[NEohioPAL] The 2011 News-Herald Theater Critic's Awards

Thu Dec 22 06:57:38 PST 2011

2011 in review: The News-Herald Theater Critic's Awards

Bob Abelman

News-Herald, Chagrin Valley Times, Solon Times,

The Morning Journal, Geauga Times Courier

Member, American Theatre Critics Association 

This review will appear in the News-Herald on 12/23/11

Every year, local theaters devote themselves to putting on the best shows possible. Although some theaters have deeper pockets, more equity contracts or a grander facility than others, truly superb work is created regardless and, in some cases, in spite of these things.  Talent always makes itself known and creativity rises to the surface no matter the pay scale and no matter the palace.

The News-Herald wishes to recognize excellent productions and excellent performances from the past year.  There was no shortage of either on our local stages.

Only those productions staged in the greater Cleveland area and seen by this reviewer are considered.  All performances were seen during their opening weekend.  National touring company productions are purposefully barred from consideration; they get enough attention.  

Best Drama

My Name is Asher Lev

Cleveland Play House

Walk through any art museum anywhere in the world and you will find people staring and silent.  When in the presence of masterworks, there is the tendency to get lost in thought, overcome by emotion, and want to get as close to the art as possible, to see what genius saw, to fill the space that genius occupied, and to share the same air as the artistic immortals.  My Name is Asher Lev, a play by Aaron Posner adapted from the novel by Chaim Potok, is the theatrical equivalent of this.  In one act, on the now silent Baxter Stage at the old Cleveland Play House, we were afforded the opportunity to see, breath and touch genius up close and personal in the form of Asher Lev, a young artist growing up in a strict Orthodox Jewish community in post-World War II Brooklyn, New York.  This intriguing, thought-provoking play was directed by Laura Kepley and featured Noel Joseph Allain, Tom Alan Robbins and Elizabeth Raetz.

Best Comedy

The Miracle at Naples

convergence-continuum

David Grimm's The Miracle at Naples is a romp, pure and simple.  A mock piece of 16th century commedia dell'arte, the play features a company of theater vagabonds traveling through Italy to offer its repertoire of farcical comedies.  While actual commedia dell'arte doesn't shy away from bawdy humor, this play is in it up to the eyeballs.  As the play progresses, its veil of couth dissipates and in its place is a preponderance of lewd scenarios, crude wordplay, and F-bombs galore.  The thing is that this is all very funny stuff indeed.  Crudity turns clever when placed within the context of a 16th century comedy, and F-bombs are immediately defused when spoken with good intention by exceptionally talented performers.  The Miracle at Naples is very well written, was brilliantly directed by Geoffrey Hoffman, and was performed with abandon by Emily Pucell, Lucy Bredeson-Smith, Robert Hawkes, Lauren Smith, Ray Caspio, Zac Hudak and Stuart Hoffman.   

Best Musical

Daddy Long Legs

Cleveland Play House 

Written as a novel by Jean Webster in 1912 and recently transformed into an intimate, two-person musical by John Caird with music and lyrics by Paul Gordon, Daddy Long Legs is set in early 20th century New England, where Jerusha Abbott is the oldest orphan in the John Grier Home.  That is, until an anonymous benefactor recognizes her intelligence and creativity and sends her to college to be educated as a writer.  Required to write him a letter each month, each song is a correspondence being written by Jerusha, played wonderfully by Megan McGinnis, or read by the secretive man who has become her patron saint, played with immense charm by Robert Adelman Hancock.  The harmonies between these two performers were mesmerizing, as was everything else about this production.

