Theatre Communications Group, the national organization for nonprofit theater, is about to release its latest annual report on the fiscal health of the field, Theatre Facts 2021. (Yes, it’s almost 2023, but this stuff takes time to collect.)

The news is not great.

The report, which compares results over a five-year period, tracks the startling COVID-era jolts the theaters experienced. Average income from single ticket sales, for example, was 93 percent lower in fiscal 2021 than in 2017. And subscription income took an 83 percent dive.  

It was a crash. But, says TCG communications director Corinna Schulenburg, there was a financial upside: expenses were down during that period when theaters were shuttered, while government aid kicked in. The result was a frothy blip of budget surpluses.

“Because of federal funding, and because theaters were producing less, they actually had some liquidity,” Schulenburg says. In fact, “what we call their working capital, which essentially is cash flow,” hit a peak in 2021.

It was so good that, according to a “snapshot survey” TCG conducted earlier this year, only 10 percent of reporting nonprofit theaters had a deficit budget in 2021, and over 70 percent reported an operating surplus that year.

Now, Schulenburg says, the challenge is that the federal funding has gone away, and the cash cushion is disappearing. By 2022, according to the same survey, 30 percent of responding theaters were projecting deficit operating budgets, and there’s a huge increase in that cohort on the horizon: 62 percent are projecting budget deficits in 2023.  

Meanwhile, audiences have not been fully returning. (Arts Alliance Illinois says, anecdotally, that members are seeing a  30-to-50 percent drop in performing arts audiences.)  And Schulenberg notes that board member and individual giving has also declined.

“This was a big surprise for us,” Schulenburg says. “We’ve seen individual giving continue to rise, annually. Theaters have been able to count on that kind of community support.” But from 2020 to 2021, trustee giving declined 26 percent, while individual giving was down 7 percent. “The pandemic is still active, shows are being canceled, and audiences are not totally returning. From our perspective, we know how resilient our field is, but we’re deeply concerned.”

The bright spot in all this, Schulenburg says, is the success of advocacy for federal funding at the height of the pandemic. It was “really remarkable; the investment from the shuttered venues operators grant and especially the PPP, as well as the ERTC [Employee Retention Tax Credit].” Over 97 percent of surveyed theaters received some form of federal relief funding, a level of investment not seen since the Federal Theatre Project during the Great Depression.

Goodman Theatre executive director Roche Schulfer Courtesy Goodman Theatre

Schulenburg mentions a presentation on nonprofit theater economics (“Why Not-for-Profit Theatre?”) that Goodman Theatre executive director Roche Schulfer delivered at a TCG forum in 2017. It was “prescient,” she says.

I went to the source for an update.

“In 1966, two economists, William Baumol and William Bowen, wrote a book [Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma] illustrating the basic economic challenge of the performing arts, which is that you can’t take advantage of gains in productivity or technology like other sectors of the economy. It takes the same number of musicians the same amount of time to play Beethoven’s symphonies, or actors to do Shakespeare’s plays, as it did when they were written,” Schulfer says. “So, as the cost of labor goes up, unless there’s a significant gain in fundraising, there’s a gap that’s filled by increased ticket prices.”

“Over the last 50 years or so, ticket prices have risen by far more than the cost of living. At the Goodman, for example, our top ticket is around $90 now. If it had followed the cost of living, it would be in the range of $33. We’ve been raising prices to make up for the gap in fundraising.”

“Our mission is to provide new and engaging work, and not to just respond to what the marketplace wants,” he told me. “But consumers will pay more for something they’re familiar with than for something unknown to them.”  

Schulfer says this disconnect, amid a shift in institutional funding, means tough times ahead:

“I think there are going to be major performing arts organizations around the country that are going to face real crises in the next 48 months. Groups like Arts Alliance Illinois and TCG are trying to build on what happened during the pandemic, which was an awareness of the importance of the arts to the overall economy. There’s an effort to build on that through the National Endowment for the Arts or other federal programs. We’ll see if that happens.” 

