That never happened. Van Lente died of ovarian cancer shortly after his father. With 450 employees at Drury Lane Oakbrook alone, the stakes were high for the business. The eldest of the third generation, Kyle De Santis, just 28 at the time and Van Lente’s nephew, took over, assisted by two brothers and two cousins, all in their twenties.
“The pressure was great,” recalls Kyle De Santis, now 43, CEO. He had been a catering manager when his grandfather died, but he had been hanging around the theater since he was 15 and knew every nook and cranny of the place. “I am the oldest in the family and had spent enough time each day with my grandfather to know how everything worked. Also, I had a lot of youthful optimism when I took on this role,” he says.
None of the De Santis family was bitten by the acting bug per se. Kyle De Santis has a business degree from Loyola and his brother Drew De Santis, who is a CFO, has an MBA from the University of Chicago. But they’re all fans of the theater and savvy enough to help their associate artistic director, Matthew Carney, pick the slate of shows for each season. It’s a consensus process that encompasses Kyle’s sister and cousins. They have all been listed as co-producers on 66 running shows.
How do you fill the shoes of a legend like Tony De Santis? Very carefully, says Kyle De Santis. Drury Lane’s success for decades has been built on its showcase of Broadway musical standards, with the 1978 Tim Rice/Andrew Lloyd Webber classic blockbuster “Evita” currently playing through March 20.
De Santis and his clan have tried to broaden the scope a bit by including a mystery most years (in September it will be “The murder of Agatha Christie on the Orient Express”). Even more daring, Drury Lane in recent seasons has been developing new work, producing a world premiere, “Beaches,” based on the 1980s Bette Midler film, which received critical acclaim in 2017.
Meanwhile, the theater has become expensive for single-stage operations like Drury Lane, with a show typically budgeted at $3 million and up. Even with a subscription base of 25,000 (compared to 16,500 when the elder De Santis died), some productions are challenged to show profit.
Kyle De Santis believes that the solution can be found in the expansion. He and his family are considering the acquisition of another theater, ideally somewhere in the Midwest similar in size to Drury Lane. That would allow expensive sets and costumes to be transferred and delivered to a new market at the end of a Drury Lane run, thus spreading the costs.
Years ago, his grandfather expanded into new markets and ended up closing theaters when audiences didn’t materialize, so De Santis is cautious. “This industry is fickle,” he observes. “We don’t want to move too fast.”
Like all theaters, Drury Lane closed nearly all of its shows from early 2020 to late 2021 during the pandemic, laying off nearly half its staff and losing money in the process. But the current revival of “Evita” has been well attended and De Santis is confident that the theater will soon be able to return to normal.
At the rival Paramount Theater in Aurora, artistic director Jim Corti hopes to emulate Drury Lane’s move toward new plays eventually. The Paramount has also embarked on its own expansion project, recently opening the smaller Copley Theater across the street from its main stage auditorium.
Corti, a 72-year veteran of the local theater who acted and directed at Drury Lane beginning in the 1980s, says the De Santis family “is taking risks artistically and it seems to be paying off. They are being innovative while also honoring the legacy their grandfather left them.”
