[NEohioPAL] 2010 Theater in Review: "Best Of" Awards

Fri Dec 31 05:02:15 PST 2010

2010 in review:
Great theater performances, productions were
peppered around Northeast Ohio

Bob Abelman

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

Member, International Association of Theatre Critics 

This review appeared in the News-Herald on 12/31/10

I regularly review and critique the unique artistic merits of individual performances of specific productions at theaters in the greater Cleveland area. This week, however, I will compare and contrast productions, and offer for your consideration the "best" theater from the past year.

As with all competitions, there are small print disclaimers:

1. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?  Who knows, but if a brilliant production is performed in a theater and I don't see it, it is not subject to consideration for a "best of" award.  

2. All productions get better with age, but all reviews were conducted during opening weekend performances.  Thus, "best-of" awards are issued for productions that are great out of the gate.

3. Equity, professional non-Equity and amateur productions are in consideration for the same awards.  Truly superb work is immediately recognizable, no matter the pay and no matter the palace.

4. National touring company productions are purposefully barred from consideration; they get enough attention.  Many community theater productions are unfortunately excluded as well, the result of logistics, scheduling constraints and the inability to put Einstein's Theory of Relativity to practical use.  

Best Comedy

The Foreigner, Porthouse Theatre

Charlie Baker (Eric van Baars) is an unassuming Brit who takes a brief holiday at a fishing lodge in rural Georgia.  The reason for the holiday is ludicrous.  The rationale for being in a lodge in the Deep South is far-fetched.  The lodge owner is told that timid Charlie is foreign and does not speak English so he can avoid unwanted contact with others, which is absurd.  Some productions of Larry Shue's farce accentuate the sitcom scenario or the more disturbing, darker aspects of the play.  The Porthouse Theatre production, under the meticulous direction of Rohn Thomas, perfectly balanced the silly with the sinister and was thoroughly delightful.

Best Comedy/Revival

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Great Lakes Theater Festival

Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream is a delightful diversion about two young couples in love with the wrong partners, who venture into woods populated by mischievous fairies and fall prey to their manipulations of the human heart.  The playwright's pretense is that all this is but a dream; a pretense that was fully embraced and re-envisioned in the Great Lakes Theater Festival reprisal of its 2003 production.  This 1590s reverie was transported to the 1960s, where the dream was more hallucination, complete with surreal landscapes, period costuming and an interweaving of Beatle's music to facilitate the storytelling.  Directed by Charlie Fee, this year's version did not lose its charm or unabashed playfulness, despite changes in its venue and casting.  

Best Drama

Emma, Cleveland Play House

The Cleveland Play House understands Jane Austen.  It understands that her romantic early-19th century novels-turned-plays need to unfold at a steady pace to keep modern audiences onboard, they need to be saturated with extravagant scenery to best embellish the rich and colorful wordplay, and they require fine and polished performances to bring life to Austen's delightfully textured characters.   Michael Bloom's world premiere adaptation of Emma, under the direction of Peter Amster and featuring Sarah Nealis in the title role, did these things and did them brilliantly.  

Best Musical

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Beck Center for the Arts

If you've ever watched ESPN's coverage of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, it's probably not because of the high-stakes competition between left-brained gladiators. You watch it because there is something disturbingly entertaining about seeing physically, socially and emotionally awkward adolescents perform within this annual survival-of-the-smartest pressure cooker.  Such was the pleasure derived from the Beck Center for the Arts' production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.  Under the direction of Scott Spence and musical direction of Larry Goodpaster, this stellar local cast (enriched with a former Broadway company member) offered immediate g-r-a-t-i-f-i-c-a-t-i-o-n.  