Best Musical/Revival

Altar Boyz

Beck Center for the Arts

The boy bands of the 1990s, including New Kids on the Block, Back Street Boys and N' Sync, were a unique phenomena.  They generated soulless but heartfelt ballads sung with intricate a cappella harmonies and highly stylized, overly choreographed up-beat anthems that took the country's teen population by storm.  From this blip on the nation's pop culture radar and the contemporary Christian music movement that surfaced shortly thereafter emerged Altar Boyz, a sweetly satirical off-Broadway sendoff of the boy band.  In 2008, this show was staged at the Beck Center for the Arts in Lakewood.  It was a box office smash, due in large part to the charm and talents of its featured players, the superb direction, technical design and musical direction by Scott Spence, Trad A Burns and Larry Goodpaster, respectively, and the tongue-in-cheek choreography of Hernando Cortez. This past year, the creative team and most of the original performers (Josh Rhett Noble, Connor O'Brien, Dan Grgic, Ryan Jagru and Matthew Ryan Thompson) reprised this show at the Hanna Theatre in PlayhouseSquare and it was fantastic.  

Best Director of a Drama

Timothy Douglas, The Trip to Bountiful 

Cleveland Play House

In 1953, when it aired on NBC, Horton Foote's play The Trip to Bountiful fit the need for a small story about simple people to be told on a tiny TV screen.  "Bountiful" revolves around an elderly widower living in the claustrophobic, urban confines of her son and daughter-in-law, who desperately wants to get back to her hometown one last time before she dies.  Production values were expanded when this play went to Broadway and, later, when it became an Academy Award-winning film, but the Cleveland Play House production let the writing once again tell the story.  Director Timothy Douglas and scenic designer Tony Cisek created a nondescript, impressionistic landscape for this production, and Douglas added a layer of underlying complexity by casting black actors in the featured roles in order to shed some light on the little known black middle class in the 1940s.

Best Director of a Comedy

Laura Kepley, Grizzly Mama

Dobama Theatre

Political assassination is no laughing matter. That is, unless it is addressed by award-winning playwright George Brant and takes the form of Grizzly Mama-a commissioned, world premiere production at Dobama Theatre.  Grizzly Mama is a dark comedy that channels every liberal's deepest fantasy: squelching the rising tide that is Sarah Palin's push toward the presidency.  Director Laura Kepley had collaborated on Brant's Elephant's Graveyard, about the lynching of a circus elephant, among other productions.  She gets his humor and this is overtly evident in this Dobama production.  Everything about the staging kept the comedy in the forefront while embracing Brant's quick and quirky style of storytelling.  

Best Director of a Musical

Pierre-Jacques Brault, Grand Hotel

Mercury Summer Stock

Grand Hotel focuses on the intersecting lives of the eccentric guests of an opulent Berlin hotel in 1928.  Everyone is in desperate need of something they do not have and cannot possess.  Everyone is going somewhere but eventually end up where they began.  The original 1989 Broadway production of this show won five Tony Awards by generating grand theatricality, tumultuous atmosphere, and a churning pace.  Mercury Summer Stock director Pierre-Jacques Brault did even more with significantly less.  In the shoe-box that was the 150-seat Brooks Theatre at the Cleveland Play House, Brault stripped the shallow and narrow stage bare so that the interior brick walls and the stage's antiquated infrastructure of wire rigging and ropes were fully exposed, leaving only dramatic lighting, clever staging, and the omnipresent players to tell the story and create the illusion of the Grand Hotel.  Expressionism was accentuated in the place of elaborate production values in this brilliant, moving presentation.

Best Musical Accompaniment

David Keith Stiver, The Rocky Horror Picture Show

Chagrin Valley Little Theatre

Each time a community theater strays from things safe and Seussical, it is a small step in the right direction.  For the CVLT to venture into the realm of Richard O'Brien's The Rocky Horror Show-a science-fiction rock-n-roll sex comedy-it was a giant leap.  Well, more like a jump to the left and then a step to the right.  Much of the allure of this campy, over-the-top parody is its music, which did not arrive at the CVLT upon the delivery of the script.  Music director David Keith Stiver, drummer Andrew Rothman and director Greta Rothman recreated the orchestral arrangements and vocal score.  Along with Dennis Yurich (Electric Guitar), Dan Kamionkowski (Piano), Joel Negus (Electric Bass) and Cathrine Stadulis (Sax), the band rocked the rafters of the CVLT and attracted more young adults to the theater than in any other time in its 85 year history.