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Sonny had spent years making music for an audience of himself when he began to understand that other people liked it too. The Chicago rapper can pinpoint a few key moments: At a party he went to in 2019, the crowd was dead, and his manager at the time commandeered the sound system to throw on some songs. When he played Sonny’s unreleased track “.Shollam,” the temperature changed in a hurry. Sonny’s funky flow shimmies over a sly, chintzy piano loop and minimalist percussion reminiscent of blog-era Cool Kids. “The whole room got up and started turning up when the song came on,” Sonny says. He remembers getting a similar response in September 2021, when he opened for Chicago pop chameleon Dreamer Isioma at Lincoln Hall. 

But nothing compared to the surprise Sonny got in April 2021. “I’m getting, like, hella notifications on my phone, talking about, ‘Your song’s blowing up on TikTok,’” he says. “But I can’t find it.” 

The song was “Kill Bill,” and Sonny couldn’t find it because it had gone viral in an unauthorized remix. It had first appeared on his project Golden Child, released in 2020 under the name HateSonny. Foreboding church bells set a chilly mood, given a serrated edge by Sonny’s growled vocals and clipped, efficient lines. 

Once friends started forwarding Sonny videos from TikTok, he noticed that they all used a version of “Kill Bill” that sounded off to him. It was a sped-up edit that smeared his vocals and distorted the bass—this “Kill Bill” sounded as jittery and disorienting as lotto balls in a raffle drum, as though it were shaking itself apart.

The huge number of people hearing Sonny’s music this way presented an unusual problem. “We hadn’t released a fast version,” says Erich Siebert, Sonny’s manager. “So there was no metadata in the sound that pointed it back to us. Nobody knew it was his song.” Classick Studios founder Chris Classick helped connect Siebert to a TikTok employee who updated the audio file on the platform. Siebert also reached out to the creator of the viral edit to get the stems, so that Sonny could release “Kill Bill (Fast)” as an official track.

“I never really expected to make any money off music,” he says. “So the fact that I was able to make that a reality for myself, it’s really fulfilling for me.”

Sonny, 22, grew up in Greater Grand Crossing. In his teenage years, in the late 2010s, he spent a lot of time hanging out in and around the Loop, where he met some of his closest friends. Rapper NombreKari says he met Sonny at a pizza place near Jones College Prep. Kari basically introduced himself by asking to borrow Sonny’s phone, as Sonny remembers it—though he didn’t know at the time what Kari wanted it for. 

“He go on my phone and like and repost this song that him and some of the other guys had,” Sonny says. “He gave me my phone back, and later on I peeped and I was like, ‘Who is this little motherfucker that liked and reposted and pasted on my Soundcloud and my Twitter?’ But then I listened to it and I’m like, ‘Oh, this is hard.’” Kari and Sonny both spent time making music after school at Harold Washington Library’s YouMedia youth arts lab, where their friendship blossomed.

FortuneHouse has coproduced a youth fashion show at the MCA, hosted visual art exhibits and musical performances, and organized free community activities at Cornell Field in Kenwood. “FortuneHouse is like an engine to a lot of the values that myself and my peers hold,” Searcy says, “when it comes to what a collective future looks like for not only us as peers, family, and friends but as people who have grown up in the city that want to give back to the city.”

Searcy’s aspirations for FortuneHouse are rooted in the friendships he’s forged with Kari, Sonny, and the rest of their collective. 

“I wanted you to be able to find me and my music, and I thought it was a bunch of Sonnys [out there], so I just threw the ‘hate’ in front of it,” he says. “I was very young, and I was going through a really depressed era. And it was really some self shit I was dealing with.”

In 2019, he and Kari spent a lot of time at MyFriendNate’s north-side home studio. They had both graduated high school by that point, and Kari noticed that the more Sonny could focus on music, the more he flourished creatively. “In high school, we didn’t have that much freedom to go to Nate’s house and make music for days on end,” Kari says. “Once we did have that freedom, that allowed him to cultivate a more distinct sound—it allowed him to find his voice.”

Searcy began envisioning plans for a physical FortuneHouse space where he could hold events and nurture community; he’d been helping host art shows at Airbnbs, but he wanted something stable. Searcy, his mother, and longtime collaborator Ryel Williams opened FortuneHouse Art Center in June 2022 at 4410 S. Cottage Grove. Sonny provided input and support the whole way through. “His words have definitely inspired FortuneHouse’s mission and direction,” Searcy says.

