By SHARON EBERSON

As Mark Fleischer says goodbye to Pittsburgh, his work home for the past 12 years, longer than any other, he is leaving with pride mingled with the same frustration and anticipation many of us are feeling, as Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera is no more.

After CLO’s 80th summer season came to an end with the curtain call of SUFFS, so did the company’s existence. The dawn of what’s next for Pittsburgh CLO and Pittsburgh Public Theater was to be revealed at an event at the O’Reilly Theater on Friday, July 31, 2026. 

Fleischer, until last week, still Pittsburgh CLO’s Executive Producer, set his exit of the city for the eve of the event. He has already begun his new role as Executive Director of Studio Tenn Theatre in Franklin, Tennessee, where he will work alongside Artistic Director Patrick Cassidy. 

“It’s been an honor to work here,” Fleischer said over lunch and a long, nostalgic conservation at Harp & Fiddle in the Strip District. “I take a lot of pride in what we’ve done, and the people I’ve worked with, the staff, the donors, the crew, but I recognize that it’s a time of transition, and a time that’s scary for some. My hope is that the community pulls around and says, ‘We still want this.’ Ask for what you want, and you’ll ask for what you want by buying tickets. And I hope that those people know change is not easy. Someone once said, ‘Change is not a Pittsburgh virtue,’ but we have had change. It’s not Heinz Field anymore.”

A downward financial spiral at both the Public and CLO, an all-too-familiar trend nationwide, had led to mass layoffs and, finally, a decision to start over, and form a single entity under a new name.

Fleischer was involved in a potential unifying process that initially involved City Theatre, before City pulled out and the decision was made to start anew. He previously presided over periods of challenge and change in the company, including a pandemic shutdown that continues to have ripple effects in theater worldwide.

The final CLO Executive Producer took over the organization that includes CLO Academy and the Gene Kelly Awards, and one of the country’s leading summer stock companies, when Van Kaplan retired as CEO and Executive Producer in September 2021 — the CLO’s 75th Anniversary year, with the pandemic still limiting or excluding indoor gathering. Kaplan had been at the helm for 24 years.

Fleischer, who came onboard as Associate Artistic Director in 2014, has been chronicling his memories from his time with CLO in installments on social media, as have many theater artists who earned their Equity cards or were launched through internships or from the stages of a CLO musical. 

(Note: Richard Rockage, whose journey with the CLO started in 2003 as a musical direction intern, and continued as an orchestration copyist into 2015, has sparked a tremendous collection of memories on Meta.)

Now, Fleischer will be in Tennessee when the 2026 cast of A Musical Christmas Carol is announced. Revealing the next Scrooge in a starry lineup that included Broadway stars Richard Thomas, Patrick Page, Michael Cerveris and Dennis O’Hare, had become a significant moment for Fleischer and CLO. When the holiday tradition turned 25 in 2016, it was Fleischer who proudly showed off the newly refurbished Byham Theater set and new effects with an onstage tour. 

A Musical Christmas Carol goes on, a part of Pittsburgh CLO’s legacy that remains in the Prologue Season announced for the merging companies. Legacy, and his stewardship of it, were very much on Mark Fleischer’s mind as he discussed the final years of CLO.

ONE-TIME ONLY SPARK FESTIVAL OF NEW WORKS

The 2018 SPARK Festival, “created as an effort to cultivate new and innovative work from emerging and established musical theater artists,” featured 12 small-cast new works in various stages of development, including the world premiere production of “Up and Away,” by Kevin Hammonds and Kristin Bair. 

I was brought in to create a new works program for the cabaret. That was the justification for the hiring. It took me a bit to figure out the cabaret, but we did create SPARK, and we had two new-musical weekends. From that program, we developed something like 20-plus shows, and had 15 shows go on to actual productions. 

The first one was Up and Away, the superhero thing that we had developed, and that went on to Portland, Oregon, at a friend’s theater who was here for SPARK with NAMM [National Association of Musical Merchants]. We produced Double-Threat Trio by Adam Overett. We produced Game On, by Marcus Stevens and David Dabbon, all at the cabaret. 

