A couple weeks after New Line moved out of the Ivory Theatre in fall 2007, the NonProphet Theatre Co. moved in to bring back a show they had done earlier in the fall: Corleone: The Shakespearean Godfather. And they experienced much of the same nonsense the New Line people had been through. No one had cleaned the theatre, all the marketing Horror Show had promised disappeared into thin air, and they were getting lied to just like New Line had. Still, Corleone opened and closed without major problems.
But according to New Line, Horror Show was still terrorizing them from afar. When New Line had moved out in late October, they still had not been given the locked storage area they had been promised many times since December 2006. So one of the owners told New Line to go buy hardware and a padlock and lock up their musical equipment in a large wardrobe cabinet off stage left. Barely a week after New Line moved out, Horror Show decided she wanted to use that cabinet too. So even though she knew the owner had told New Line to put locks on it, even though she knew New Line had the key, she got bolt cutters and cut off the New Line locks. Better still, she crammed all the equipment into one end of the cabinet, damaging New Line's very expensive keyboard, and then left the cabinet wide open during the next four shows. Miraculously, the only things that were stolen were some patch cords. New Line would not find out about this until January.
Then just a few weeks after Corleone, the NonProphets moved back into the Ivory for their show second, and they finally experienced the full force of Horror Show's ineptitude. According to two members of the NonProphets I spoke with, Horror Show had gotten them to agree that she could put on a children's show during the day, one day between the NonProphets' two weekends, exchange for a reduction in the NonProphets' rent. She promised she would not touch their set or any of their belongings or props, and that the theatre would be thoroughly cleaned.
Then the NonProphets returned to the theatre for their second weekend. To a big mess. Some of the actors got to the theatre early that night in order to run lines, but instead found that their set had been vandalized -- a once functioning door unit no longer worked because it had been ripped out of the floor where it had been anchored. Apparently, Horror Show had decided there wasn't room enough on stage for her children's show without moving the NonProphets' set (which she had promised not to do). And her people were so incompetent that they stripped the screw heads trying to remove set pieces, so they literally just ripped them out of the stage deck, ruining the set pieces and damaging the stage.
Props were missing, including a purse with a CD player in it. Later, one of the owners would claim that the props weren't really "missing" since they were found in the theatre a couple months later; that those props weren't found during the run of the show seemed not to matter to him.
More than that, the house was a mess, littered with programs and paper, pieces of clothing, etc. There was broken glass on the stage and also in the audience. The restrooms were disgusting, urine on the floor, toilets unflushed, all the bathroom supplies run out and not restocked, and the lobby desperately needed a vacuum.
They complained to the owners, who chose not to give a shit.
Welcome to the Ivory.
Sic Semper Tyrannis!
An Ivory Survivor
