Fred Anzevino, founder of Theo Ubique Theatre, dies at 67

Chicago Tribune

29-04-2025

Fred Anzevino, a touring Broadway performer turned Chicago director who created one of Chicago's most distinctive and successful neighborhood theater companies, died Monday at home in Evanston at the age of 67.
Anzevino's death was announced Monday night by the board of directors of the Theo Ubique Theatre Company, the company he founded. He had been in the midst of rehearsals for his next show.
Anzevino was the passion behind the strangely named Theo Ubique, a Greek-Latin hybrid meaning 'God present in everything,' a theater company he founded in 1997. He said at the time that he had grown weary of the increased commercialization of musical theater even though he had been a busy touring actor.
'Theater heals through honesty, concentration, simplicity, awe,' he told the Tribune. 'If one can evoke elements of the spiritual on stage, it can heal all people.'
He relished staging Broadway musicals in a tiny space. First at the Heartland Studio Theatre, then at the 60-seat No Exit Cafe, both in in Rogers Park, and finally in a custom-designed theater on the Howard Street border of Chicago and Evanston, Anzevino worked his magic through countless jewel-box productions of titles from Stephen Sondheim's 'A Little Night Music' to 'Pump Boys and Dinettes.' Several Chicago companies went on to produce so-called micro musicals in the city, but Anzevino was the first to do so with equal measures of integrity and success.
His secret sauce was his ability to spot, and then snag, formidable young talent. And then figure out how to make them shine.
His musicals often were cast with recent graduates of the city's leading musical-theater training programs, thrusting forward the careers of young graduates, many of whom went on to major careers. He also was able to forge relationships with two highly talented musical directors in Austin Cook and then Jeremy Ramey; Ramey worked with Anzevino on 42 shows over a 12-year period and said Monday night that he was 'heartbroken and devastated.'
'Fred was an institution and a teddy bear, all at once,' said Sawyer Smith, an actor currently working at the Signature Theatre near Washington, D.C. 'I remember meeting him for the first time. I was so nervous. All of the actors I admired had cut their teeth at Theo with Fred. He saw you intimately and knew how to get you to dig deeper. Once you were under his wing, he was your biggest champion. He fought for who he believed in, for what he believed in.'
'What Fred did for storefront musical theater in this city will always be unmatched,' said Christopher Chase Carter, a choreographer who worked at Theo Ubique. 'He set the standard.'
Born in 1957 in Providence, Rhode Island, Anzevino showed early promise as a baseball player but instead studied theater at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City, at Rhode Island College and at George Washington University. As a young actor, he was part of the national tour of the Tony Award-winning musical 'Big River.'
Although the cause of his death has not yet been determined, Anzevino was open about being an AIDS survivor and was a man who long had lived with HIV. He considered himself deeply fortunate, and it was that seriousness of purpose that informed both his work with collaborators and his deeply emotional productions.
At its creative peak between about 2008 and 2016, Theo Ubique shows dominated local awards ceremonies. Memorable productions also include stagings of 'Jacques Brel's Lonesome Losers of the Night,' 'Evita,' 'Chess,' 'Cabaret' and 'The Light in the Piazza.' Anzevino was not daunted by complexity nor by the seeming size of shows; everything, he believed, could be staged intimately, if you had talented collaborators. He staged 'Cats' in a room that many would have felt was barely big enough for a litter box.
With help from supporters and Evanston officials, Anzevino managed to raise enough funds for a new theater space which opened on Howard Street in 2018, just managing to get on its feet prior to the pandemic. Thereafter, Anzevino, anxious to give younger artists opportunities and fearing his generation was becoming out of step, stepped back some. But at the time of his death, he remained Theo's artistic director and was in rehearsal for 'Diana: The Musical,' which he was co-directing with long-time collaborator Brenda Didier.
Theo board chair Stephanie Servos said Monday night that the company's board of directors were devastated by Anzevino's death and that she hoped the company would be able to rename the theater in Anzevino's honor. 'Fred was like a father to me,' Servos said.
'The larger the theater gets, the more external problems there are and the more difficult it becomes for honesty to appear,' Anzevino told the Tribune in 1997. 'Spiritual and holy theater can only be performed in small and dingy spaces.'
Dingy disappeared over the succeeding years. But never the small, and never Anzevino's insistence that his art, and his artists, had sacred purpose.
Survivors include a sister, Joann Benedetti.
'He worried so much about me even though he was my little brother, Benedetti said Tuesday. 'Fred was just a very humble person. I'm going to miss him so much.'
Plans for a memorial service are pending.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.