We were supposed to do An Untitled New Play by Justin Timberlake in our space. Then the shutdown came, and we reached out [to City Theatre] because it was going to be a co-pro anyway. We just moved venues because of what was happening and availability. … We had a Gallery of Heroes show that is about to go back out [Beyond the Moon, by Joseph Domencic and Christina McCann]. That was developed in SPARK, and then went to schools, and we already have 28, 29 schools booked for [the next school year]. And then Perfect Mate happened after COVID. That was a commission.

Pittsburgh CLO introduced “Dungeons & Dragons The Twenty-Sided Tavern,” at the Greer Cabaret in 2022. The live, onstage D&D game has actors calling out suggestions and the audience making decisions on smartphones, determining which heroes appear, where they explore, and how their story ends. 

The was a commercial work that we invested in. I was really interested in the technology. … In terms of what was in the cabaret, there also were the adaptations, the smaller version of Xanadu, the smaller version of Young Frankenstein, the smaller version by two actors of First Date. Those are all things that I feel very proud of. Also, at that time, my comrade in that was Olivia O’Connor, who was from the area and had gone to CMU, and was working at Roundabout [Theatre Company], and then managed to come back. And now she is at the Geffen. … I’ve always appreciated when she came in and said, “I have to go,” and I said, “You have to go. I’m so proud. Go.” I do believe in that.

I wanted to say that SPARK also had a sense of community. I loved those two or three weeks when all the rooms in the Academy were in use, and people walking in and out. We brought [Tony-winning composer and lyricist] David Zippel as a mentor … and then we had the late night stuff, where people would share their own songs or other songs. … It was always about getting them to go beyond us. A couple of ideas have gone on, and writers have done things that we developed that they may not have done. We commissioned things. So yeah, I think SPARK proved what it needed to do, and then came the post-COVID era, of where the resources went and what we needed to do to hold onto our core business. And we still came back to the [Greer] Cabaret. We still did some shows. …  I was given great opportunities to structure something, with colleagues like Olivia and others. And then COVID comes along. 

THE SHUTDOWN: FROM STAGES TO SCREENS TO STADIUMS

With theater already feeling the heat of technological advances in other forms of entertainment, and other reasons to stay home or stay away, COVID-19 was the setback no one could have seen coming.  

Going into it, I was in New York doing auditions for Guys and Dolls. And then it was like, do you hug people when they come and audition? Do you not? I’d gone to see Little Shop the week before, and I remember I was coughing. And then the woman in front of me reaches in her purse, and I thought, “Oh, she’s going to give me a lozenge.” No, she literally takes out a cloth and rubs her hair. And I was like, “Oh, we’re in something.” So we came back, and I remember a trial day of working from home, and we’re all discovering this thing called Zoom. I mean, Pittsburgh was lucky in some ways because of shared services, because of the resident companies, there was an automatic ability to get together. So Kevin [McMahon, at the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust] at the time, Marya [Sea Kaminski, at the Public] and Christopher Hahn [of Pittsburgh Opera] and Van, they would have these 8 a.m. meetings every day, asking, “What do you know?” …

But when it shut down, I remember like, “OK, it’s going to be a few weeks.” Every day, I would get up and redo the CLO schedule and the CLO budget for the summer. … And then it was, “OK, we’ll do five shows, four shows.” And then I remember a Board member calling, and he goes, “It’s not going to happen.” So once we made that decision, I told every actor we had already cast on the phone, including the head of Equity, who was going to come do a cabaret that year, Kate Shindle, and John Rubenstein, because he was going to play Herr Schultz [in Cabaret]. I had had to make that call, because I knew I wasn’t the only call they were getting. They were losing jobs. Everybody had lined up their summer. … I remember pacing in my backyard in the Mexican War Streets, and just calling. I have a couple voicemails I’ve saved from people that came back that just brought tears to my eyes, because they were appreciative of what I was doing, but also knew that I was making 75 calls. So as much as I have horrific memories of what that was, to go back to something you were saying earlier, about the [pop-up, independent work being done in Pittsburgh], it kind of put CLO in a pop-up phase that was sort of exciting. Sidney Franczak, who’s on our staff still, running our marketing, we actually have pretty positive memories, much like I’m sure other people do, of finding ways to do things, even at home. It was the first time I hadn’t done summer theater since 2008. 