Best Director of a Comedy

Peter Amster, The 39 Steps

Theater has the potential to create a conscience in self-absorbed audiences sheltered from the hardship of others.   Theater can inspire social revolution, propagate political upheaval and call into question religious dogma. Theater can change the world.  Thankfully the Cleveland Play House production of The 39 Steps, spearheaded by director Peter Amster, did none of these things.  This rendering of Patrick Barlow's aerobic stage adaptation of the classic, 1935 Alfred Hitchcock spy movie was a romp from beginning to end-a parody of film noir romantic thrillers, where every cloak-and-dagger genre convention and every Hitchcockian quirk was built for laughs and got each and every one of them.  Amster made it happen.

Best Director of a Drama

Jeremy Paul, Anna Bella Eema

The one-act Anna Bella Eema by Lisa D'Amour is a simple story of a reclusive mother and her 10-year-old daughter, who occupy the one remaining mobile home in a trailer park earmarked for destruction.  Through a series of soliloquies, they offer insight into their lives and their perception of the world that awaits them outside the protective confines of their run-down domain.  These characters are so socially isolated, psychologically damaged and thoroughly disoriented that memory merges with fantasy, experience is inseparable from imagination, and linear thinking becomes discombobulated.  In the collaborative Cleveland Public Theatre and Theater Ninja production of this play, director Jeremy Paul somehow pulled all this together so that it not only made sense but was a brilliant, intriguing piece of storytelling.  

Best Director of a Musical

Pierre-Jacques Brault, Annie

The musical Annie, based on the Depression-era comic strip about an optimistic redheaded ragamuffin, is performed often but it is not often performed well.  Many local theatres believe that a sold out run is the goal and not the reward, and the means to that end is a parade of adorable little girls who can belt, a handful of well-intended community players to repeat cartoon captioned dialogue, cardboard sets and a dog.  Director Pierre-Jacques Brault brought an authentic, artful Annie to the Fine Arts Association in Willoughby, complete with artistic vision, attention to detail and the intent to genuinely entertain its audience rather than placate them.  And the run completely sold out after its preview performance.

Best Performance by an Actress in a Comedy

Tracee Patterson, Dead Man's Cell Phone

Sarah Ruhl's absurdist comedy Dead Man's Cell Phone demonstrates how social media instantly connect us with, but simultaneously remove us from, one another.  Jean, an unassuming stranger with no life of her own, picks up a dead man's ringing cell phone and, by doing so, picks up his life where it left off.  Tracee Patterson, as Jean, was so profoundly unassuming in this Dobama Theatre production that she nearly collapsed in on herself.  Jean is pathologically plain, yet everything Patterson did to create this timid character was complex and captivating.  

Best Performance by a Supporting Actress in a Comedy

Kate Tonti, The Dixie Swim Club

The Dixie Swim Club explores the lives of five girlfriends who met in college and now meet each year at the same beach cottage to drink, swim, drink and support each other through life's unpredictable twists and turns.  All five actresses in the Chagrin Valley Little Theater production of this sentimental comedy were wonderful, but Kate Tonti was exceptional.  She played Vernadette, a human accident waiting to happen.  Every entrance came accompanied with increasingly improbable injuries and personal tribulations, and her comic timing was flawless.      

Best Performance by an Actress in a Drama

Dorothy Silver, Wings

Don't just take my word for it.  Fran Heller, Cleveland Jewish News:  "Dorothy Silver, the doyenne of Cleveland theater, gives a bravura performance as stroke victim Mrs. Emily Stilson, a woman in her late 70s who in her youth was an aviatrix and wing-walker..  The demanding role is the latest in a star-studded career of brilliant performances by this gifted actor."  Christine Howey, Scene Magazine:  Dorothy Silver, in what is basically a solo with backup, is surpassingly brilliant."  Tony Brown, The Plain Dealer:  "This is a performance of great economy that portrays a lifetime in delicate detail."  Roy Berko, Cool Cleveland:  "Every once in a while a theatre-goer gets to experience a great actress in a great role. Such is the case with Dorothy Silver in Wings, on stage at the Beck Center."  

