[NEohioPAL] 2013 News-Herald "Best Theater" Awards
Bob Abelman
r.abelman at adelphia.net
Sun Dec 29 05:38:35 PST 2013
2013 News-Herald "Best Theater" Awards
Bob Abelman
- Final article for -
News-Herald, Morning Journal, Chagrin Valley Times, Solon Times,
Geauga Times Courier
Member, International Association of Theatre Critics
This review will appear in the News-Herald on 12/29/13
Every year, local theaters work hard and devote themselves to putting on the best shows possible. Although some theaters have deeper pockets, more Actors' 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 always 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. Most performances were seen during their opening weekend. National touring company productions are purposefully barred from consideration; they get enough attention and more than their share of column inches.
Best Comedy
"The Lyons"
Dobama Theatre
"The Lyons" served up epic domestic dysfunction as the evening's entertainment, with terminal cancer as its punch-line and some of the most unlikable characters to ever populate a stage to deliver it. Think "Seinfeld" with everyone a Costanza. What made this pathologically pathetic family so funny is that there was not a bit of bad intention in their complete lack of consideration.
Playwright Nicky Silver is the master of clandestine causticity and director Nathan Motta found performers capable of presenting all this dark, corrosive comedy without flinching at the toxic fumes. Dudley Swetland, Jeanne Task, Anjanette Hall and Christopher M. Bohan, as the
neurotic Lyons family, were an absolute treat.
Best Drama
"The Iceman Cometh"
Ensemble Theatre
You needed a drink or two after Eugene O'Neill's classic drama, performed last Spring at Ensemble Theatre. It was not because the play takes place in a bar or that the play takes four hours and four acts to tell its tale about men who can fall no lower that they come to this place to drink themselves unconscious. It was in celebration of how well this rich, wonderfully constructed play - directed by Ian Wolfgang Hinz - was performed. And because you didn't want to see Dana Hart as Hickey, Robert Hawkes as Larry Slade, or any of the other fine actors playing sympathetic characters drinking alone.
Best Musical
"Next to Normal"
Beck Center for the Arts
"Next to Normal" offers a vivid depiction of a manic-depressive, delusional woman -- Diana Goodman (Katherine DeBoer) - and demonstrates how her disease infiltrates, infects and isolates members of her family (Scott Plate, Chris McCarrell, Caroline Murrah). At the Beck Center for the Arts, this startling story was paired with magnificent storytelling by director Vicky Bussert and told in the intimate confines of Beck's black box theater space. The person you heard fighting back tears throughout the performance was you.
Best Director of a Drama
Raymond Bobgan, "Rusted Heart Broadcast"
Cleveland Public Theater
"Rusted Heart Broadcast" takes place after a technology-induced pandemic destroys life on the planet. Playwright and director Raymond Bobgan tells this tale through the second-hand storytelling of one small group of survivors, who offer a running narrative embellished with a visceral, highly expressionistic montage of chanting, original song, and highly stylized movement. Bobgan's creative stage management kept all this high-energy activity singularly focused and absolutely engaging, resulting in a particularly poignant production.
Best Director of a Comedy
Beth Woods, "There Is a Happiness That Morning Is"
Cleveland Public Theatre
Written in the rhymed verse of William Blake, "Happiness" features two professors whose area of expertise is Blake's 18th century poetry. They have recently engaged in a scandalous display of public lovemaking on the main lawn of their rural New England campus - a natural and joyful act Blake himself would have appreciated - and must now apologize to their students to save their jobs. One (Brian Pedaci) employs Blake's collection of poems that reflect the innocent, pastoral world of childhood to explain his jubilant behavior. The other (Derdriu Ring) uses Blake's darker "Songs of Experience" to justify her actions and rail against the school's inept administrator (Matthew Wright). Director Beth Wood's playful staging allowed the words and all the humor in this play to flow beautifully and provided enough engaging activity to balance out its defining verbosity.
Best Director of a Musical
Pierre-Jacques Brault, "Peter Pan: The Musical Adventure"
Mercury Summer Stock
It can be argued that Willis Hall's "Peter Pan: The Musical Adventure," with music and lyrics by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe, is a lesser version of the classic story. In the hands of lost- boy director Pierre-Jacques Brault, this production was absolutely breathtaking. As with all Mercury Summer Stock shows, "Peter Pan" was infused with unbridled imagination, unbound energy, and unparalleled talent in lieu of an unlimited budget. Gone are the sedentary set pieces, replaced with inventive and highly stylized representations of locations. Gone are the wires to create flight, replaced with Brault's astoundingly creative choreography to simulate the absence of gravity. All this engaged audiences in ways more concrete and less imaginative stagecraft could not.
Best Musical Director
Nancy Maiser, "Next to Normal"
Beck Center for the Arts
As musicals go, "Next to Normal" is a tough one to watch. It is not escapist fare, nor does it merely aspire to scratch the surface of heartache and offer songs about suffering with a security net. Brian Yorkey's powerful lyrics expose raw nerves to arctic air while Tom Kitt's pulsating rock-operatic score serves as a centrifuge to work emotion to the surface and suspend it there. Little dialogue is offered so as not to disrupt the music's momentum and impact. The on-stage six-piece string-heavy band, under Nancy Maiser's brilliant direction, adds to the intimacy of the storytelling. We are never far removed from the soundtrack of these characters' troubled minds for the duration of the play.
