Nearly 20 years ago, on June 5, 1997, Candlelight Dinner Playhouse abruptly announced it was canceling performances scheduled for that Thursday evening.

The theater, which opened in 1961 by a man credited with creating the concept of dinner theater, never reopened its doors at 5620 S. Harlem Ave. in Summit. The Candlelight and adjacent Forum Theatre buildings were torn down. The site is now a Portillo’s restaurant.

The Candlelight was a Southland institution. The offices for this newspaper’s predecessor, the Southtown Economist, were located down the street at 5959 S. Harlem Ave.

“A major force in the cultural life of the Chicago area is shuttered,” Chicago Tribune arts critic Sid Smith wrote in his 1997 dispatch about the Candlelight’s closing for financial reasons.

“This comes as a shock to us,” producer William Pullinsi told Smith at the time. “Candlelight’s closing is a commentary on the difficulties of producing live theater today ... We’ve been a family-run operation ... and our customers and staff have become like a family to us.”

I appreciate how many Daily Southtown readers have fond memories of seeing Candlelight productions of “Annie,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Man of La Mancha” or dozens of other shows during its 36-year run.

I witnessed firsthand countless parents celebrating anniversaries at the theater, couples on dates and groups of friends enjoying dinner and a show. To mark the 20-year anniversary of the theater’s closing, I thought it would be fun to invite readers to share their fond memories of evenings spent at the Candlelight.

If you have stories or pictures to share, please email me at the address listed at the end of this column.

I’ll start by sharing my own personal recollection of the Candlelight. I worked there, briefly, as a waiter for several months in 1987, during a production of “Little Shop of Horrors.”

I liked working in restaurants when I was in high school and college. I started as a dishwasher at a Poppin’ Fresh Pies in LaGrange, then worked for five years as a cook at the Wolf’s Head Inn in Indian Head Park.

My final semester of college in early 1987 became too hectic and I quit the cook job. When school was out that summer, my friend Ray Hood persuaded me to join him on the wait staff at the Candlelight.

Waiters and waitresses wore uniforms of white shirts with black aprons and bow ties. The workflow at the Candlelight was vastly different than that of a typical restaurant. There were fun hours of setup before shows, usually a busy hour serving dinners and drinks before a show began, an intense 15 minutes or so during intermission, then cleanup after the show.

The wait staff had downtime during the performances while the actors were onstage and the musicians played. Dulled by boredom during the shows, some of us would walk a block down the street to grab a beer or two and play cards at the Summit Meeting, a bar at the corner of Harlem and Archer avenues.

Like the Candlelight and Forum, the Summit Meeting bar is gone now. An Auto Zone store stands in its place.

After a few months I figured out the Candlelight waiter job wasn’t right for me. I disliked the long, awkward hours of downtime broken up by furious rushes.

I liked the people who worked there, though. I didn’t mingle too much with the actors and musicians, but they were always friendly. I remember working on New Year’s Eve, when couples could dance on the stage after the show. The band played a 20-minute instrumental version of “Girl From Ipanema.”

There was a kitchen matron named Mary, a Polish woman who enforced the rules and kept the staff in line.

I briefly met Pullinsi, who founded the Candlelight with business partner Anthony D’Angelo, in 1986 when he received an honorary doctor of humanities degree from Lewis University in Romeoville. I was editor of the student-run newspaper at the time and was introduced to Pullinsi backstage at the university’s theater.

“Are you related to Joseph Slowik?” I remember Pullinsi asked me.

“Yes, he’s my father,” I replied.

Pullinsi’s eyes lit up and he told me about how he studied acting with my father. I quickly realized he was talking about a different man, and set the record straight. My father, Jozef, was a mechanical engineer. Joseph Slowik taught acting at The Theatre School at DePaul University, formerly the Goodman School of Drama.

Slowik, the professor emeritus, died Jan. 27 at age 87, DePaul announced earlier this year. A scholarship is named in his honor.

I remember when Pullinsi stepped onstage to receive his honorary degree, Lewis University’s president talked about how much of an impact Pullinsi had not just on theater and the arts, but on the economy. He’d employed hundreds of people over the years, the president said, and his business endeavors created livelihoods for countless actors, musicians, technicians and restaurant workers.

Maybe that’s where I got the idea that Pullinsi seemed like a good boss, because a year later I took the job working for him.

Pullinsi, 77, retired at the end of 2015 after serving for many years as artistic director of Theatre at the Center in Munster, Ind. The Chicago Tribune, which annually recognizes artists of various disciplines, honored Pullinsi with its 2015 Chicagoan of the Year Award for Theater.

“For generations of Chicagoans, the affordable and unpretentious Candlelight was the very first place they came to see a Broadway-style show, without paying for Loop parking or worrying about getting there in time for the curtain,” Tribune theater critic Chris Jones wrote at the time.

At the Candlelight, Pullinsi and D’Angelo pioneered concepts such as staging commercial musicals in the round, mounting productions that ran for months at a time instead of shorter runs, and using stage hydraulics, Jones wrote.

“Pullinsi, who says he wants no fuss but hopes to keep busy in his retirement, has racked up Joseph Jefferson Awards like scoops of ice cream. He has directed or produced at least 400 theatrical entertainments in the Chicago area, a number unlikely ever to be bettered.”

Candlelight performers and crew have gathered at times for reunions or to celebrate former colleagues who have died. They share the perspectives of those who worked behind the scenes to make possible the many evenings of entertainment enjoyed by countless patrons.

I’m interested in those perspectives too. But mainly I’d like to hear from patrons about the times they remember having dinners and seeing shows with family members and friends at Candlelight Dinner Playhouse.

If I receive enough responses, I’ll share them in another column.

tslowik@tronc.com

Twitter @tedslowik