Best Musical Director

Larry Goodpaster, The Marvelous Marvelettes

Beck Center for the Arts

The Marvelous Wonderettes is a jukebox musical that stands on the shoulders of others.  Its musical score is comprised exclusively of previously released popular songs.  It features four female best friends who, at their 1958 senior prom, provide the evening's entertainment, which consists of hits from the era.  Caitlin Elizabeth Riley, Amiee Collier, Nikki Curmaci and Theresa Kloos have world-class singing voices that, collectively, captured the magical harmonies of the ageless classics they performed and, when placed as the lead vocal, sold those songs for all they were worth.  The music provided by Karen Langenwalter (reeds), David Maxson and Jesse Fishman (guitar), Bill Hart (drums), and Larry Goodpaster and Bryan Bird (keyboards) was tight, true to the original recordings, and absolutely transportive.  All this was under Goodpaster's marvelous direction.  

Best Performance by an Actor in a Drama

Dana Hart, St. Nicholas

Ensemble Theatre

The extended monologue-that is, one person, one story and a stage-has become a lost art form in contemporary theater.  It found its way home in the Ensemble Theatre production of Conor McPherson's St. Nicholas, under Sarah May's direction.  McPherson is a master storyteller and this work about a middle-aged, self-hating theater critic who befriends vampires overflows with vivid imagery and passages that are both powerful and poetic.  Actor Dana Hart mastered the material, made it his own, and was thoroughly enchanting in this production.  He managed to make the play's despicable hero relatable, if not likeable, and established a connection with the audience that reinforced his character's authenticity within this gothic fantasy.  He owned the stage for 90 minutes and made intermission seem an eternity.

Best Performance by a Supporting Actor in a Drama

Terence Cranendock, End Game

Cleveland Museum of Art

Samuel Beckett's Endgame takes place during the final hours of the final days of earth.  It introduces us to the last stronghold of the living-a decaying fortress whose inhabitants have been stripped of any semblance of rationality or decency.  These holdouts of humanity consist of a tyrannical blind man named Hamm who cannot stand, his shuffling servant Clov who cannot sit, and the tyrant's elderly parents who are kept in trashcans. In the Cleveland Museum of Art production of this play, under Massoud Saidpour's direction, Terence Cranendock is spellbinding as Clov.  As his character drags himself about the stage doing Hamm's bidding, Cranendock's acting choices are carefully orchestrated affairs.  Every decision by Clov seems to be laden with indecision; every action is a physically strenuous and emotionally exhausting enterprise.  Cranendock was wonderful to watch and his exchanges with the superb George Roth, as Hamm, made for some truly great theater moments.

Best Performance by an Actress in a Drama

Heather Anderson Boll, My Barking Dog

Cleveland Public Theatre

Eric Coble's one-act My Barking Dog, in its world premiere at the Cleveland Public Theatre, told the story of two single, socially isolated and depressed individuals-Toby, an unemployed office manager, and Melinda, a late-shift factory worker-who meet after witnessing a wild coyote at their apartment complex.   Their curiosity about the coyote's well being turns into fascination, which transforms into fixation, which morphs into increasingly disturbing forms of fanaticism and activism.  The fine line between reality and fantasy become as blurred as the border between urban sprawl and natural habitat.  Actress Heather Anderson Boll's physicality filled the stage and never failed to offer something absolutely intriguing to look at.  Sharing the stage with the brilliant actor Nick Koesters and under Jeremy Paul's direction, Bolls took incredible artistic risks and gave Coble's quirky character flesh and blood. 

