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Keillor leaving St. Paul?

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Garrison Keillor said the show will leave the Fitzgerald Theater, which Minnesota Public Radio bought for the show in 1980. (Photo: Andrea McAvey )
A Prairie Home Companion is changing homes for the spring. Garrison Keillor says he's decided to replace the radio show's traditional five-week spring stint at the Fitzgerald Theatre in St. Paul with more touring. The news has some people wondering if he'll return to the Fitzgerald next year... or at all.

St. Paul, Minn. — Garrison Keillor says he's worried. He says after 30 years of A Prairie Home Companion, he thinks his St. Paul fans might be getting a little tired of him.

"I just feel I need to move on before the audience tells me to," he says.

Usually Keillor's music and theater variety show resides a few weeks each spring and fall at the Fitzgerald. It spends the rest of the season on tour, or at its second home at the Town Hall Theater in New York.

But this spring Keillor is replacing the Fitzgerald performances with shows in Rochester, Morris and Minneapolis, and in Vermillion, South Dakota. He says it's all part of an attempt to keep the show fresh.

"I find oddly as I keep doing this that I'm more and more attached to it and I find it more and more fun to do, and so I'm extremely leery of wearing out the audience in one place," he says.

Minnesota Public Radio president Bill Kling declined a request for an interview but did submit a written document stating A Prairie Home Companion's decision to go on tour this spring is not at all unusual. Kling says MPR would be thrilled to have the radio show back at the Fitzgerald for the fall 2006 season - and beyond - but that MPR respects the decisions made by Keillor and A Prairie Home Companion.

The public positioning statements are polite, but Keillor admits he's had disagreements in recent months over Minnesota Public Radio's management of the Fitzgerald Theater, involving the recent on-location filming of Robert Altman's movie about the radio show, and the departure of the theater's long-time manager.

"I wouldn't lie to you about that; there has been some ill-feeling there, but down deep the real reason is that a show has to find its audience," Keillor says.

While he's taking the show on the road this spring, Keillor stresses that he has no idea what he'll do with the show next fall.

For its part, MPR management is unlikely to be happy with Keillor's latest move. A Prairie Home Companion and the Fitzgerald Theater were important factors that led to MPR's decision to expand its offices in its current location instead of finding a new home.

MPR bought the theater in 1980, two years after A Prairie Home Companion began performing there. The weekly radio show has been the mainstay of the theater's season ever since.

It's also been an attraction for the city of St. Paul. Brad Toll, vice president of marketing for the St. Paul RiverCentre Convention and Visitors Bureau Authority, says A Prairie Home Companion has a financial impact on the city, because many people who travel downtown for the show also pay for parking and eat at local restaurants. But he says losing A Prairie Home Companion would mean more than just dollars.

"St. Paul has been very proud to say we're the home of Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion show at the Fitzgerald Theater and as we bring media through St. Paul on tours and tell them about St. Paul, we always point out the Fitzgerald Theater and the fact that the show is produced there and now as well the movie was produced there," according to Toll.

The Fitzgerald Theater was built in 1910 and called the Sam S. Shubert Theater. It's St. Paul's oldest surviving theater space. In 1933 it was converted into a movie house for foreign films and renamed the World Theater. In 1994 Keillor petitioned to have it named after St. Paul native and author F. Scott Fitzgerald. Toll says he hopes to see A Prairie Home Companion back in the theater next year.

There are only three more Prairie Home Companion shows currently booked at the Fitzgerald.

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