Best Performance by a Supporting Actress in a Drama

Ursula Cataan, The Elephant Man

Bernard Pomerance's Dickensian drama The Elephant Man is based on the true life story of a young man who, in the late-19th century, goes from being a freak show attraction to the protected ward of a London Hospital.  The most touching moment in the play-a play saturated with such moments-comes when a theater diva beauty who befriends the beast dares to touch his hands, introducing John Merrick to his first taste of gentility and femininity.  Ursula Cataan was marvelous in this engrossing CSU Summer Stages production.

Best Performance by an Actress in a Musical

Jennifer Myor, The Scarlet Pimpernel

The hero in The Scarlet Pimpernel, a British aristocrat named Percy Blakeney, risks losing his wife and card carrying privileges to the Heterosexual Man's Club by assuming effeminate airs so as not to let on that he is actually the swashbuckling Scarlet Pimpernel.  The romance in this quirky Mercury Summer Stock musical, such as it is, was left to Jennifer Myor as Percy's French wife, Marguerite, who does not know about her husband's heroics.  Myor was featured in 13 songs and had the lungs, charisma and skill to make each song and each performance memorable.  

Best Performance by a Supporting Actress in a Musical

Sandra Emerick, Bye Bye Birdie

Aspiring song writer Albert is convinced he can make his fortune and marry his girlfriend Rosie if he gets rock and roll idol Conrad Birdie, soon to be inducted into the army, to sing one of his songs on TV's The Ed Sullivan Show.  Sandra Emerick brought what Chita Rivera brought to the role of Rosie in the original 1960 Broadway production of Bye Bye Birdie.  She was passionate, peppery, and possessed the wherewithal of an accomplished singer/dancer.  Emerick was a pleasure to watch and listen to in this Porthouse Theatre summer production.

Best Performance by an Actress (as played by an actor)

Everett Quinton, Oh Dad.

Behind every good man is a good woman and, sometimes, behind a good portrayal of a woman is a man.  Such is the case with Everett Quinton as Madame Rosepettle in the CSU Summer Stages production of the wildly gothic, avant garde Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad by Arthur Kopit.  Quinton sauntered onto the stage the way larger-than-life, aging and insane film star Norma Desmond strides toward the movie camera and says "All right Mr. De Mille, I'm ready for my close-up" in the film Sunset Boulevard.   His eyes were ablaze, his curled lips revealed a toothy madwoman's snarl, and his body dramatically entered the room ten minutes before the rest of him did.  This was a production with lots to look at, but you couldn't take your eyes off of Quinton. Not for a second.

Best Performance by an Actor in a Drama

Anthony Elfonzia Nickerson-El, The Great White Hope

Howard Sackler's The Great White Hope revolves around Jack Jefferson, a heroic figure based loosely on the first black heavyweight champion of the world, Jack Johnson.  It depicts the blind hatred this prizefighter endures by being a successful black man in pre-World War I America, exacerbated by his bold self-assuredness, his outlandishness, and his love for a white woman.  The play follows his tumultuous career and puts on display the tragedy of a proud man cheated by his handlers, degraded by the press, and beaten by racism.   As Jack Jefferson in the Karamu House production, Anthony Elfonzia Nickerson-El was marvelous.  His intimidating physical presence was wonderfully off-set by intelligence and playfulness, resulting in a very powerful, moving and compelling performance.  

Best Performance by a Supporting Actor in a Drama

Michael McArthur, It's A Wonderful Life

Sometimes the best performances surface in the most unlikely of places. In this case it's on a community theater stage in Chardon, in a rather modest Geauga Lyric Theater Guild holiday production of a rather mediocre adaptation of Frank Capra's film It's a Wonderful Life.  Because the film is so well-known and cherished, stage productions often embrace the film's iconic characterizations.  Michael McArthur-a diminutive Jiminy Cricket-of-a-performer-did this in his portrayal of benign angel Clarence, and did this well.  However, he added a humanity and humor that was all his own.  The lines he spoke were familiar, yet his performance was astoundingly fresh.  