Best Performance by a Supporting Actress in a Drama

Nancy Shimonek Brooks, Doubt

Rabbit Run Theatre

Doubt reigned supreme in the 1960s as Americans tried desperately to make sense of a world engaged in an unpopular war, in the midst of a civil rights movement, and embittered by the Catholic Church's attempt to bring change to the ways of worship.  Playwright John Patrick Shanley set his drama Doubt: A Parable smack in the middle of this period and shrouded the personal doubts of his characters within these broader conflicts.   Nancy Shimonek Brooks was spellbinding as Sister Aloysius, an old-school school principal who suspects young Father Flynn of having an inappropriate relationship with an eighth grade boy.  In this Rabbit Run summer stock production directed by Ann Hedger, Brooks captured all that is cunning, caustic and disturbingly stoic about this character, yet gave credence to Sister Aloysius' unflagging convictions.   Her performance was riveting.

Best Performance by an Actor/Actress in a Comedy

Jim Lichtscheidl/Sara Bruner, The Taming of the Shrew

Great Lakes Theater  

Once again, Great Lakes Theater committed literary blasphemy and artistic alchemy by re-envisioning one of Shakespeare's masterworks.  This time around the target was The Taming of the Shrew, which was transported from the 1590s to the 1980s, transmuted from the Italian city of Padua to a fashionable L.A. boardwalk, and transformed from a comedy to an all-out romp.  Shrew offers an epic battle of the sexes and this production featured Jim Lichtscheidl as a wonderfully playful Petruchio and Sara Bruner as a gum-gnawing, obstinate-to-the-core Katherine.  Director Tracy Young took everything that was Shakespeare's and upped it in intensity, velocity and frivolity, adding heavy doses of burlesque and a madcap 1980's vibe to the mix.  There was nothing that Lichtscheidl and Bruner could not handle and handle brilliantly.  

Best Performance by a Supporting Actor in a Comedy

Carl Simoncic, Art

Willoughby Fine Arts Association

 Art, written by Yasmina Reza, is an exposé of the bond between men.  Well, the bond between three middle-aged French men whose passion is art, who congregate in ultra-cosmopolitan man-caves, and who have no trouble sharing their deepest feelings with one another. Serge, a wealthy dermatologist, has purchased a trendy, expensive white-on-white painting.  Carl Simoncic was wonderful as Marc, a friend with classical leanings who is mortally wounded by Serge's modernist tastes and ridiculous purchase.  Simoncic's soft-spoken and controlled demeanor beautifully gave way to short-lived emotional outbursts, and he both recognized and utilized the quiet moments-the natural pauses the playwright works into the script-to expose his feelings.  This was a delightful production directed by James Mango that also featuring Tom Hill and Greg Gnau.

Best Performance by a Supporting Actress in a Comedy

Kate Tonti, The Dixie Swim Club

Aurora Community Theatre

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 Aurora Community Theatre production (Jackie Cassara, Chris White, Denise Bernstein, Jeri Neal, and Kate Tonti) 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.  Tonti, director Barbara Rhoades, and the rest of the cast had performed this show at the Chagrin Valley Little Theatre the previous season and received recognition from the Ohio Community Theater Association. 

Best Performance by an Actor in a Musical

Conner O'Brien, Company

Fairmount Performing Arts Conservatory, Professional Wing

Company is one of those shows where Stephen Sondheim's lyrics and music so outshine George Furth's script that many productions are more of a song-fest than a story with songs about the pros and cons of marriage.  Not so with the Fairmount Performing Arts Conservatory's production at the Mayfield Village Civic Center.  This was a Company chock-full of talented actors who could sing, dance and generate rich, interesting characters, brought together by a director, Fred Sternfeld, who married Sondheim's style with Furth's storytelling.  At the center of all this was Conner O'Brien as an immediately endearing, absolutely adorable Bobby.  He demonstrated the wherewithal to find all the lyrical and melodic complexities in Sondheim's work, the voice to effectively express them, and the acting chops to sell it all to an audience.  

