Café society

“I lucked out. I got this woman who walks in, and—who the hell? You know, I didn’t know who she was; she lives in the neighborhood. And that’s Rebecca Finnegan. You know Rebecca, right?”

Fred Anzevino isn’t just recounting the moment one of the city’s top-drawer musical-theater actors showed up for an audition; he’s describing his company’s turning point. Before 2004’s A Kurt Weill Review, Theo Ubique was yet another company on the fringe. Its early productions—Pinter’s Betrayal, Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple—gave no sign that Theo Ubique (pronounced thee-oh oo-bee-kway) would become Chicago’s best barrista of the coffeehouse musical. Instead, they read like any storefront line-up, which was precisely the problem.

“We did what everybody does,” Anzevino says. “And Fred Solari [Athenaeum Theatre’s executive director, who died in March] told me, God rest his soul, ‘Fred, you gotta find your niche.’”

With Kurt Weill, that’s just what Anzevino did. “We had no idea what we were doing,” he says of the tribute to the German composer. “I said, ‘Let’s serve sauerkraut and krautwurst and let’s get a German theme going and, you know, dress the girls real sleazy and have them serve as cocktail waitresses.’ And the next thing you know, it was nominated for six Jeff awards.”

Theo Ubique’s serendipitous turn coincided with another discovery: its venue, the No Exit Café in Rogers Park, whose owner, Michael James, also owns the long-time neighborhood staple the Heartland Café. (James himself has a theater pedigree: His father, Hal James, produced a little show called Man of La Mancha on Broadway.)

Inside the hole-in-the-wall, European-feeling No Exit, patrons huddle around tiny tables while quirkily dressed waiters serve food and wine. The lights dim and the waiters—who, it turns out, are also the actors—step up on a small platform that can barely hold a cast of four, then perform with an unironic, heart-wide-open genuineness the rarity of which you don’t appreciate until you see it. (Last year’s expansion only increased the seats from about 57 to 70.)

As the Red Line periodically trundles along just outside the café’s windows, the No Exit provides the ideal setting for Theo Ubique’s urban twist on suburban dinner theater, with lovingly mounted, no-frills revues and musicals like last year’s The Fantasticks, A Jacques Brel Revue (which ran for an eyebrow-raising five months) and now Flora, the Red Menace, John Kander and Fred Ebb’s Depression-era musical about a young woman caught between her department-store job and her unionizing commie boyfriend (in 1965, the show gave a 19-year-old Liza Minnelli her first Tony).

Anzevino’s turn to musical theater marked a return to his salad days. After basking in the sexual-revolution ’70s in Manhattan while studying at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, he toured for two years with Big River. But in the mid-’90s, “I got very sick and faced my own imminent demise, so that was really screwed up,” Anzevino says with a disarming laugh. As he regained his health, the son of strict Italian-American Catholics (who were also supper-club proprietors) found his spiritual side and cofounded Theo Ubique, a Greek-Latin hybrid: theo as in God, ubique as in ubiquitous.

It was in the company’s pre-cabaret days that Anzevino happened to meet his co–artistic director, Beverle Bloch, when, after a performance of Betrayal, Bloch’s then-husband “had this terrible desire to tell the director [Anzevino] what he should’ve done in his play,” Bloch says. “He was that sort of person.” Bloch’s marriage dissolved, but her artistic relationship with Anzevino flourished. Now Anzevino, 48, and Bloch, 58, live and work side by side, sharing the same Rogers Park apartment building and, as with Flora, often codirecting.

Yet despite the company’s recently found success with musicals, Anzevino wants to do more revues. “Everyone’s doing scaled-down musicals now,” Anzevino says of the storefront trend. “But what we have that they don’t have is the No Exit Café.”

Flora, the Red Menace enters the No Exit on Fri 9.