Those months at the Bronzeville Airbnb in summer 2020 proved pivotal for Sonny too. “We was in there brainstorming and plotting on all the stuff that’s came to fruition since then,” he says. It’s also when he first heard the remix that he didn’t know would change his career. “I looked myself up on Soundcloud, and I saw a remix of ‘Kill Bill’—it was a fast version,” he says. “It had, like, 10,000 plays of the song. I was like, ‘This is cool.’ I didn’t really think much of it.”

Sonny’s manager also picked up on a shift in the rapper’s approach around the release of Golden Child in 2020. “He started making his transition—thinking more long-term and being more methodical,” Siebert says. “That was when he started to really find himself. He was more in touch with his identity and had a better understanding of where he wanted to go with his music.”

Sonny is focused on putting in the work—recording more music, making traditional music videos—and he isn’t counting on lightning striking twice. He’s got an EP in the works called All Gas No Brakes, according to Siebert, and if all goes well we’ll see it in the first quarter of 2023.

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Never miss a copy! Paid print subscriptions are available for 12 issues, 26 issues, and for 52 issues from the Reader Store.

Chicago Reader 2022 print issue dates

The Chicago Reader is published in print every other week. Issues are dated Thursday. Distribution usually happens Wednesday morning through Thursday night of the issue date. Upcoming print issue dates through December 2022 are:

12/8/2022
12/22/2022

See our information page for advertising opportunities and editorial calendars of upcoming issues.

2023 print issue dates

The first print issue in 2023 will be published three weeks after the 12/22/2022 issue, the final issue of 2022. The print issue dates through June 2023 are:

1/12/2023
1/26/2023
2/9/2023
2/23/2023
3/9/2023
3/23/2023
4/6/2023
4/20/2023
5/4/2023
5/18/2023
6/1/2023
6/15/2023
6/29/2023

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Sonny had spent years making music for an audience of himself when he began to understand that other people liked it too. The Chicago rapper can pinpoint a few key moments: At a party he went to in 2019, the crowd was dead, and his manager at the time commandeered the sound system to throw on some songs. When he played Sonny’s unreleased track “.Shollam,” the temperature changed in a hurry. Sonny’s funky flow shimmies over a sly, chintzy piano loop and minimalist percussion reminiscent of blog-era Cool Kids. “The whole room got up and started turning up when the song came on,” Sonny says. He remembers getting a similar response in September 2021, when he opened for Chicago pop chameleon Dreamer Isioma at Lincoln Hall. 

But nothing compared to the surprise Sonny got in April 2021. “I’m getting, like, hella notifications on my phone, talking about, ‘Your song’s blowing up on TikTok,’” he says. “But I can’t find it.” 

The song was “Kill Bill,” and Sonny couldn’t find it because it had gone viral in an unauthorized remix. It had first appeared on his project Golden Child, released in 2020 under the name HateSonny. Foreboding church bells set a chilly mood, given a serrated edge by Sonny’s growled vocals and clipped, efficient lines. 

Once friends started forwarding Sonny videos from TikTok, he noticed that they all used a version of “Kill Bill” that sounded off to him. It was a sped-up edit that smeared his vocals and distorted the bass—this “Kill Bill” sounded as jittery and disorienting as lotto balls in a raffle drum, as though it were shaking itself apart.

The huge number of people hearing Sonny’s music this way presented an unusual problem. “We hadn’t released a fast version,” says Erich Siebert, Sonny’s manager. “So there was no metadata in the sound that pointed it back to us. Nobody knew it was his song.” Classick Studios founder Chris Classick helped connect Siebert to a TikTok employee who updated the audio file on the platform. Siebert also reached out to the creator of the viral edit to get the stems, so that Sonny could release “Kill Bill (Fast)” as an official track.

“I never really expected to make any money off music,” he says. “So the fact that I was able to make that a reality for myself, it’s really fulfilling for me.”