Best Performance by a Supporting Actor in a Musical

Brint Learned, Assassins

Lakeland Civic Theatre

Assassins by John Weidman with songs by Stephen Sondheim is about the nine people who either killed or tried to kill an American President.  The concept that drives this precarious bit of storytelling suggests that what has been perceived as isolated political acts of madness are really the personal expressions of broken people seeking happiness.  They have just chosen a rather unique and creative outlet.  Brint Learned was brilliant as Samuel Byck, the Nixon-slayer wannabe in disheveled Santa Claus garb.  Learned's lengthy and emotionally charged monologue was a masterpiece and, under Martin Friedman's astute direction, one of many highlights in this fine production.

Best Performance by an Actress in a Musical

Maryann Black, Chicago

Porthouse Theatre

Chicago is about Cook County murderesses Velma Kelly and Roxie Hart, who find themselves on death row and in competition for notoriety in the fickle 1920s Chicago press. The musical is infused with jazzy riffs and clever lyrics by John Kander and Fred Ebb, and is forever stamped with choreographer Bob Fosse's signature sultriness.  Maryann Black, as Roxie, was flat-out adorable.  She lit up the stage and did so during the Kander and Ebb torch-songs as well as the opulent production numbers creatively staged by director Terri Kent and shared with the phenomenal Sandra Emerick as Velma.  Black is blessed with phenomenal pipes, musical theater wherewithal, and a body built for Fosse's provocative movement-which, as the show's choreographer, she nicely re-envisioned.  

Best Performance by a Supporting Actress in a Musical

Laura Perrotta, Cabaret

Great Lakes Theater

The musical Cabaret, directed by Victoria Bussert, takes place in the steamy, sweaty Kit Kat Klub where, amidst the hedonism, sexual decadence and burgeoning Nazi movement of 1930's Berlin, damaged cabaret performer Sally Bowles and naïve American novelist Cliff Bradshaw fall in love.  Interestingly, a secondary romance between landlady Fraulein Schneider and a Jewish store owner stood out in this Great Lakes Theater production.  This was due to a superb performance by Laura Perrotta.  More actress than songstress, Perrotta delivered her gorgeous duet "It Couldn't Please Me More" with John Woodson with dramatic flair and carried much of the dramatic weight of this show on her shoulders.

Best Choreography

John Crawford, Hello, Dolly!

 Porthouse Theatre

So many of the past summer's theater offerings were built to inspire serious reflection, somber reassessment, and solemn rumination.  Porthouse Theatre's Hello, Dolly! wasn't one of them.  This delightful slice of seasonal theater burst with the kind of contagious care-free exuberance that only a good, old-fashioned musical done well can muster.  Showcased in this production was John Crawford's lighter-than-air choreography that both captured the broadly stylized nature of the musical and imbued it with the same joyful musical theater sensibilities that won Hello, Dolly! the 1964 Tony Award for Best Musical.  Best of all was Crawford's work with the 16 members of the ensemble who masterfully executed complicated patterns of choreography as a corps of waiters and as promenading, waltzing, polkaing and galloping locals.   

Best Scenic Design

Daniel Conway, The Game's Afoot

Cleveland Play House

It is rare when the curtain opens and the scenic design gets a standing ovation.  Such was the case with Cleveland Play House's world premiere production of Ken Ludwig's The Game's Afoot.  The comedy takes place in famed stage actor William Gillette's Connecticut mansion, which was an authentic replica of a multi-tiered medieval castle complete with oak beams and banisters, massive doors, huge glass windows overlooking a snowstorm, and walls adorned with tapestries and weaponry.  Daniel Conway's set filled the Allen Theatre from wing to wing and from floor to fly-space and was awesome.  Sometimes budget can help bring to fruition creative vision. 

Congratulations to all those recognized and to all those others who have delivered wonderful work that enriched our lives. 
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