When John Skrodenis saw a new Teatro ZinZanni billboard go up last December, his heart sank.  On a yellow background, a bald head with glasses slid into the frame from the top. According to ZinZanni’s other signs around the city, the head belonged to Mr. P.P., the center of their newest show, Mr. P.P.’s Clubhouse. From below, Mr. P.P.’s feet popped into the frame, in loafers and knee socks. And between them, in bold, red text, it read: “Head Down, Glasses Up.”  The ad was puzzling on its own. Teatro ZinZanni was dinner theater meets the circus meets Las Vegas. It was ostentatious and colorful. It sparkled. And the two-toned poster felt completely disconnected from the performance. But to Skrodenis, that billboard was also a sign that Teatro ZinZanni had decided not to take his advice.  A month earlier, Skrodenis says, he’d sat down with the owners of Teatro ZinZanni, hoping to offer some marketing help. His girlfriend, Ame Corwin, was the head of the costume department for the theater, and they both knew that the show was struggling.  The owner, Norm Langill, said that ticket sales had been “soft” through the summer, Corwin says, and on opening night, some of the theater’s longest running actors said they’d never seen the crowd that thin. “And then it just went straight into the gutter,” Corwin says. “I’m saying 50-percent capacity on a good day.”  Skrodenis runs a small marketing firm, and he was eager to help, he says. So he asked for a meeting with one of the owners. He started with the name of the show. “We ran a really simple survey,” he says, asking for people’s reactions to the name Mr. P.P’s Clubhouse—which was technically a reference to the MC’s ping-pong ball act. “Eighty-five percent of respondents associated that name with male genitalia… in the age of Jeffrey Epstein all over the news, you’re not going to bring someone to that show.”  Skrodenis says he even told the owners that either he or his business partner would be happy to help pro bono, but they never followed up.  Meanwhile, according to staff at the time, things weren’t looking better in-house either. “The butts are not in the seats,” Corwin remembers telling the company’s board in a plea to get the leadership to change course. “It’s not about personal opinion. It’s just there’s no butts in seats, so there’s a problem.”  “Everybody had their own theories,” says Hannah Haddix, the show’s bar and floor manager. “A lot of people were like, ‘Oh, it’s the economy,’ or this and that. But it was very apparent. And there was talk every day about, ‘Oh, my God, where are the people?’” As early as October, paychecks started arriving late. According to emails provided to The Stranger, there was always a reason they were delayed—an administrative error, a holiday, a change in bank policy. But Haddix had been at a restaurant when it was about to collapse once before, and the late paychecks felt like an early warning sign. “It was obvious to all of us that this was not a lucrative season,” Haddix says.  “December came around, near Christmas. Those weeks were supposed to be undeniable cash cows, and it was still just crickets in the audience,” Haddix says. “That’s when we felt compelled to go to the owners and say, ‘We need some reassurances.’” Both Corwin and Haddix told The Stranger that their concerns were dismissed. The dining room staff asked that the company sign a contract saying that they would get paid for their work, even if ZinZanni went bankrupt. “We wanted some sort of assurance that we would be compensated for our work, even in the event that the business went under,” Haddix says. “The writing was on the wall.”  The owners eventually did sign it, Haddix says, but first, Jane Langill, the co-owner and Norm’s wife, gathered the staff and insisted that there was nothing to worry about. “They got up in front of us and were like, ‘Everything’s fine,’” Corwin says. “She said that they have things figured out, and that they had always paid their employees in the past,” Haddix says. “She cited all the times that they had closed the business early, or that they had financial problems, but that paying the employees was the priority.” Corwin says she made a final plea to the board that month, telling them she didn’t think the show could make it past mid-January if they didn’t change their trajectory, and fast.  Corwin’s warning turned out to be spot-on. Teatro ZinZanni shut down Mr. P.P.’s Clubhouse on January 24 and put the theater on hiatus, laying off most of the staff and ending all of their performers’ contracts early. They originally told customers with tickets after the close date that they would issue refunds in February, but as of March 22, their email’s auto-reply simply says the theater will refund ticketholders “as soon [they] are able.”  As of the end of March, employees say that most of them have not gotten their last paychecks, which they estimate are collectively worth more than $143,000. The Stranger saw wage sheets from individual employees who are owed $1,000 to more than $4,000. “Almost all of us are living paycheck to paycheck, and losing out on $3,000 is an incredible hardship,” says John Bartlett, who worked in the dining room.  And it’s not just employees and patrons that are looking for what they’re owed. According to a lawsuit filed by their caterer, Harried Hungry, ZinZanni owed him about $300,000 when they shut down.  These debts seem to have been piling onto the stack of bills that was already under ZinZanni’s mattress. According to IATSE 887, the union representing the show’s costume department, the company had been deducting employees’ union dues and health insurance costs, but never paid them to the union or the benefit provider. Between the two, they owed almost $7,000, and it was steadily accruing late fees. Before that, in 2022, they settled two lawsuits out of court—one for allegedly failing to pay an employee, and one for misusing an investor’s funds.  Norm Langill declined to answer a detailed list of questions from The Stranger. “I think Teatro ZinZanni’s 28-year story in our hometown will eventually be an interesting piece of a larger picture of the challenges facing performing arts in the mid-2020s,” he said in an email. He wasn’t able to talk about the financial or legal issues, “and alas that’s the immediate task at hand,” he wrote. “But the sun will come up tomorrow, with any luck.” *** If Teatro ZinZanni’s owners seemed overconfident, it wasn’t entirely baseless. The show had been thriving in Seattle since before the Monica Lewinsky scandal hit the headlines.  It opened in 1998, in the heyday of dinner theater in Seattle. Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding had recently finished a year-long run, and Late Night Catechism was still going strong. The founder of ZinZanni, Langill, was already a known quantity in the Seattle arts world. He ran a nonprofit called One Reel, which had been presenting Bumbershoot at Seattle Center for 18 years, and landed him the Number Four spot on The Rocket’s list of the 100 top powerbrokers in the Northwest’s music industry. All eyes in-the-know would have been on this project even if he hadn’t raised a 25-sided spiegeltent in an empty lot just north of Seattle Center. But the spectacle certainly helped.  The interior was paneled with dark wood and stained glass, all made in Belgium in the 1920s, built to be set up and broken down in a matter of days as it travelled with itinerant vaudeville shows. The 285-seat tent had mirrored walls and carved wooden booths, and it was draped in red velvet curtains. “This is the real thing,” Stephen Quinn, their facilities manager, told the Everett Herald at the time. “The genuine, handmade, one-of-a-kind antique.” Thanks to the destruction of two world wars, there were only 12 of them left in the world, he said.  The final show for ‘Mr. P.P.’s Clubhouse’ was January 24. Credit: Walter Williams  And then there was the show. In its first year, at least two local publications compared the experience of being in the audience to a Fellini film. The cast was full of aerialists and jugglers and comedians. They imported talent from all over Europe. Heart’s Ann Wilson joined the cast as a cabaret chanteuse (and, in the following years, Thelma Houston and Maria Muldaur did, too). By August 1999, they had extended their show five times, and were considering a sixth. Seattle Gay News described it as “possibly the most popular form of entertainment going on in town right now, and rightfully so.”  In their first four years, they reportedly sold around 280,000 tickets. And by 2011, they’d expanded to San Francisco and Chicago, and launched a children’s show, and a camp for aspiring acrobats, jugglers, and clowns.  ZinZanni’s luck seemed to turn in 2017, when they left their first home—for the second time. For most of their first two decades, ZinZanni rented the empty lot at 222 Mercer Street from the Seattle Opera. They left in 2002 to pitch their tent in an old Cadillac dealership in Belltown for a few years, and came back in 2007. But in 2017, the Opera finally decided to sell the land so they could build a new venue for themselves.  ZinZanni had had a few years to prepare for the change. As early as 2015, they were offered a chance to buy the land themselves, but the Opera rejected their offer because it was “well below market.” So when the time came, Langill tried to save their campsite by building public support. In a matter of weeks, 1,600 people signed a letter calling for them to be saved, including some of Seattle arts’ most powerful, including chef Tom Douglas, KEXP’s John Richards and Tom Mara, Sub Pop’s Megan Jasper, and most of the members of Pearl Jam. “It will be devastating for the company,” Langill told The Stranger at the time. “One hundred people will be out of work—our entire staff.” They weren’t able to change the fate of the lot. (It’s now the Center Steps apartments, with the Mammoth sandwich shop on the ground floor.) Miraculously, that wasn’t the show’s final curtain, but it did mark the beginning of their actual roving circus era, and provided the first window into their financial struggles.  First, they moved to a temporary spot in Redmond’s Marymoor Park, and then in 2018, they moved into the old Redhook Brewery in Woodinville, across the street from Chateau Ste. Michelle Winery.  According to court records, ZinZanni created a separate company called TZ Woodinville, and took on some new investors. The group, called Crosby 2 in the court documents, put $3 million into the company, earning them a 30-percent share of the Woodinville-based theater. The funds were only allowed to be used for the renovation of the new space, the documents say, but Langill diverted the funds to pay his own debts, leaving contractors unpaid. The lawsuit says that Crosby 2 then lent the company another $1 million to get out of that hole, which was also used to pay off Langill’s own debts. The suit, which was filed in 2020, was settled out of court two years later.  And that wasn’t the only one. In 2018, as ZinZanni was moving across the lake, they hired Markus Kunz as the General Director of TZ Woodinville. According to court documents, he was hired with a salary, and the promise of a $50,000 bonus at the end of 2019. But that bonus never came. He, too, sued the company in 2020, and eventually settled out of court.  But before the drama of the Woodinville location could fully pan out, the COVID-19 pandemic quashed the very idea of gathering to see giddy, sweaty, aerosol-filled performing art for years. ZinZanni reportedly laid off their performing and restaurant staff, and records show that they got at least $1 million in PPP loans to maintain their core staff. (The loan documents report between 14 and 89 jobs.)  Since lockdown lifted and we’ve slowly crept back into gathering for fun, ZinZanni has returned to its itinerant ways. It celebrated its 25th anniversary at the Sanctuary ballroom of the Lotte Hotel, and eventually landed at Emerald City Trapeze Arts in SoDo. It was there that they put on what might be their last show, Mr. P.P.’s Clubhouse. *** Two months after the final show, ZinZanni’s former staff still have a group chat. Most of them have struggled to find a lawyer that will represent them in a wage theft case, Haddix says, because it appears too likely that ZinZanni will declare bankruptcy.  IATSE 887, the union that represents the costume department, says they got wind that the show was planning to sell their costume inventory, sewing machines, and supplies. “The union sprang into action,” says their union rep, Kelly Caffey. “We started to file a wage lien on the revenue that would be made from the sale and went out to banner and petition outside the sale. Apparently, TZZ caught wind of our action and abruptly canceled the sale. We arrived to an empty warehouse Saturday morning.” The fight to get paid has slowed down a bit. “Many of us have reached out via email, phone, text message, and it’s just been complete radio silence,” she says.  And some of the staff are still mourning the loss of a show that meant a lot to them. “We don’t get paid as much, but it’s literally for the love of the experience,” Corwin says. “We’ve all been grieving a little bit of a loss because of how special it was.”  “It really is like lightning in a bottle when you work there,” she says. “It’s not like any other production.” The post What Happened to Teatro ZinZanni?  appeared first on The Stranger. ...read more read less