“The circus is leaving town.”
With these words, Teatro ZinZanni earlier this week abruptly pulled the plug on a show scheduled to run through early April. The long-running, Seattle-founded cirque/cabaret dinner theater known for its campy spectacle shows and iconic spiegeltent also cut its current Chicago show short and laid off staff in both cities.
“Attendance hasn’t been up to snuff,” said co-founder and artistic director Norm Langill. Combined with rising living and production costs, there simply wasn’t enough revenue coming in to keep running the productions, he said.
“In order to stop the losses, we have to do [a] closure. We have to … evaluate how to go forward,” Langill said.
In total, around 90 operational staffers are being laid off across the two cities. An additional two dozen performers, who are independent contractors, are seeing their contracts end early.
Langill said paying staff and performers was his priority, and he expects there to be enough cash to do so.
While the shows are ending early, Langill said this isn’t the end of ZinZanni.
The company is also retaining a small number of core admin and marketing staff as staff or consultants as we “explore our options in Seattle and Chicago,” said Jane Langill, Norm’s partner, in an email, though she noted that in Seattle, ZinZanni would shut down operating in the current venue.
It’s not the first time ZinZanni is folding up its tent with the hope of popping up elsewhere. Ever since having to leave its longtime Lower Queen Anne home in 2017, the company has been somewhat itinerant, most recently landing at Emerald City Trapeze Arts in Sodo with “Mr. P.P.’s Clubhouse,” originally scheduled to run through Sunday, April 12. The show started its run last October.
Final curtain call will now be Jan. 24. “If you have tickets for a performance scheduled after January 24, 2026, your purchase will be automatically refunded in February to the credit card on file,” a statement on ZinZanni’s Seattle website notes.
ZinZanni had struggled financially in previous years. After losing its longtime space, Norm Langill moved Teatro ZinZanni to the old Redhook Brewery in Woodinville in 2018 from a temporary location in Redmond’s Marymoor Park but closed it in 2020, citing financial hardships worsened by the pandemic.
In October 2020, several investors in the Woodinville site filed a lawsuit accusing Langill of diverting funds intended to be used for the company to instead pay his personal debts and for other non-company purposes; the parties reached a settlement in 2022.
That year, ZinZanni announced its return to Sodo Park, a historic factory-turned-event space in the Sodo neighborhood, and later to the Lotte Hotel in downtown Seattle.
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