[NEohioPAL] "Best of" Awards

[Bob Abelman]

Looking back at local area theater

 

Bob Abelman

News-Herald, Chagrin Valley Times, Solon Times, Geauga Times Courier

Member, International Association of Theatre Critics 

 

This retrospective appeared in the News-Herald 12/18/09

The holiday season and the end of the calendar year seem to bring out the melancholy in people.  With it comes the desire to review what has recently transpired with sentimentality and fond selective remembrance. 

 

Magazines do year-in-review features.  Television specials trace magical moments from the past season's primetime programming.  Theater critics do best-of articles that recall outstanding productions and performances.  Here's mine, but with a disclaimer and some small print.

 

Over the course of the past year, I have not seen every play that has been performed at every local area theater. It is simply not possible to do and still remain happily married.  So, "best-of" is relative.

 

National touring companies have been excluded from consideration.  They get enough attention.  

 

Best Performance by a Young Actress or Actor

 

The definitive Juliet was found in Chardon earlier this year.  In the Geauga Lyric Theater Guild production of Romeo and Juliet, Kelly Smith was as adorable as she was intelligent, intent and intense.  The 17-year-old from Willoughby South High School clearly understood the play and its poetry, mastered its language and rhythms, and exuded all the innocence, new-found desire and apocalyptic heartache that have made Juliet the universal poster child for teenage angst since the 1590s.   

 

Best Performance by an Actress in a Drama

 

Educating Rita is a carefully constructed, cleverly worded two-character tale, where a young British hairdresser desperately seeks to alter her existence by improving her mind.  Nancy Shimonek Brooks was a marvelous Rita in the Rabbit Run Theater's summer stock production.  She made her character's insatiable curiosity about poetry and literature tangible, and captured everything that is endearing and invigorating about a suppressed woman reaching for and obtaining her true potential.  

 

Best Performance by an Actress in a Musical

 

Jodi Dominick and Jessica Cope share this recognition.  They played "the girls" in the romantic musical comedy I Love You Because, a fun, frothy and effervescent indulgence.  They transformed fairly one-dimensional caricatures into richer characters and sold the series of song and dance self-disclosures about boy-girl relationships as if it were beachfront property.  They delighted the audience in the cozy 14th Street Theatre in downtown Cleveland, and did so consistently in an extended run. 

 

Best Performances by an Actress in a Comedy 

 

Rabbit Run Theater in Madison also produced the best performance by an actress in a comedy.  The play was Neil Simon's Broadway Bound' and the actress was Sandy Kosovich Peck.   Peck's dignified, endearing portrayal of a 1950's woman facing the ultimate upheaval-independent children, a faithless husband and a fading father-was a masterpiece of acting.  She was meticulous, always interesting without calling attention to herself, and never gave in to the temptation of sentimentality.   

 

Best Actress (as played by an actor)

 

In Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Dan Folino portrayed a psychologically and physically scarred transsexual lead singer in a glamour rock band.  Being Hedwig required audacity, vulnerability and the acting chops to expose one's soul on stage so the character's pathos could convincingly seep through to the audience at the intimate Hi Fi Concert Club in Lakewood.  This was not your mother's musical, unless your mother has an Adam's apple, and Folino was so much more than just a man in a dress. He was a man who looked good in a dress.

 

Best Part in a Drama

 

On August 20, 2008, director Jacqi Loewy donated an organ to fellow director, long-time dialysis patient and total stranger Brian Zoldessy.  Within six months after the transplant, Zoldessy went on to direct the world premiere of Cleveland Heights at the Performance Arts Center on the CCC Eastern campus and Loewy directed Neil Simon's The Good Doctor for Ensemble Theatre.  Loewy's left kidney was the best part of the one production and her heart was the best part of the other. 

 

Best Director of a Drama

 

The drama Yellowman reveals the racial prejudice that exists within the African-American Gullah culture in the Sea Islands of South Carolina.  It consists of richly descriptive monologues that are written as if they were jazz riffs.  Each has its own underlying rhythm-a musicality-that entices its performers to almost sing their lines.  Director Fred Sternfeld-no stranger to musical theater-was sensitive to these rhythms and cadences, and found the creative potential of their synchrony in this marvelous Karamu House production.  

 

Best Director of a Comedy or Musical

Me and My Gir" is set in England, where a family of snooty aristocrats discovers that the legitimate heir to the title of Earl of Hareford is a smooth-talking cockney hustler.  To bring this old chestnut of a musical to life and counterbalance some of its more (and many) monotonous moments, Mercury Theater director-choreographer Pierre-Jacques Brault had his cast and crew buy into a mindset of controlled lunacy, as if the atmosphere was saturated with nitrous oxide.  The production, which resembled a Marx Brothers film, earned very high Marx.  

Best Choreography

 

In The Comedy of Errors, twin brothers are separated by shipwreck and end up in the cities of Ephesus and Syracuse.   Great Lakes Theater Festival's rendition of this play transformed the city of Ephesus into a sensuous, contemporary Rio de Janeiro in the midst of a Carnaval celebration, complete with steamy Brazilian nightclub music.  The ensemble was infused with dancers who entered and exited the Hanna Theater stage in salsa-saturated and samba-inspired perpetual motion, courtesy of brilliant choreographer Martín Céspedes.  Céspedes' contribution had this production brimming with vitality from the opening moments to the play's conclusion.  

 

Best Performance by an Actor in a Drama

 

Kevin Crouch was so good as the brooding, suicidal aspiring playwright in the Great Lakes Theater Festival's production of Chekhov's 1895 play The Seagull, that numerous 911 calls were made during intermissions.  They were made on behalf of fellow audience members, who were so moved by Crouch's performance that they required intervention. 

 

Best Performance by an Actor in a Musical

 

In the James Barrie-based musical about a boy who won't grow up, John Paul Soto tapped the qualities of Peter Pan that made him adored by children and accessible to the adults who had difficulty envisioning a small but strapping male playing a part defined by legendary females on Broadway.  Soto was all unbridled energy and passion in this Beck Center for the Arts production of Peter Pan, and a genuine joy to watch fly, fight and crow. 

 

Best Performance by an Actor in a Comedy 

 

For Better, a satirical comedy staged by Actors' Summit in Hudson, revolves around a group of young professionals and their significant others-their iPhones, laptops, Bluetooths and Blackberries.  Keith Stevens played Michael, whose long-distance relationship with his wife is simultaneously enhanced and torn apart by technology.  He gave a hilarious performance, highlighted by a drunken cross-continental cell phone conversation with his best friend, played brilliantly by Tony Zanoni.

 

Best Set Design

 

Raskolnikov, the main character in Crime and Punishment, is a terribly conflicted young man struggling with his faith, his poverty and his radical belief that the heinous crimes committed by well-intended people are justifiable and above the law.  For the Cleveland Play House production, scenic designer Lee Savage built towering, peeling metallic walls for Raskolnikov's austere, one-room apartment and a deep, narrow hallway that leads to it.  The set actually generated a sense of vertigo for theater-goers, reflective of Raskolnikov's oppressive life and disoriented state of mind.  Way cool.

 



 
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