Ensemble’s ‘Water by the Spoonful’ adds gravitas by the tbsp when a tsp would do Bob Abelman Cleveland Jewish News, The News Herald, The Morning Journal Quiara Alegría Hudes, who studied music composition at Yale, is known in musical theater circles as the woman who wrote the book for the Tony Award-winning “In the Heights” and is the librettist/lyricist for the new musical, “Miss You Like Hell,” which opened Off-Broadway last year. She also wrote “The Good Peaches,” which received the inaugural 2016 Roe Green Award and a world premiere production at the Cleveland Play House, accompanied by the 55-piece Cleveland Orchestra. On the side, Hudes earned the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for “Water by the Spoonful,” the second installment of her Ortiz family trilogy, which is currently on stage at Ensemble Theatre. Even her writing in this dramatic work is lyrical. And the dissonant cords of the late jazz great John Coltrane, which play in the background, serve as a musical metaphor for the tousled lives of the recovering addicts and the returning soldier who populate this play. It is the lyrical, free-flowing nature of “Water by the Spoonful” that gets sadly overshadowed in this otherwise engaging Ensemble production, replaced by a tablespoon of gravitas when a teaspoon would more than suffice. For more of this article, go to www.clevelandjewishnews.com/columnists/bob_abelman/