You have talked about how that brought out the PIttsburgh CLO entrepreneurial spirit, that has shown up many times in the past. The going hasn’t always been easy. 

I think back on that New Year’s when Olivia and I coordinated the Songs for a New Year, where we had writers we knew through SPARK write a song, and then gave it to a choreographer, and it was given to an actor, and it was filmed, and we released them. It was also designed to pay actors. I remember we did singing video grams, where actors got a major cut. Then we did the talk show, and those were some of the joy. Having all the Scrooges on together, and then having Jeff Howell and a bunch of Tiny Tims who had grown up … Clay Aiken … and I wasn’t alone. Actually Patrick [Cassidy] was doing the same thing with Studio Tenn Talks. 

Pittsburgh CLO returned to its stadium roots as pandemic restrictions eased, with a production of “The Wizard of Oz,” and 75th anniversary gala concerts that included Cassidy, Clay Aiken, Norm Lewis, Robbie Fairchild, Max Von Essen, Jackie Burns and more. It was in the midst of the planning the stadium shows that Fleischer told Van Kaplan was retiring, and he accepted the position as his successor. “A Musical Christmas Carol,” which will continue this year at the Byham Theater, was integral to CLO staying in people’s minds during the pandemic, partnering with WQED to broadcast the show from preservation recording. While not a pro shot, it is a lasting memory of Jeff Howell’s finale as Bob Cratchit and served as a reminder of Pittsburgh CLO’s entrenched place in the local theater firmament, and what we could look forward to when we could gather in a theater again. Award-winning actor Richard Thomas being the first Scrooge out of the shutdown gate was a boon. 

With A Christmas Carol, I remember going to QED and saying, “Hey, is there any way? Because I don’t have a really good version.” And then Scott Evans, who’s a resident director, and I, over the internet, trying to edit this thing. It showed twice. And I know my team also did things, like, they brought hot cocoa to people. We were trying a lot of things. … And then for Richard Thomas to say, “I’ll come do [play Scrooge],” and do seven or eight performances in like one week, that was huge. … And of course, there were the shows in the middle of the stadium. We were going into our 75th anniversary. I had already thought about trying to go back outdoors before COVID [Pittsburgh CLO’s first home was Pitt Stadium], because I’m big on history. I consider myself a steward. I believe I stand on Van’s shoulders and Charlie Gray’s shoulders, [William Wymetal]’s shoulders … I think there have only been five directors in 80 years. 

So, the Steelers sign on — they go, “We’ll give you the stadium. You have to pay people.” And we were going through Equity to get protocols … and we had the [Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre outdoor stage]. I brought Marco Susani back, who had worked at the stadium and had been on Local 3, and had worked at our shop. And I remember we never had a dress rehearsal, because it rained or it was lightning. We did them all in the dressing rooms — locker rooms, excuse me. But I remember we also had to be tested for COVID every day, and we wore these little devices that UPMC provided … that would tell me how much time I spent with different people. So if someone tested positive, we could then go back and say they were with only these three people for 15 minutes. Test those. And then I never had so many weather apps on my phone in my life! There was a guy that was responsible, if we got lightning, we had to get off. 

And then we opened Wizard of Oz. The kids were supposed to do Wizard of Oz, and it got shut down as their Academy musical. So we said anyone involved in that can be a part of this. So we had the kids. We had brought back a couple of people like Evan Ruggiero and Lisa Ann Goldsmith. But I’ll never forget that first day, because it rained all day, and everyone told me I should cancel. And I was calling my friends at [Kansas City] Starlight and Muny, who said, “You just keep going, Mark.” I said, “We’re not canceling. It’ll be fine.” And it just stopped. Watching people pour in that first day for Wizard of Oz, including Franco Harris being there, it was so amazing. I forgot how much we missed it. How much it meant to hear someone sing, and be live, and be with people. The only thing that killed us was we couldn’t price it the way we wanted to [at the stadium] because of Tickmaster. And so we had The Wizard of Oz, and the 75th anniversary. It was really the hardest I’ve ever worked.