Best Performance by an Actor in a Drama
Lynn Robert Berg, "Richard III"
Great Lakes Theatre
Shakespeare's "Richard III," directed by Joseph Hanreddy, follows the exploits of Richard Plantagent. As do all of Shakespeare's histories, this one begins with a struggle for the crown, is followed by murder, disloyalty and betrayal, and ends with the fellow whose name is in the title being assassinated or imploding under the pressure of the job or his own demons. King Richard III hits the trifecta in his dramatic demise. Lynn Robert Berg plays the title character and is deliciously villainous, bringing to life all that is simultaneously appealing and appalling about Richard. From the opening moment of the play - when Berg boldly steps forward to reveal his character's ambition and put on display the twisted body that serves to represent his twisted soul - he owns the audience.
Best Performance by an Actress in a Drama
Laurel Hoffman, "Self Defense"
convergence-continuum
Carson Kreitzer's "Self Defense" is an intense fictionalized account of real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos' tribulations and trial. While Charlize Theron won the Academy Award for transforming herself into the Daytona Beach prostitute in the 2013 film "Monster," Laurel Hoffman's portrayal in this convergence-continuum production was thoroughly transfixing. Hoffman was a scowling, confrontational, perpetually pacing piece of work - a complicated composite of unrefined bravado, blind anger, survival instincts gone awry, and denial. She took on the awkward physicality of someone absolutely uncomfortable in her own skin, and did so with incredible conviction.
Best Performance by an Actor in a Comedy
Tim Walsh, "Skin Deep"
Chagrin Valley Little Theatre
"Skin Deep," a comedy by Jon Lonoff, is a painfully thin and woefully shallow bit of storytelling that is little more than a non-stop series of offensive fat jokes made at another's expense. Though valiantly delivered by local players, the show fell flat upon the utterance of the very first sucker-punch line aimed at the woefully insecure Maureen (Jenny Barrett). The show shifted gears when Joe Spinelli, played by Tim Walsh, showed up at Maureen's one bedroom apartment for a blind date. On paper, Joe is just another one-dimensional foil. Walsh stretched the stereotype beyond the playwright's conception, found tenderness where none existed in the script, and embellished those rare times when they did. By fleshing out his character, Walsh singlehandedly salvaged this production and this play.
Best Performance by an Actress in a Comedy
Laurie Birmingham, "Blithe Spirit"
Great Lakes Theatre
Noël Coward's "Blithe Spirit" is the comedic equivalent of a dry martini: a jigger of urbane smugness, a splash of slapstick, gently stirred (the worlds created by Coward are never shaken). The play, directed by Charlie Fee, revolves around Charles, a socialite and novelist who invites the eccentric clairvoyant Madame Arcati and friends to his house for a séance, hoping to gather material for his next book. The séance inadvertently opens a pathway for poltergeists. The best thing about this production was Laurie Birmingham, who's every motion and movement as Madame Arcati was superbly eccentric. Whether she was roaming the room sensing ectoplasmic energy through her wrists, waving aimlessly through air in search of the invisible Elvira, or dancing with abandon to attract the spirit she uses to allure those who have crossed over, Birmingham's hilarious actions never failed to raise the dead.
Best Performance by an Actor in a Musical
Pat Miller, "Spamalot"
Beck Center for the Arts
The 2005 Tony Award-winning "Spamalot" tells the legendary tale of the quest for the Holy Grail by King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table as filtered through the dribble glass that is the British comedy team of Monty Python. This is one silly, silly show, and no one better handled the comedy in this Scott Spence directed Beck Center production than Pat Miller. He was brilliant as Patsy, whose job as King Arthur's manservant was to simulate with two halves of a coconut the sound of hoof beats for Arthur's nonexistent horse. Every facial expression and each gesture placed a comedic glyph above the dialogue, adding flair to the festivities and enriching an already outrageous production.
Best Performance by an Actress in a Musical
Sara Bruner, "Sweeney Todd"
Great Lakes Theatre
Stephen Sondheim, like Shakespeare, knows to off-set his dark drama with broad comedy. In the Great Lakes Theatre production of "Sweeney Todd," directed by Vicky Bussert, that responsibility fell on actress Sara Bruner and her comedic portrayal of Mrs. Lovett. As she has done in past productions of the Bard's work - most notably as Katherine in "Taming of the Shrew" - Bruner's impeccable comic timing and delightful physicality wove its way through a rich, fully formed character. Her Mrs. Lovett was a creature who had been ridden hard and sent to the stalls wet, but still managed to be immediately accessible - even while singing about turning men into meat pies.
Best Choreography
Martín Céspedes, "She Loves Me"
Beck Center for the Arts
Sometimes quality trumps quantity, and this was certainly the case with Martín Céspedes' choreography in the genteel, old fashioned romantic musical comedy "She Loves Me." At the epicenter of this play is Georg (Jamie Koeth), a mild-mannered middle-manager, and Amalia (Rebecca Pitcher), a high-strung sales girl, who are feuding employees in a perfumery in Budapest. They loath each other until they finally realize that they love one another. The play is void of garish production numbers, but Cespedes' simple, stylish and charming choreography perfectly complements Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick's music and lyrics. Between Cespedes' eye for delicate, fluid movement and director Scott Spence's attention to detail in each and every scene, there is not a moment in this production that is not a very pretty picture.
Best Design
Wilson Chin, Scenic Design for "Rich Girl"
Cleveland Play House
Here is an example of set design perfectly complementing storyline. Victoria Stewart's romantic comedy "Rich Girl," a Cleveland Play House co-production with George Street Playhouse, transforms the flexible Second Stage space at PlayhouseSquare into a posh, lavishly appointed New York apartment with a view. The set, designed by Wilson Chin and lit by Matthew Richards, helped define tough-talking and hard-hearted financial guru Eve (Dee Hoty), while showcasing the graceless, polar opposite aspects of her daughter Claudine (Crystal Finn). Everything built for elegance gave way to amusement, helping to make this romantic comedy have just the right balance of both.
Congratulations to all those recognized and to all those others who have delivered wonderful work that enriched our lives.
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