May 16, 2017

Meet Jenn Kincaid of Uptown Underground

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jenn Kincaid.

Jenn, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I’ve wanted to own a venue for as long as I can remember. When I was going through school for a degree in theater, I ditched my acting classes pretty early in the game and enrolled in the Theater Management stream. One of our projects that term was creating our own theater from the ground up with a very limited budget. It was my kind of challenge. Like many other stage managers, I love creating organization from chaos. And usually when I’m told that I can’t do something, that’s all the push that I need to go out and do it.

I’m from a small town in Ontario, Canada. Once I finished school at York University in Toronto, I moved back home and got a job at a performing arts center that was just about to open its doors. It was once an old theater that had fallen on hard times, spent a number of years as a bike shop, and then was purchased by a real estate guy who played guitar in a Beatles cover band and really wanted an auditorium of his own to program his dream roster of classic rock bands to play in this intimate 700-seat space. I was hired to start the front-end & box office operations from scratch and assist the General Manager and Marketing Manager. What a way to start my career life! Most everything I put in place there is still the system they use today. The GM became a mentor of mine and taught me the ins and outs of daily operations and the larger financials of running an entertainment business. And I got to do all of this while seeing bands like Eric Burdon & War and Blue Rodeo.

I made the move to Chicago in 2004. “The Land of Opportunity” was calling and I needed to give it a shot for myself. I started out doing freelance stage management gigs for a number of different companies in town, and got to witness another theater build-out while assisting the director of the Evanston Arts Depot. The resulting space is inside the Main Street Metra Station and is home to Piccolo Theatre.

In 2006, I landed the job of Operations & Facilities Manager at Victory Gardens Theater. They had just purchased the historic Biograph Theater on North Lincoln Ave, and I was put in charge of getting the liquor license for the venue as well as keeping a number of other build-out projects on schedule in addition to holding down the facilities-fort at the Greenhouse Theater – their old space just south of the Biograph on Lincoln and where their offices resided until 2010. Just months after the grand opening of the Biograph (an $11.2 million restoration project in total), Hollywood came knocking. The filming of “Public Enemies,” starring Johnny Depp as the infamous John Dillinger shut down the entire block of Lincoln Ave as the film crews transformed the entire street into 1920s Chicago. The Biograph was used to house props, extras and the key talent for the film, and the brand new marquee and renovated exterior of the building was ripped out, replaced and re-painted to make it resemble the theater where Dillinger spent his last night. Since the film shot at night, I spent from 6pm-3am every night with the locations department on set and from 10am-6pm doing my regular job for VG. It was one of the most thrilling and Red Bull fueled, 6 weeks of my life. The minute the film wrapped, I oversaw the construction crews that were tasked to return the space to the way they found it in time for the opening of Victory Gardens’ new show.

I got a title change to General Manager of the Greenhouse when it was purchased by new owners in 2008. I spent 5 years managing the annual rental business to various itinerant theater companies and special events as well as a roster of awesome staffers and a small bar & concessions. It was during this time that I met my former business partner who introduced me to the world of burlesque. He was working with The Belmont Burlesque Revue during their run at The Playground Theater in Lakeview and convinced me to come see a show. I was hooked immediately.

In 2009, a rental at the Greenhouse fell through and left me with a 6-week hole to fill in October. I called up my partner and queried him about doing a haunted house for the Halloween season. He convinced me instead to run a Halloween-themed burlesque show, and with a successful run of “Peek-A-Boo” the foundations for Kiss Kiss Cabaret were begun. We debuted “The Kiss Kiss Cabaret” in 2011 and ran it at the Greenhouse every Friday night for 3 years.

By May of 2013, I was finally ready to quit my job at the Greenhouse and throw everything I had into building a theater of my own. I felt that the number of literal hard hats I’d worn over the years had prepared me as much as I was going to be prepared to design a business plan and build a venue for Kiss Kiss Cabaret. I took 2 months to write and perfect the business plan and in August of that year, approached the Alderman’s office in Uptown with the idea. I knew that Uptown was where we wanted to be. With its ties to Capone and the jazz-era scene, it was the perfect neighborhood for a burgeoning burlesque club. The Alderman agreed and immediately introduced us to the owner of The Uptown Broadway Building at 4707 N Broadway. It was kismet. By October 2013, we had our space and a financial backer to help us build it out.

Uptown Underground opened to the public on December 31st, 2014 for the annual “Kiss Kiss Cabaret New Year’s Eve Hullabaloo!”

Has it been a smooth road?
Nothing about the build of Uptown Underground was smooth. For all the ways in which I thought I was ready, nothing can really prepare you for starting a new business that includes achieving a liquor license and the build-out of a 7000-square foot space.

