by Michael Todd
Amy Ryan appreciates her thriving Benson neighborhood in Omaha.
Its entertainment district is alive and well, hosting concerts at venues like The Waiting Room and Barley Street Tavern, the monthly Benson First Friday celebrations, and a number of bars call Maple Street between 58th and 63rd streets home.
Ryan sees room for improvement, though, when it comes to serving youth and seniors. She says as owner and operator of the Pizza Shoppe, she’s well aware of the needs of her growing community. And so, as part of a wide array of drivers for her project, Ryan is spearheading the mission to restore the Benson Theatre at 6054 Maple Street.
This Saturday starting at 5 p.m., the Pizza Shoppe hosts a jazz showcase featuring musicians from the University of Nebraska Omaha Department of Music, Brownell-Talbot School and the Benson community. Funds raised will benefit the Benson Theatre Project, a nonprofit that’s already raised about $80,000 so far, and hopes to raise $75,000 through its presentation of The Shining — the very first stage adaptation — which will be performed at the Sokol Auditorium on March 21 and 22.
The final goal: $250,000 and to purchase the Benson Theatre space by the end of April. These are just the beginning stages, though, and Ryan looks forward to bolstering Benson through a variety of workshops teaching business-plan creation and helping to incubate the neighborhood’s art community. Below, Ryan talks about her background as a social worker, what the Benson Theatre hopes to accomplish and more.
See the jazz showcase schedule here.
Hear Nebraska: I’d like you to start by talking about how the jazz showcase came together.
Amy Ryan: Sure. Dr. [Peter] Madsen is a music professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. I’ve helped him through the Pizza Shoppe do fundraisers for their music department over the years. So he knows about the mission of the Benson Theatre. He had offered to be a part of a fundraiser for the Benson Theatre. He’s really excited about the idea of having jazz in Benson, having educational institutions come and be a part of the entertainment district of the community. So we have a shared interest in that vision of having a place for youth, not just college students, to have a place for performing arts in Benson.
So he offered to be a part of it, and Brownell-Talbot also joined in to come raise some funds.
HN: Is the jazz showcase meant to take people back to the theater’s early days?
AR: It’s definitely a genre we’d like to host. The purpose of the Benson Theatre is to be a community space for anyone to use. So Hear Nebraska could have their workshops and fundraisers there. The programming is open for already-existing nonprofits and artists. So we definitely want to see jazz be a part of the culture of Benson.
HN: Tell me about the main goals for the theater in the coming months.
AR: Our goal for this year is to purchase the building, and that needs to be done by April 30. We have an investor group we’re working with, but we’ll be raising money, too. A lot of it will be from the production of “The Shining” that we’re doing. Stephen King sold us the rights to The Shining for a dollar (laughs). It was a really quick and amazing response we got from him. That will be held at the Sokol Hall. The cast and the script has been approved. We’re looking to raise about $75,000 during the production. We’ve raised about $80,000 so far.
HN: The restoration will occur after the building is purchased, correct?
AR: Yeah, we’ve gotta purchase the building, and then once the building is in the nonprofit’s name, we can apply for grants for the restoration.
HN: What’s the timeline after the building is purchased? Do you have a goal for when it will open.
AR: It’ll be a year at the least. Sometime in 2015, it should be open.
HN: Tell me a few stories you’ve heard about the Benson Theatre in its heyday.
AR: In its heyday, vaudeville became popular in the ‘20s, a lot because of social issues. It was a way for artists to express themselves about social injustice or the poverty they were experiencing. Vaudeville in French means voice of the city.
So that’s intriguing to me, that it was a platform for a variety of performing arts. It had a lot of sociopolitical meaning to it. It had a successful run from the ‘20s to the ‘40s, then it became a movie theater after that. Our vision is to restore it to house both film presentations — it will host the Omaha Film Festival for instance, and of course any other independent films — as well as having the performing arts, the revival of vaudeville.
I’m so passionate about this project because I’ve been in Benson for 19 years now. I was a social worker who inherited a restaurant, a business. I’ve studied Benson for most of my adult life and the problems that exist. I’m delighted about the idea of Benson growing as an entertainment district: things like Hear Nebraska and The Waiting Room, all wonderful things that are happening in Benson.