Best Performance by an Actor in a Musical

Mitch McCarrell, Bat Boy

Bat Boy: The Musical is a modern-day gothic tale about a half-boy/half-bat struggling to find a place in the world.  Set to music.  Everything about this play and the Great Lakes Theater Festival production of it-from its outlandish characters to the quirky lyrics and campy production values-is fully intended for laughs.  The title role was handled brilliantly by Mitch McCarrell.  Behind his bat-ears, pointy teeth, sonic screeches and cave-dweller physique resided incredible athleticism, stage presence and a true song-and-dance man.  McCarrell's energy, charisma and his own buy-in to this production carried this show and the audience along with it.

Best Performance by a Supporting Actor in a Musical

George Roth, My Fair Lady

Director Paul Gurgol's approach to his Beck Center production of My Fair Lady was that it is a George Bernard Shaw play with songs.  As such, the musical's literary heritage and the power of the English language it employs so brilliantly were paramount in its presentation. Actor George Roth, who donned the tattered wardrobe of Alfred Doolittle, Eliza's ne'er-do-well father, was on the same page with Gurgol.  Roth's cockney-laced words were spoken as if they were poetry and showcased the Shaw-manship in this production.  His very presence on stage added a warmth that immediately altered the show's climate. 

Best Performance by an Actor in a Comedy

Nick Sandys, The 39 Steps

The storyline in the Cleveland Play House's parody of film noire murder mysteries, The 39 Steps, followed the adventures of dashing Richard Hannay as he inadvertently gets mixed up with double agents, accidently uncovers a plot to steal vital British military secrets, gets framed for murder and, of course, takes it on the lam.  All this was performed brilliantly by Nick Sandys as our square jawed and thin-mustached hero.  Sandys captured every aspect of the archetypical good guy sucked into a foul situation.  His clipped diction, perpetually cocked eyebrow and cavalier approach to danger were spot on and the physicality he brought to the role-particularly during the mock chase scenes-was a delight to watch.  

Best Performance by a Supporting Actor in a Comedy

Andrew Cruse, "The Walworth Farce"

Because the family unit was such an integral part of Dobama Theatre's dark comedy The Walworth Farce, each actor supported the others.  In the play, Dinny (Bob Goddard) fled Ireland for England with his two young sons.  Now grown men, Sean (Andrew Cruse) and Blake (Daniel McElhaney) share a crowded, dilapidated flat with their father, which they never leave and where, at their father's insistence, they compulsively and repeatedly retell Dinny's distorted and broadly stylized take on the family history.   Cruse's portrayal was wonderfully textured, tender and, yes, humorous.  He effectively communicated Sean's social retardation while simultaneously showing us a small spark of self-realization.  

Best Choreography

John Crawford, Bye Bye Birdie

The Porthouse Theatre production of Bye Bye Birdie, under the direction of Terri Kent, embraced all that is light, buoyant and comedic in this musical.  These qualities were particularly evident in John Crawford's choreography, which celebrated the energy and innocence of early-1960s youth by having the small town teens spontaneously burst into exuberant and clever dance routines with no provocation whatsoever.  The dancing was performed by a superb ensemble of mostly Kent State University musical theater majors.  

Best Scenic Design

Robert Mark Morgan, Emma

Robert Mark Morgan's scenic design in the Cleveland Play House production of Emma not only captured the time and temperament of Emma's rural early-19th century England existence, but painted marvelous portraits with set pieces that rose from the flooring and gorgeous scenery that dropped from the ceiling.  Each scene was seamlessly constructed and added to the fluidity of Jane Austen's storytelling.      

Congratulations to all those recognized and to all those others who have delivered wonderful work that enrich our lives.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.neohiopal.org/pipermail/neohiopal-neohiopal.org/attachments/20101231/b23c924b/attachment-0003.htm>