[NEohioPAL] Top-10 Memorable Moments in Cleveland Theater, 2013 Edition

[Bob Abelman]

Top-10 Memorable Moments in Cleveland Theater, 2013 Edition

 

Bob Abelman

Chagrin Valley Times, Solon Times,

Geauga Times Courier

Member, International Association of Theatre Critics 

 

This review will appear in the News-Herald on 1/3/14

 

When we reflect back on a live theatrical production, it is usually a specific moment that we recall - an instant when a playwright's idea, a director's vision, and an actor's performance become one.

 

Such moments seem frozen in time, suspended in space and are remembered forever.  It is these isolated, elusive moments that keep theatergoers coming back for more, year after year.

 

Theatrical missteps and miscarriages are similarly memorable and, often, just as entertaining.  Awe can be found in work both awesome and awful.

 

Here are ten of this past year's most memorable moments - both fantastic and unfortunate - from productions that have graced Cleveland's amateur and professional stages.

 

10.  Not that there's anything wrong with that.  Dobama Theatre's "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 populate a stage to deliver it.  Think "Seinfeld" with everyone a Costanza.  Playwright Nicky Silver is the master of comedic causticity and director Nathan Motta found performers capable of delivering all his dark, corrosive humor without flinching at the toxic fumes.  The audience met every line uttered by Dudley Swetland, Jeanne Task, Anjanette Hall and Christopher M. Bohan with a moment's hesitation - the silence of shock - before the laughter flowed loud and long.  

 

9.  Fine dining.  It is a rare and wonderful thing when the low-budget, no-frills theater space that is the Chagrin Valley Little Theatre's River Street Playhouse puts on a show that is actually intended to be low-budget and no-frills.  Equally rare and wonderful is when the typically safe and conservative community theater company opens itself up for something as blatantly irreverent, thoroughly inane, and joyously stupefying as Trey Parker's "Cannibal! The Musical."  This show about a very odd assortment of miners who embark on an ill-fated expedition from Utah to Colorado was funny to the core.  But it was those astute, groan-worthy add-ons and contemporary, localized references inserted by director/music director Andrew Rothman that made this show hilarious.

 

8.  Beauty isn't skin deep.  Sadly, "hilarious" does not describe an ill-fated earlier effort by this same theater called "Skin Deep."  This painfully thin, woefully shallow comedy was little more than a non-stop series of offensive jokes at others' expense. Though valiantly delivered by local players, the show fell flat and stayed there upon the utterance of the very first sucker-punch line of the first-of-many fat jokes.  Half-hour TV sitcoms generate a joke every 15 seconds; damn the character development, plot progression and dramatic arc, man, full speed ahead.  When a full-length comedy for the stage excludes those key elements, it is a formula for failure.  Playwright Jon Lonoff must not have gotten the memo.  

 

7. Tour de force.  PlayhouseSquare's Broadway Series delivers some of the best of Broadway's national tours to our doorstep.  They are the most expensive theater tickets in town, but patrons are likely to witness truly magical moments when stunning stories merge with astounding storytelling.  The 2012 Tony Award-winning musical "Once" revolves around a disheartened, disenfranchised Irish street musician.  During the opening night performance of one of his gorgeous, impassioned folk-rock anthems about heartbreak, a guitar string snapped mid-song.  Actor Stuart Ward continued playing, as if such misfortune was commonplace in his character's life and was almost. expected.  That moment made the character and his journey all the more interesting.

 

6.  Less is not more.  "I wish I could tell you about the South Pacific..   I wish I could tell you about the sweating jungle, the full moon rising behind the volcanoes, and the waiting.  The waiting.  The timeless, repetitive waiting."  There's passion in the words of James A. Michener, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning novel-turned-musical revealed the dramatic story of young American sailors stationed in the Pacific Islands during World War II.  Sadly, passion was the thing missing from this summer's production of "South Pacific" at Porthouse Theatre.  As a cost-saving measure, two pianos rather than an orchestra were employed, which failed to fill the 500-seat open-air pavilion with the majestic music of Rodgers and Hammerstein and carry the audience to the far-away beaches of Bali Ha'i.  The sense of timeless, repetitive waiting - for a richer, fuller orchestration during each musical number - was certainly achieved.