Sonny, 22, grew up in Greater Grand Crossing. In his teenage years, in the late 2010s, he spent a lot of time hanging out in and around the Loop, where he met some of his closest friends. Rapper NombreKari says he met Sonny at a pizza place near Jones College Prep. Kari basically introduced himself by asking to borrow Sonny’s phone, as Sonny remembers it—though he didn’t know at the time what Kari wanted it for. 

“He go on my phone and like and repost this song that him and some of the other guys had,” Sonny says. “He gave me my phone back, and later on I peeped and I was like, ‘Who is this little motherfucker that liked and reposted and pasted on my Soundcloud and my Twitter?’ But then I listened to it and I’m like, ‘Oh, this is hard.’” Kari and Sonny both spent time making music after school at Harold Washington Library’s YouMedia youth arts lab, where their friendship blossomed.

FortuneHouse has coproduced a youth fashion show at the MCA, hosted visual art exhibits and musical performances, and organized free community activities at Cornell Field in Kenwood. “FortuneHouse is like an engine to a lot of the values that myself and my peers hold,” Searcy says, “when it comes to what a collective future looks like for not only us as peers, family, and friends but as people who have grown up in the city that want to give back to the city.”

Searcy’s aspirations for FortuneHouse are rooted in the friendships he’s forged with Kari, Sonny, and the rest of their collective. 

“I wanted you to be able to find me and my music, and I thought it was a bunch of Sonnys [out there], so I just threw the ‘hate’ in front of it,” he says. “I was very young, and I was going through a really depressed era. And it was really some self shit I was dealing with.”

In 2019, he and Kari spent a lot of time at MyFriendNate’s north-side home studio. They had both graduated high school by that point, and Kari noticed that the more Sonny could focus on music, the more he flourished creatively. “In high school, we didn’t have that much freedom to go to Nate’s house and make music for days on end,” Kari says. “Once we did have that freedom, that allowed him to cultivate a more distinct sound—it allowed him to find his voice.”

Searcy began envisioning plans for a physical FortuneHouse space where he could hold events and nurture community; he’d been helping host art shows at Airbnbs, but he wanted something stable. Searcy, his mother, and longtime collaborator Ryel Williams opened FortuneHouse Art Center in June 2022 at 4410 S. Cottage Grove. Sonny provided input and support the whole way through. “His words have definitely inspired FortuneHouse’s mission and direction,” Searcy says.

Those months at the Bronzeville Airbnb in summer 2020 proved pivotal for Sonny too. “We was in there brainstorming and plotting on all the stuff that’s came to fruition since then,” he says. It’s also when he first heard the remix that he didn’t know would change his career. “I looked myself up on Soundcloud, and I saw a remix of ‘Kill Bill’—it was a fast version,” he says. “It had, like, 10,000 plays of the song. I was like, ‘This is cool.’ I didn’t really think much of it.”

Sonny’s manager also picked up on a shift in the rapper’s approach around the release of Golden Child in 2020. “He started making his transition—thinking more long-term and being more methodical,” Siebert says. “That was when he started to really find himself. He was more in touch with his identity and had a better understanding of where he wanted to go with his music.”

Sonny is focused on putting in the work—recording more music, making traditional music videos—and he isn’t counting on lightning striking twice. He’s got an EP in the works called All Gas No Brakes, according to Siebert, and if all goes well we’ll see it in the first quarter of 2023.

Read More

Never miss a copy! Paid print subscriptions are available for 12 issues, 26 issues, and for 52 issues from the Reader Store.

Chicago Reader 2022 print issue dates

The Chicago Reader is published in print every other week. Issues are dated Thursday. Distribution usually happens Wednesday morning through Thursday night of the issue date. Upcoming print issue dates through December 2022 are:

12/8/2022
12/22/2022

See our information page for advertising opportunities and editorial calendars of upcoming issues.

2023 print issue dates

The first print issue in 2023 will be published three weeks after the 12/22/2022 issue, the final issue of 2022. The print issue dates through June 2023 are:

1/12/2023
1/26/2023
2/9/2023
2/23/2023
3/9/2023
3/23/2023
4/6/2023
4/20/2023
5/4/2023
5/18/2023
6/1/2023
6/15/2023
6/29/2023

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