But I sometimes worry, the people I’m most concerned about in Benson are children and seniors. I don’t think we’re a full community if we don’t have a spot for them and special needs groups. So the theater is an awesome opportunity for us to have volunteer positions for youth, for seniors, for cinema presentations and different things we don’t currently offer for the arts district.
So I think for me, I would love for everyone to notice that although Benson is certainly thriving, there are still a lot of underserved and underprivileged people that live in Benson. I think this theater could be a great way for them to be a part of the community.
HN: Could you expand upon the background you have a social worker, and how have you learned about the people who you feel need to be served better in Benson?
AR: My history is I have a master’s in counseling/psychology. I ran a domestic violence shelter for two years in urban Kansas City, and then I ran one near the Air Force base near Bellevue before I kind of inherited the restaurant. I’ve always spent time with underserved people.
That’s where I fit in the world, I guess. Benson, as far as noticing it, because I have a pizza place, I feed the indigent people in Benson on a daily basis. The children, many of them are latchkey kids, so I’ve sort of helped raise the youth in Benson just from having a pizza place and caring about them. I’ve done free tutoring programs for them. The pizza place in the community is where those kids come hang out or if they need help.
So I’ve been able to be on the forefront of seeing those needs of the children. Seniors are the same way. We have so many bars — and again, those are awesome — but it’s not a place for the seniors, the special needs groups and the kids. I also think that creating an educational programming in the theater — that’s what we’ll be doing during the day — and then having performances at night. So these workshops will be offered for free for people to learn business planning. That way, bands, different artists, other nonprofits will learn how to create a business plan and have success in generating revenue for what they want to do.
I think there’s a huge need for that because business skills are something I had to learn the hard way, just as a social worker with no business sense back 19 years ago. I think we can assist people in their success by educating them on business planning. That’s another part of the programming of the theater that is in place just because I’ve witnessed the struggles that we have, seeing these artists who are amazingly talented but are working three jobs. I think we can do a lot to change that and have people do what they love and be self-sustaining at the same time.
Showcase schedule
5 p.m.
UNO Johnson Combo
Mr. Jason Johnson, Emily Berry, Kaitlin Thomas, Garrett Howard, Don Halverson, Jared Kennedy, Phil Kolbo
5:45 p.m.
Guest speaker, City Councilman Pete Festersen
6 p.m.
Falls and Doits
Summer Jazz Camp Combo
Dr. Pete Madsen, Grace Calderon, Kate Hamann, Christian Madsen, Ashleigh Madsen, Tommy Simon
6:30 p.m.
UNO Madsen Jazz Combo
Dr. Pete Madsen, Jordan Relford, Brian Nelsen, Diego Castellanos, Matt Ehlinger, Adam Brooks, Zach Roland
7 p.m.
Guest speaker Jim Esch
7:15 p.m.
Brownell-Talbot School, The Raider Blues Jazz Combo
Emily Bergquist, David Bredthauer, Rachel Cruse, Tucker Curry, Maya Mathews, Lukmaan Sattar, Gabe Schatz, Austin Taylor
7:45 p.m.
UNO Trio, Trea
Matt Ehlinger, Alex Annan, Zach Roland
8:15 p.m.
Guest Speaker Dr. Dan Cox
8:30 p.m.
Brownell-Talbot School , The Gold-Tones Combo
Gabi Basile, David Bredthauer, Julia Fiksinski, Ethan Foxall, Taylor Stuke, Adi Telikicherla, Amelia Wood
9 p.m.
Community Duo
Benson High/UNO
Cubby Phillips, Michael Frederickson
10 p.m.
UNO Pettit Combo
Mr. Darren Pettit, Blake DeForest, Jason Smith, Jared Smith, Ben Tweedt, Alex Annan, Nate VanFleet
Michael Todd is Hear Nebraska’s managing editor. He watched a documentary on the supposed hidden meanings of the film adaptation of “The Shining” and will now forever link Kubrick to NASA. Reach him at michaeltodd@hearnebraska.org.