And I had gotten a call before that, from [Helen Hanna Casey] saying, “Van wants to retire. Do you want this position?” Now? We had talked about it before, so it wasn’t a total surprise. The timing was. My first concern was Van. … So I got handed the organization in the middle of COVID, and who knew what was going to come out of it?

Among theater’s indoor comebacks was a series of cabarets by local artists at the Greer, which emerged from another series.

I did cabaret acts at the Duquesne Club where I basically called actors and said, “Look, the club will open so waiters can get back to work. Members will pay for this. Just sing out of your book.” And it was Caroline Nicolian, it was Billy Mason, it was Allan Snyder, Chris Laitta. And they didn’t sing out of their book. They all made shows. It was a way to pay them, pay a piano player. The first few were behind a plexiglass shield. It got people back to work. That’s what mattered to me. And other theaters did different things. … It’s just fascinating to think, we became sort of entrepreneurial. We furloughed a few of people, but we hung onto people, and we came back. 

REGROUPING, STRUGGLES, AND THE BENEDUM BLUES

Fleischer was among the first Pittsburgh theater leader to sound the alarm that his organization was struggling, a year before the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published a story in August of 2025 saying that CLO, the Public and City Theatre were in trouble. It led to what came he calls the 3-2-1 season — three shows at the Benedum Center, two at the Greer Cabaret, and one at the Byham — in 2024. 

We had a lot of people who had bought their subscriptions for 2020, that held on and said, “You can just keep it.” But then we came back in 2022. Now we get to the economics. Well, we’ve already spent that money, but we owe all these people a season. … Thank goodness we had the ARPA [American Rescue Plan Act] funding, and things like that. But it’s all about the summer season. 2022 was a mostly joyful time. We’d done Christmas Carol. We opened with Jersey Boys on tour. We had some great titles. [But] one of our consulting firms that we’ve used a lot, TRG, says, naturally you lose 20% of your audience every year, and you had two seasons that you didn’t do, ’20 and ’21. It means you lost 40%. You come back, you’re already down 60%. We also had the polarization of vaccines, to mask or not mask. [On the other hand], when the door opened and people came in, people I met that summer were so excited to come back. … This dad, who I’ve written about a lot, who came in and said, “You gave me back my father-daughter dates.” She was like 12 when they started, and now she’s 35. So there’s knowing what we meant to some people, but volume was a challenge.

So ’22 happens, we don’t get as many subscriptions as we want. We’re seeing things change. It’s ’23, during the renewal campaign, that I’m like, “Oh, I’m not seeing the track.” What I think happens, those people who’ve been on account got to see it without paying, and now we send them a renewal notice. My program was pretty CLO standard. It was The Music Man and A Chorus Line. We had Once on This Island, which was [going to come on tour, but was stopped by COVID], so I said we owe people this show. So there were a couple of those.  

So it was ’23 that I knew we needed to make the change to 3-2-1, which was the three venues I thought would have worked. We’ve been in the Benedum by then 35 years … the longest [CLO] had been anywhere. That’s two generations that know it, and want those seats. And then my development directors say they want to be in the Benedum. So I think at that point, it was like, well, we got through 3-2-1, people were interested, but I just looked at where our cash flow was and what was happening. So there were lots of discussions and the decision, probably not the right one in hindsight, was to [do all summer shows] at the Benedum. … It’s what people knew, and what they wanted. They still do. I could go through a whole explanation with someone and go, “Here’s why we need to move.” And they will say, “But it’s the best theater. Don’t you want to be there?” It is. It’s the grand dame. 

We tried things. We did Madame Clicquot at the Byham, things at the Greer. But it’s a challenge, because the economic model has shifted. I mean, your own prices in your own life are up. So that affects every business. We’re seeing restaurants close. It’s not just theater. And we’re seeing other cultural groups adapt, that have shrunk programming, and other things. So it was, how do we give people what they care about? 

COULD CO-PRODUCTIONS HAVE SAVED CLO?

Fleischer believes that a strategic alliance with other summer-season companies is still a viable answer to restoring the locally produced Broadway-style musical revivals that CLO was known for over 80 years. Like everything else, it comes with challenges.

