It’s opening night of “Elvis Presley was a Black Man Named Joe” at Black Ensemble Theater in Uptown. The crowd is sparse but eager for a show — and they will get one that breaks the usual style of musicals that grace this stage.
This new show is written and directed by Jackie Taylor, the founder and CEO of Black Ensemble, who for decades has been a force on the city’s arts scene. This time, Taylor has added a twist to the unique jukebox musical style attributed to her theater. This story is autobiographical, and it depicts Taylor’s childhood growing up in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green Homes, where she and her little brother Joe became lifelong fans of Elvis.
“The only movies that they played were Elvis Presley,” Taylor reminisced in her office at the theater a few days before the opening. She said the movie theater in her neighborhood only showed Elvis movies and cartoons. So she and Joe formed a bond over Elvis that clearly persisted, judging from the Elvis memorabilia displayed all around her office.
Taylor is known for staging jukebox musicals that take audiences through music history.
But this staging is an accomplishment in itself. Taylor, who founded the theater company in 1976, is working double duty, gearing up for a multi-million dollar capital campaign to extend Black Ensemble’s campus across a stretch of North Clark Street.
Earlier this month, Black Ensemble cleared the final hurdle to full City Council approval of the development, which will sit right across from its current site. Taylor calls it the Free to Be Village development, and when fully realized, it will include a 13,000-square-foot performing arts education center, ground-level retail spaces, 50 units of affordable housing for artists. The estimated price tag: $76 million.
“This has been a dream of Jackie’s for decades,” said Kris Nesbitt, senior director of planning at Black Ensemble. “To create not just a theater as a permanent outpost of creativity and eradicating racism, but an entire village that can nourish people in terms of community, activity, housing, really the full kind of things that somebody needs within, within a creative life.”
Nesbitt said Taylor had been talking about presenting the idea to city council since the late 2000s. Over the years, the theater has been acquiring property and fostering positive relationships with neighbors.
“Right now, we’re really about to dive headlong into the process of launching the capital campaign,” said Nesbitt. “[We’re] fleshing out our partnerships for an affordable housing developer. This is sort of a broad brush that has been approved, and now we’re lining up the actual nuts and bolts to make it happen.”
The location for Jackie Taylor’s Free to Be Village development will be situated on this site across the street from Black Ensemble Theater on Clark Street and include a 13,000-square-foot performing arts education center and 50 units of affordable housing for artists.
Manuel Martinez/Manuel Martinez/WBEZ
Nesbitt said the theater is also creating a smaller, 150-seat performance space within its current complex to incubate new playwrights, host readings and workshop plays in progress.
Daryl Brooks, producing managing director of Black Ensemble, has worked at the theater for 25 years. He has watched the growth of the company and worked closely with Taylor through the years.
“I’ve been with Jackie Taylor since we were at the 150 seat theater on Beacon Street, which is now Jackie Taylor Street,” said Brooks. “And seeing her make the move to right now being in a multi-million dollar theater, to working toward a $100M investment in the times we are in now, is absolutely remarkable.”
Taylor’s reach goes far beyond the shows on stage, Brooks said. A pioneer in Chicago theater and a key player in rebooting the city’s African American Arts Alliance, rebranded as Black Arts & Culture Alliance of Chicago in 2023, Taylor has left her mark on a generation of creatives in Chicago.
“You have people that sneak in that are, like, famous. And they’ll just randomly be like, ‘Yeah, Miss Taylor taught me back in the day,’ ” said Brooks. “Keke Palmer came to see ‘The Jackie Wilson Story.’ Her mother and father met here at the Black Ensemble Theater when they were in ‘The Other Cinderella.’ It’s just so rich [Taylor’s] created that.”
For Taylor, the Free to Be Village is a move toward lasting sustainability for the company she started back in the 1970s.
“What I want is for the theater to be able to support itself outside of ticket sales and fundraising,” said Taylor. “And I felt the best way to do that was to have assets. So when I presented this idea to the city council, I presented the whole idea. I didn’t just present the cultural center. I presented the village.”