When I look back at it now, the process seems remarkably fast. However, I remember the anxiety of the early days because we were working toward a huge deadline – New Year’s Eve. From day one, it took about 6 months for approval of the architectural design. Once we got the bid drawings, it took another 2 months to find a general contractor and then another 3 months after that before they started work. We broke ground in September of 2014 after having already given our notice at the Greenhouse that the show was leaving by the end of the year.

Concurrent to the build of the space was the licensing process with the City of Chicago. There were hold-ups everywhere; sub-contractors that needed sign-offs from city inspectors before they could proceed that caused delays of weeks at a time, the general contractor himself neglecting to find an HVAC sub-contractor until a month before the keys to the space were to be delivered, and working through a mandated, third-party expediter for the liquor license requiring extra steps to be taken with every communication between the business and the city.

We have an amazing juggler in our show. The maximum number of balls he juggles is 5. I lost count of the number of balls I had in the air and hoops I was jumping through for 6 months. During this whole process I was also working 3 other part-time jobs to make ends meet.

We made it by the skin of our teeth. A team of incredible volunteers and our families worked for 3 days solid between Christmas and New Year’s Eve to clean the space, move furniture, hang art, and buy supplies. I made a special trip down to the Department of Buildings to pick up our Certificate of Occupancy on December 31, 2014 at 9:00am – exactly 12-hrs out from our Grand Opening Night Party.

We didn’t officially get our liquor license until February 2015, so beyond the crazy New Year’s Eve party we threw, we were unable to open to the public for business for another 6 weeks after we anticipated. Our Grand Opening Week events were cancelled and tickets refunded. The Kiss Kiss Cabaret had to move back to the Greenhouse for a month while we waited. During that time we also had to fire the general contractor who left us with a punch list a mile long of unfinished items.

Six months after we finally opened, I parted ways with my business partner. While it was for the best, that process took until March 2016 to finalize, and left me with all of the business operations for both companies to handle on my own with only a handful of part-time staffers. It also meant bearing the full weight of the financial burdens of the start-up myself since I had to defer any salary for myself in order to hire 2 full-time positions who could help me. It was a scary and tumultuous time. The first year of any business is tough, but I felt as though I’d been dealt a particularly tough hand to play.

So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Uptown Underground story. Tell us more about the business.
Uptown Underground delivers “Top Shelf Retrotainment” – a branded term that our team came up with to describe the kind of entertainment that you’ll see any night on either of our two stages. “Retrotainment” refers to a kind of populist entertainment from bygone eras – burlesque, magic, jazz, cabaret, circus, radio shows, vaudeville, etc. “Top Shelf” references the type of spirits that you can find on our original, Prohibition-era cocktail bar – an assortment of local and regional liquors and craft beer and wine.

We have 2 different customers: our audience and our producers. For our audiences, we provide a fun night out whether it be for a date night, a celebration of sorts, or just an evening on the town with friends. We have a cool atmosphere and friendly house and bar staff to assist with your evening plans. For our show producers, we provide full technical and box office services. We work with both first-time and seasoned producers on their shows from start to finish to put the best product possible on stage, and to keep the audiences coming back for more. We also work with charities and various not-for-profit companies to help produce their annual benefit shows, as well as private events – weddings, birthdays, corporate shows, etc.

I’m really proud of the fact that there’s no one else in the city that’s quite like us. We’re an amalgam of a bar, club, and theater and we fit into all three of those categories nicely. We’re shining a spotlight on a type of entertainment that, until now, hasn’t had a stage of its own in the city since the large Vaudeville houses closed in the 1940s. Our stage is designed specifically to showcase the arts of burlesque and cabaret and to mimic the grand designs of those gorgeous old theaters on a tiny jewel-box scale.

How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
The burlesque industry in Chicago has already seen a massive re-birth in the last 10 years. What I am watching happen now is the same thing with the magic scene in Chicago. One of our shows, “Chicago Magic Lounge” is helping to bring Chicago-style magic back into the entertainment vocabulary in the city and it just happens to be the perfect partner for burlesque. Both of these entertainments began in Chicago during the first “White City” World’s Fair and are just now coming back into popularity.

I can only hope that these forms of “populous” entertainment continue to flourish over the years to come. It makes sense to me – what we do is readily accessible to everyone. Coming to see one of our shows doesn’t involve a particular level of education about theater or a deep interest in the theatrical arts. It simply involves wanting to be entertained and still counts as a night of culture in my books! What we do is immediate and interactive. We reference current events, we break the fourth wall, and we spend time acknowledging our audience and their importance and desire for involvement. And we produce beautiful work on stage. Most people are lacking in that type of interaction anymore. We sit at desks and stare at screens all day. What we do is a fun way to let loose, have a couple of drinks and see some really amazing stuff happening LIVE about 10 feet from your face.

Since our opening in 2015 there have been a couple other new, smaller venues pop up and numerous other existing spots in the city where burlesque and magic are being produced. We’re happy for the company and for our artists who are now working all over town. What’s the saying? All boats rise…

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