Hellcab at Profiles Theatre

When Will Kern's Hellcab Does Christmas first opened in 1992, technical director Robert G. Smith had to remove the street doors of the Hull House at Broadway and Belmont in order to squeeze the front half of a Yellow Cab into the multi-purpose facility. Profiles Theatre's twentieth anniversary revival of the long-running hit, now titled simply Hellcab, is mounted in a single-wide storefront, its performance space in the rear accessed by hallways barely accommodating ordinary furniture, let alone the Crown Victoria sedan that production director and Co-Artistic Director Darrell W. Cox, along with scenic designer Shaun Renfro, proposed bringing on stage.

"It's a 303 Taxi," says Profiles Co-Artistic Director Joe Jahraus, "Konstantin Khrustov, who plays the driver in the play, has a friend who works for a tow company in the suburbs and remembered them bringing in a taxi from a closed 303 office in Mount Prospect. They couldn't get it to start, so they towed it to a mechanic, who gutted the engine, gas tank and transmission. After that, we towed it to the alley behind our Main Stage theater where Jim Moore and Rick Julien, our technical directors, cut off its roof."

That's when the problems began. "The plan was to move the car in one piece," reports Moore, "but the Main Stage has no freight access, so that left the front door. We assembled a big crew to tip the chassis on its side and load it onto some reinforced dollies—some of which broke and had to be rebuilt—and pushed it out to the sidewalk where the glass doors leading to the playhouse lobby had been taken off."

Did this operation attract attention? This is Uptown, after all. "Oh, pedestrians really enjoyed watching this huge car rolling down Broadway on its side like a giant fishing trophy!" Julien recalls, "This being Chicago, of course, many tried to pretend they didn't notice anything—that was the funniest part!"

So did the boat—uh, the car—go into the bottle? Moore grimaces, "Even though we'd measured repeatedly, it was still a tight fit with car parts jutting out all over the surface. We started at three o'clock in the afternoon and by one in the morning, we'd got it as far as the lobby. THEN, the door from the lobby to the auditorium wasn't wide enough, so we cut through the wall—twelve inches of concrete-with an industrial saw to get it onto the stage. Oh, and built a new door frame."

It was all worth the trouble, however, says Cox, "The original hellcab had hidden stagehands turning the wheels like puppeteers. Our steering mechanism is still intact, so the tires actually move when Konstantin turns them. Since he doesn't leave the cab much once his day has begun, we kept the front doors, but took them off in back to facilitate the flow of the 33 passengers—some wearing stiletto heels, some equipped with disability canes, and some carrying concert-sized accordions—who pop in and out of the rear seat."

Hellcab runs at the Profiles Theatre Main Stage to January 27.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Contributing Writer