Rialto Square Theater gets back to show business

The Rialto Square Theatre has been announcing shows at a brisk pace and plans to keep doing so as the theater prepares to bounce back from a pandemic that has kept the stage dark since March 2020.

On Friday, the Rialto announced “Friends! The Musical Parody” with a publicity release pitched to a post-pandemic audience eager to get together with friends again. The show comes to Joliet on Oct. 19.

The Rialto sill has to get its crew together again for a schedule that is starting up again in late August.

Down to a pandemic staff of Executive Director Val Devine, the building engineer, and the box office manager coming in on a part-time basis, the Rialto is preparing to staff up again after the Fourth of July.

“In preparing for our August lights, we can’t wait until the day before to bring people back,” Devine said.

Besides that, “It’s just getting too crazy,” she said. “We’ve rolled out a lot of announcements. It’s more than one person can handle.”

The announcements will keep rolling, Devine said. The theater has a pipeline of shows that it has not announced out of uncertainty when pandemic restrictions would be lifted. Some shows have been rescheduled multiple times in the past year as the Rialto and performers tried to guess when performances could restart.

“At some point, people lost track of what they bought tickets for,” Devine said.

Now, the Rialto is fairly confident the shows will go as planned.

“Each week moving forward, you’ll seen one if not two or three announcements,” Devine said.

The Rialto in the last two weeks also announced Dwight Yoakam, the country music star who will likely have the first post-pandemic performance when he arrives Aug. 22, and the band Kansas, which is coming Dec. 4.

The reaction to both performers has been “huge,” Devine said.

The theater schedule also is loaded with shows that had been postponed by the pandemic.

Another newly announced event is the Aug. 31 inaugural inductee awards ceremony for the Hall of Fame at the Illinois Rock and Roll Museum on Route 66, which will include appearances by REO Speedwagon and other rock legends.

The ceremony originally was scheduled for March 2020 before being postponed by the pandemic. The museum moved it to the Rialto, a bigger venue where it hopes to sell three times the number of tickets previously sold for the smaller Renaissance Center.

Moving the ceremony to the Rialto “makes perfect sense,” said Debyjo Ericksen, vice chair for the museum board, “because it lends itself so well to performances as well as an induction ceremony like this.”

The Rialto is managed by VenuWorks, which oversees theaters across the country, including states that have allowed venues to open earlier than in Illinois.

“They are getting good responses because people are wanting to do things,” Devine said. “They are tired of Netflix and sitting at home.”