CHRIS MANOS ROCKS!
By Bob Foreman
© 2013
Christopher Manos the producer of Theatre of the Stars qualifies as Atlanta’s “Mister Show Business.” He is the singular sensation who has produced more than seven-hundred musicals, plays, operas and ballets in Atlanta over fifty-two years.
A bundle of sheer unbridled energy, Chris, a native of Cleveland, Ohio, settled here in 1960 having married the former Glenn Ryman, an Atlanta gal turned professional dancer in New York City where Chris was working as a producer for the Theatre Guild. Chris was hired as executive producer of Atlanta’s failing Theatre under the Stars, a six week summer season of semi-professional musicals held at the 6000-seat amphitheatre in Chastain Park.
Commencing with the 1961 season, he introduced Broadway, movie and recording stars into the mix and within three years had erased the group’s accumulated deficit, $1.8 million in today’s money. That same year he inaugurated his Winter Play Season at the 700-seat Peachtree Playhouse (now a night club) with six weeks of non-musical star stock, followed the next year by the Fine Play Season.
He then began to produce ballet and opera on a Grand Scale up at Chastain; merged his outfit with the Atlanta Civic Ballet (now the Atlanta Ballet); and acquired what would later become the Atlanta Children’s Theatre from the Junior League. In 1968, Chris christened the new Alliance Theatre with the epic to end all other epics, “King Arthur,” with a cast of two hundred, combining the Ballet and his newly-formed Opera and Repertory Theatre divisions.
As told in great detail in Diane Thomas’ splendid book Hundred Days, the money ran out after twelve productions, and because Chris was merely a tenant, the Arts Alliance offered him no support. No one has ever truly taken his place there. Only partially daunted, Chris created Theatre of the Stars, which continued his summer star stock indoors at the Civic Center (now at the FOX) and took a long-term lease on the Peachtree Playhouse for his Winter Play Season. Google Jim and Sally Way of Atlanta Ga. for more information on the shows of that era.
Chris has given more work to professional actors, stagehands, directors and designers than anyone else ever in the southeast, chief among them Louise Hudson, his Girl Friday for forty plus years. His son Nick is now second in command.
“A trip down memory lane is boring at best,” Chris once said, with both feet planted firmly in the future. Upcoming shows at the FOX include his new production of “The Little Mermaid.” Visit theatreofthestars.com or phone (404) 252-8960.
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