In 2002, a year or so before the Drury Lane Theatre-Martinique was replaced by a Walmart, Mickey Rooney walked out on its round stage in the south Chicago suburb of Evergreen Park, blinked in the direction of the fully visible large-print teleprompters that contained his act and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, here is what is left of Mickey Rooney.”
Of all the opening lines I ever heard in a show, and there have been many, the resilient melancholy of that one sticks in the mind.
Standing watching in the corner was John R. Lazzara, aka “Johnny Lightning,” the Drury Lane impresario who owned the joint with his brother Ray, and who had booked Rooney and his eighth and last wife, Jan Chamberlin Rooney, a vocalist.
Rooney’s appearance, like similar visits to the corner of 95th Street and Western Avenue by the likes of Shelley Winters, Gloria Swanson, Ozzie and Harriet, Tony Bennett, Cyd Charisse, Claudette Colbert, Phyllis Diller, Julie Newmar, Tony Randall and Lana Turner all were part of a plan that Ray Lazzara — in the wake of his beloved brother’s recent death in Palm Beach, Florida, at the age of 76 — said was John R. Lazzara’s winning strategy at what once was one of the most famous dinner theaters in America.
Lazzara had no MBA and, as Ray puts it, “zero experience in show business,” but he did figure out a way to fill his theater complex with his mostly blue-collar patrons: ice shows, frothy musicals like “Singin’ in the Rain,” “La Cage Aux Folles,” and “Sophisticated Ladies,” and appearances by fast-fading Hollywood stars.
Lazzara would pay up to $5,000 for a big name. And, as a perk, the star could stay or hold court in the glam little star apartment (“The Purple Passion Pit” was its nickname) at the theater, first built by Tony DeSantis, who developed the Drury Lane beginning in the post-war era as part of a chain that ringed the city of Chicago. DeSantis had been among the first to figure out that free parking, prime rib on the menu, clean restrooms and a couple of Baccarat chandeliers could allow a suburban showbiz entrepreneur to compete with the hassles of a costly night out in downtown Chicago.
In the business they call show, of course, a strategy needs a personality. Although DeSantis had remarkable long-term success (both the Drury Lane in Oakbrook Terrace, now run by his grandson Kyle, and what is now the Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire are still operating, employing hundreds of actors every year), he was what you might call a straight arrow, driven, it always seemed to me, by a determination to always separate himself from Chicago’s Wise Guys. DeSantis was determined to serve his customers with every fiber of his being, but he did not crave a spot center-stage.
But Lazzara, who drove a red Lamborghini, dyed his hair to stay youthful and favored flamboyant fur coats, bespoke tailoring and big opening-night parties, was cut from a different cloth entirely.
The Lazzara brothers got their start with a pizza place, then a place called Annie Tiques, which featured a salad bar in the bed of a 1925 Model T truck. (The band leader Rich Daniels said his eponymous band had played there, earning $100 for all 18 of them.) Then the Martinique, purchased from DeSantis in 1987.
Lazzara had an innate understanding that an old-school complex like his, where one might come to see a show and come back to get married in the attached chapel, or vice versa, or have your funeral there, eventually, needed a big, welcoming, larger-than-life personality at its center. And Lazzara implanted his personality on everything.
As the actor Curt Dale Clark recalled this week, not only did all Lazzara’s shows begin with a booming, Hollywood-style voice saying, “And now, John R. Lazzara presents (insert title here),” but once you returned from intermission, you’d get, “And now, John R. Lazzara presents Act 2 of …”
Just in case you forgot whose theater you were attending.
Gerald West/Chicago Tribune
Brothers Ray and John Lazzara outside the Drury Lane-Martinique, showing off recent improvements to the theater in Evergreen Park on Sept. 15, 2000. (Gerald West/Chicago Tribune)
At the holiday season, Lazzara liked to do an ice show. He’d freeze the surface of the theater’s small, round stage and hire a little clutch of skaters who could do pocket miracles on about 1% of the space used by the triumphant U.S. Olympian Alysa Liu in Milan. He’d even make many of his skaters to do double duty. In 1997, for example, you could see Lazzara’s “Celebration on Ice” (which lasted for a dozen years) and then come back and take your kids to a matinee of “Nutcracker on Ice” with the same tired skaters. The Joffrey Ballet this was not, but I saw legions of kids and their grandparents having a blast, typically within a few minutes’ drive from their homes. And without the grandparents having to raid their retirement funds for tickets.
Lazzara may have had no experience, but he did understand how to spot talent. His discoveries included a young actor-director-choreographer called Marc Robin, who directed many shows at Drury Lane and went on to enjoy a major career in American musicals. Robin, a youthful gay choreographer, and Lazzara, his paternalistic old-school benefactor, perhaps made an odd professional couple in the 1990s. But each well knew how much they needed the other. And both men had great senses of humor and talent aplenty.
In 2005, as Ray Lazzara recalled this week, Walmart showed up with an offer to build a store on the prime land occupied by the Drury Lane and, with the audience getting older and older and smaller and smaller, it had become clear to the brothers that the time had come to hang it up. Thus, the wrecking ball came for the Purple Passion Pit and the rest of the complex, a monument to a fading but wonderfully hospitable era of Chicago entertainment and local entrepreneurship. The Lazzara brothers were smart, though. They only leased the land, retaining ownership.
At that point, the catering shifted over to Applause, Applause, the Lazzara’s Burbank restaurant, but the show at the Drury Lane was over for good.
John R. Lazzara died on Feb. 19 in Palm Beach, where he had wintered for some years amidst ongoing treatment for lung cancer. He was married only briefly and did not have children. Like many of his ilk, he was married to show business.
“We lived very different kinds of lives,” his brother Ray said. “But my brother knew how to live. We were only a mile apart from each other in Oak Brook.”
There are, of course, thousands of Walmarts like the one at 95th and Western. But there was only ever one “And now, John R. Lazzara presents …”
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic
