In March 2005, officials at Broadway in Chicago made an announcement that would change the course of our city’s theater scene: Due to booming ticket sales for the Chicago leg of the national Wicked tour, a permanent, open-run production would be mounted here.

SIGNS OF THE TIMES The light-bulb budget at the Viaduct Theatre (left) can't hold a candle to the Oriental's..

Photos: Thomas Chadwick

Two and a half years later, Wicked is still a runaway success. The open run played right into Mayor Daley’s initiative to refurbish the downtown theater district, and it’s already paying dividends for the city. Wicked’s prolonged presence is also a boon for Broadway in Chicago, the sole organization responsible for booking and marketing downtown tours of Broadway shows. Since its creation in 2000, BIC has presented productions that have become the city’s fifth-biggest tourist attraction, pumping a reported $635 million annually into local cash registers, according to a study conducted by economic consulting firm Fishkind & Associates.

But even as out-of-towners flock to Chicago to catch New York–created attractions—next week the musicals Jersey Boys and Altar Boyz settle in for long runs—this shift to mass-marketed theater seems more dismaying than positive, and echoes New York’s unfortunate shift from theater district to theme park in the 1980s. (For more on Broadway’s Disney-fication, see “Fat Cats,”)

A prime witness to Broadway’s change was Frank Rich, op-ed columnist for The New York Times and that paper’s chief drama critic from 1980 to 1993. “When I arrived as drama critic [in New York] in the ’80s, the audience was one third tourists and two thirds from the tristate area,” Rich says, quoting statistics from the League of American Theaters. “It’s now flipped. A lot of these big shows, which are corporate brands, they are primarily for tourists.”

With downtown’s renewal, the same thing seems to be happening here.

Chicago theater is currently facing two unrelated dilemmas that may well collide to bleach out its personality. The rise of the digital age means that the media ink once lavished on the city’s grassroots theater scene—a scene that has given the city a unique flavor and reputation—is now running dry. Meanwhile, globally branded and marketed theater has become a priority for city officials who want a functioning entertainment-industrial complex downtown.

If the city of Chicago is to retain its identity as an American center for original live arts—something it’s in danger of losing as Wicked ads dot the horizon—it must now fight the image of an outpost for franchises. For instance, consider the ominous enticement of Blue Man Group ads: “If you haven’t seen Blue Man Group, you haven’t seen Chicago.” It’s a strange ultimatum, given that in this country alone you can also currently see the show in New York, Boston, Las Vegas and Orlando.

Bringing tourists to the city for Broadway in Chicago shows has been a manifold triumph, but in a changing world that’s particularly unkind to small businesses like storefront theaters, the city and its residents ought to now turn their attention to another matter: theater for Chicagoans.