 

5.  Bringing out the old to ring in the new.  The first production by the new Mamaí Theatre Company was "Medea," written by Euripides around 431 BC.  This play is the standard-bearer of tragedies that explores the hellacious fury of a woman scorned.  Traded in for a younger model by her husband, Medea flies into fits of rage and engages in a bloody, vengeful rampage.  Registering at the extreme end of the sliding scale of sanity, as well as the Richter Scale of intensity, Tracee Patterson's Medea was so terrifying that even her crop of blond hair seemed traumatized.  Despite her full-body rage, there was an underlying intelligence, deliberation and wit that came through, which made her all the more terrifying.  This Medea's dramatic mood swings created vertigo. and resulted in one of the most memorable performances of the year.  Ms. Patterson can next be seen in "Deathtrap" at Great Lakes Theatre.

 

4.  Bi-Polar x 2.  As musicals go, "Next to Normal" is a tough one to watch.  This Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning show offers a vivid depiction of a manic-depressive, delusional woman - Diana Goodman - and demonstrates how her disease infiltrates, infects and isolates members of her family.  Brian Yorkey's powerful lyrics expose raw nerves while Tom Kitt's pulsating rock-operatic score serves as a centrifuge to work emotion to the surface and suspend it there. The Lakeland Civic Theatre production under Martin Friedman's direction, with Amiee Collier as Diana, was brilliant.  So, too, was the Beck Center for the Arts production two weeks later, under Vicky Bussert's direction and with Katherine DeBoer playing the lead.  Those fortunate enough to catch either production are probably still weeping from the experience. 

 

3.  Misery loves company.  Women did not have the corner on the market of crazy this season.  As do all of Shakespeare's histories, "Richard III," directed by Joseph Hanreddy at Great Lakes Theatre, begins with a struggle for the crown, is followed by 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.  Lynn Robert Berg played the title role and was deliciously villainous, bringing to life all that is appealing and appalling about Richard.  From the opening moment of the play - when Mr. Berg boldly stepped forward to put on display the twisted body that served to represent his twisted soul - he owned the audience.  

 

2.  Never land.  It can be argued that Willis Hall's "Peter Pan: The Musical Adventure" is a lesser version of the J. M. Barrie classic.  In the hands of lost-boy director/choreographer Pierre-Jacques Brault, and starring Pan-esque actor Brian Marshall, the Mercury Summer Stock production was absolutely breathtaking.  As with all MSS shows, "Peter Pan" was infused with unbridled imagination, unbound energy, and unparalleled talent in lieu of an unlimited budget.  Gone were sedentary set pieces, replaced by inventive and highly stylized representations of locations.  Gone were wires and rigging to create flight, replaced by astoundingly creative movement to simulate the absence of gravity.  From the moment Peter's shadow was cast upon the theater walls, the audience was engaged in ways less creative stagecraft cannot tap. 

 

1.  More Fairy Tales.  It's not as if the "Sleeping Beauty" story has been in hibernation.  Since its publication by Charles Perrault in 1697, it has at the very least inspired Tchaikovsky's ballet score in the late-1800s, the Brothers Grimm fairytale in 1917, Walt Disney's animation in 1959, and an edgy, modern-day film by Julia Leigh that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011.  This romantic tale about a beautiful princess, the enchantment of sleep, and a devoted prince was told once more on the Palace Theatre stage at PlayhouseSquare by master storyteller/choreographer Matthew Bourne.  It took the form of dance-theater set to Tchaikovsky's score and placed in a darkly gothic setting that mixed ballet with contemporary movement.  This national tour was wonderful in conception and - from the moment the curtain opened - gorgeous in execution.

 

Here's to more memorable theater moments in the year to come.

 

 
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