BY DAVID MCKEE

Late Monday, in a startlingly candid press release, Onyx Theatre gave Artistic Director Sirc Michaels the chop. Despite having “lent his considerable talent, experience, and energy to revitalizing the venue and bringing new works to its audiences, making it a hotspot for local theatre practitioners, and breath[ing] new life into” Onyx’s own productions, Michaels received an involuntary “tearful farewell.”

Ironically, the ouster shortly follows a second sellout run Michaels’ staging of Evil Dead The Musical at Onyx. A year ago, prior to Michaels’ short-lived tenure, Onyx’s 2010-11 season had fallen into chaos and theater owner Michael Morse was plugging the gaps with whatever could be imported at short notice. The new artistic director, despite some early missteps (like the badly mishandled Sin City Shortsfest), soon put together an ambitious production schedule, including Evil Dead, much of its $10,000 budget raised online.

Wrote Morse, “If it wasn’t for Sirc there’s a good chance the theatre would not currently be open. But now that he’s helped us through the hard times,” Michaels gets the boot, and with him goes a production slate of seven shows, including Debbie Does Dallas and The Texas Chainsaw Musical. As Michaels said in a prepared statement, “No one likes to see their hard work come to nothing.” (Update: Michaels says Texas Chainsaw and the also-proposed Christ Alive! will be staged elsewhere.)

Morse ended Michaels’ high-profile termination notice by saying “we want to move on to projects we think are better for our community and more closely represent the edgy, exciting, alternative material our audiences have come to expect from us in the past … Naked Boys Singing, Miss Coco Peru and Silence of the Clams. In other words, fewer of the “new works” Michaels was crediting with bringing, and undoubtedly slimmer box-office takings for Onyx, whose pre-Michaels offerings were routinely in the habit of opening to 20 customers or fewer.