I brought in five different theater companies here to Pittsburgh. We’d see each other at conferences and say, “We should work together,” and I’d day, “We need to do it now.” So we came in, we had a huge discussion of what does it mean to be a co-pro? And this is not new. Van, and Michael Jenkins in Dallas, and Chris Manos in Atlanta, would put out tours, but we were trying to talk about, how can we still be a locally produced thing? Local casting is most important to us. So we’re like, all right, well maybe there’s no such thing as a true co-pro. Maybe it’s for one show, we just build the set, and share it … with the director, choreographer, music director, and they travel with it. We sort of did that with Beautiful, with [director/choreographer Dan Knechtges]. Maybe it is all those things, and a couple of lead [actors]. But we realized that we still want to work on this. I remember Dan Knechtges at TUTS [Theater Under the Stars of Houston, Texas] saying the challenges we’re going to run into are: What show can we all do? And we would all sit there and go, let’s do Mean Girls. Well we already did it, or we’re about to do it. So we threw out some titles, and then we’d find out that [a producer] is sitting on it, and we can’t get it. And then it would be the calendar, and then trying to work it across the country because of gas prices. … But we were all committed to it. We were getting on the phone. We did 50-minute check-ins every other week. I still think that was a good idea. And we saw it work. I mean CLO came out of this last year because of things like Frozen, with our deficits shrunk significantly. 

WHAT ABOUT A TENT?

This is what I always say: The company has always been entrepreneurial. One of the best things I got was Charlie Gray putting the 50th anniversary book together. Andrew Medlar is going to put one in every branch of the [Carnegie Library system], because I have a whole bunch of them. But going back to that book, I discovered that CLO shut down from 1968 to ’71 — they couldn’t make it. They moved into the Civic Arena. They were never filling it. Not that they were going to, but they were also unionized for the first time. There were expenses they hadn’t had. There’s a great quote that says, “The only time we were not struggling is when we were in the [Melody] tent,” their home before moving into the brand-new Civic Arena. I went and looked for a tent, but tents have changed now. Now you’ve got to have air conditioning, you’ve got to have fireproofing.

Note: Quantum Theatre was among the first of the local companies to mount a return from the pandemic shutdown, and it was under a tent, with the new musical, “The Current War.“

A DIFFERENT ECONOMIC MODEL

So now, how do we bring in people for whom this was part of their summer. We went to three shows at the Benedum, partly because there’s more programming happening, and Broadway touring is just a different economic model. We spend up to a million dollars now to put on a show. We’ve been able to control some of that even lower, with the co-pro items. But we bring a tour in like SUFFS. We pay a guarantee of [$385,000], that’s our  upfront cost. Then we split expenses on the other side, and then we split any profits, if there are any. And that split even is different. That’s 70 / 30, 70 to New York, 30 to us, most of the time. … And touring Broadway, it’s bigger than it’s ever been. 

In ever-increasing instances, producers are depending on tours to recoup, because so few musicals, or even plays, recoup on Broadway.

More shows don’t recoup on Broadway like they used to. It was 4 to 1 before. Now it’s like 5 or 6 to 1. When we capitalized An American in Paris, it was capitalized like $12 million to $14 million. [Capitalizing a Broadway show means raising all preproduction costs, setting the fund apart from weekly running expenses.] Now I see proposals, and it’s capitalized at $26 million to $28 million. That’s double in 10 years. On Broadway, they’re not making money, so they put it on the road, and keep [copywrights] tied up. We were talking about the high schools that can do certain shows, and we can’t get those same titles. … We used to try to be 10 years [apart when repeating shows]; six or seven was rare. And to find the mix, I think even three shows as a season was a challenge. When we did 3-2-1, I think it all worked together. But putting Frozen in a season with Camelot and Back to the Future, someone may not see that as a subscription. When it was six shows, it’s different.This year was very female forward, and it’s been a great year with the two shows we produced. So yeah, that would be the idea, that I think there’s a model to be done, but there’s not many large organizations to make it work. … TUTS [in Houston] is probably the closest to us, and trying to find the same way. 

Distinct companies, productions and venues are widespread in our area, but there’s a significance to the city’s cultural vitality of having locally produced shows in Downtown theaters.

