 20th-Century Fox and at Radio City Music Hall, so they thought I was the logical candidate. It was a chance to preserve the institution because I could never see the thing making any money. Profit wasn't the main business reason.

Brindisi: The Scallens have a real good nose for what people want to see. On play selection, we rarely disagree. When they wanted to do "Cats," I didn't. Turned out to be good that we did it. He wanted to do "Grease" and I didn't, but that turned out great. I'm more steeped in tradition, and they've pulled me out of that. It's a healthy thing.

Scallen: That's true. The trouble is that the younger group that we want to appeal to, they don't know these older shows. Some of the older shows I like very much and we still do some of them.

McDonald: The last major thing I did there was "Sound of Music" in 1992. I had been sick for many years; I was a cancer gal, and they asked me to come back. It was a real special thing to be back on that stage. The first day we staged that number, "The Sound of Music," I just completely lost it.

Kelsey: I'm not really surprised it's continued. Under Gary Gisselman's leadership, and now Michael, they've done really solid shows all these years. And that's the proof of the pudding. You can go have dinner anywhere, but it's the show, and the experience. And it was always quality.

Gisselman: Just about everything that Herb predicted when we first talked about this place has come true, how the western suburbs would grow and that "By golly, it doesn't look like it now, but there's going to be a lot of stuff out here." And that's just how he said it, "By golly, there's gonna be ... "

Brindisi: The reason I think Chanhassen can always be there, should always be there, is that it's an incredible value. You can't get a better show and better dinner and free parking for $75 anyplace. I'm sorry, it just doesn't exist. And that's where we win. They pick us because of the value.

Graydon Royce • 612-673-7299

QUIZ ANSWERS

1. "Phantom"

2. "Fiddler on the Roof" with Loni Anderson (center)

3. Amy Adams in "Good

News"

4. "Guys and Dolls"

5. "I Do! I Do!"

6. T.R. Knight in "Brighton Beach Memoirs"

7. "The Sound of Music"

8. "Big Bang"

9. "Annie"

10. "Equus"

11. "Cats"

12. "A Little Night Music"