All these theaters have their place. I was a subscriber to City, and I’m a subscriber to Quantum, and I would go out and see [Little Lake Theatre]. … I couldn’t see as much as I wanted to. But what does the community want? Do we want artistic professionals that are paid a living wage? And what happens if you lose those people? Some of them are college professors and high school teachers, and moved here because it was worth it. But that idea, when we talk about what the ticket price was for [Mean Girls or Beautiful], well, what is that ticket price supporting? And is it worth it to you? And like I said, I love going into some garage, wherever, and seeing someone do amazing work. And I guess that’s what’s changing. You said there’s these different little groups doing great work. There’s a lot more now. When CLO started in 1946, there was no touring Broadway, not like there is now. We had the opera, we had the symphony. The ballet came along. I don’t remember their ages. That was the thing. And then Pittsburgh CLO suddenly closes down in ’68, opens in ’71 at Heinz Hall. How all those groups existed in Heinz Hall is one of my mysteries, to this day.

So what has happened? Our population hasn’t grown, but we’re doing more. You still have buildings and crew and people and staff. But what we’ve done over time, that we’ve maintained that mission of nurturing homegrown talent, launching careers within my own time, seeing whether it’s a young Kai Sachon or Liz Leclerc who’s now off doing stuff, but also what the Academy does. … We’ve got kids who take off and go to Broadway, but that’s not what it is. To me, that’s the future audience, that’s board members, that’s people who love the theater. … If we can get them as young kids to be in their high school musicals, all that stuff we do, that’s building that audience to come back.

I think the shows we’ve created in my tenure, whether it be cabaret, with the Dungeons & Dragons thing — I remember an older donor, I love this, saying they have no idea what’s going on, “but I am so excited to see all these young people in the theater.” But they didn’t come back. They came for that, and the next year was Puffs, because I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll do Dungeons & Dragons, then we’ll do this Harry Potter. Nope. They’re coming for their thing. … When I was creating 3-21-, I sat down with Christopher Hahn, and he said, ‘Mark, opera fans will go where there’s opera.’ And if you want ballet, you know where to go. But the challenge for musical theater in this town is there are more options. I go to Front Porch, I go to the things that are happening at the Cabaret now, but that’s the difference. 

LEGACY: ‘THE ROOT AND THE HEART AND THE VALUES’

I’m proud of everything we did to come back from COVID, but maybe it needs to be shaken up. It can be something completely new. But I do believe in the legacy of CLO. … I have a friend whose mother was a Croatian immigrant who came and saw her first show in ’47 because her dad said, “This is what Americans do.” So they came to see Civic Light Opera, and now that woman’s daughter is in the Academy. It’s really been great to hear people’s stories of what it’s meant to them.

After telling his story of his 12 years here, the longest he had lived anywhere outside of his hometown, he leaves for another regional musical theater company, just outside of Nashville, that will produce a five-show 2026-2027 season. He leaves with questions for Pittsburgh audiences, and about the future of regional nonprofit theater in general.

As I move to another adventure with Patrick Cassidy at Studio Tenn, in a very different sort of model, I think that’s sort of what I’m intrigued by: How do you serve and what do you do, but still trying to be professional and pay people a living wage? I think there’s room for all sorts of theater. The question is, what do we want? I believe a true city creates culture, creates its own, not just imports it. But the shift of sands in terms of economics have made us take a different look. I was in those original [merger] meetings, and I still believe in the concept. I hope that things go forward, but I also hope that that legacy of the brands, of the Public and what that meant from that first production of The Glass Menagerie, and our first production of Naughty Marietta, all the way up through creating Broadway shows. And I think those things are very much important to the Board members that voted for this movement. And I believe they’ll look out for it. …

Looking back, like I said, I’m very proud of that COVID era, as scary as it was. And then coming out of it and then pulling together a team. It’s a very different organization than it was. But the root and the heart and values I think are maintained. And I think that’s been a strength. … I appreciate every artist and person I’ve met here, and I wish them the best of luck. It’s an interesting time.

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Tags: 2026, Benedum Center, Interview, Mark Fleischer, Merger, Pittsburgh CLO, Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, Pittsburgh Public Theater