Great Lakes Goes for the Cake

Friday, July 16, 2004
By Tony Brown, Plain Dealer Theater Critic

Summertime, and the livin’ is a little bit scary but very exciting for Great Lakes Theater Festival.

Without doing any kind of advance study to test the waters, Cleveland’s classical company is making one of the boldest moves in its long history, reinventing itself in its 43rd season as a summer-fall repertory theater.

The great experiment begins at 7:30 p.m. today, when Shakespeare’s "The Taming of the Shrew" hits the stage. It will play in repertory (alternating performances) through Sunday, Aug. 22, with "The Compleat Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)," which opens Friday, July 30.

"It’s summer, it’s bizarre, it’s scary," said Andrew May, the company’s associate artistic director, who’ll be playing Petruchio in the maiden production of the new order, "Shrew."

"We’re going on gut instinct because we don’t have the money to do a big marketing-research study," he said. "We could have kept on doing what we’ve been doing, which isn’t working, or we could change. So we’re changing."

The initial two-play repertory is all-Bard: the comic fireworks of "Shrew," which can be hard to stage because of its sexual politics but which offers juicy roles for actors such as May and Laura Perrotta, who plays Kate; and the slapstick farce of "Compleat Works," which packs all 37 of Shakespeare’s plays into one long romp by three actors.

There’s good news for fans of Great Lakes, which has operated for the past 13 seasons as a nine-month, September-May stock company, producing one play at a time. Summer Shakespeare companies tend to succeed, from the huge Stratford Festival of Canada to the tiny Cleveland Shakespeare Festival.

And few have succeeded as well as the medium-size Idaho Shakespeare Festival, where Great Lakes producing artistic director Charles Fee also holds a similar position. Over more than a decade in Idaho, Fee has built a $7.5 million amphitheater and grown the company’s annual budget from $300,000 to nearly $2 million. His dual directorship has created a producing partnership between his two companies.

Fee has done a superb job in his first two seasons at stabilizing the finances of his Cleveland venture, which operates on a $3 million annual budget, and streamlining the theater’s operations.

Most recently, Fee forged an agreement with the Cleveland Play House to use both companies’ costumers to construct most of Great Lakes’ costumes at the Play House’s larger, air-conditioned shop. The move allows Great Lakes to open two shows within two weeks.

To Change or Not to Change
Which begs the question: If the company is so stable now, why go changing it? To paraphrase Woody Allen, theaters are like sharks; they have to keep moving to survive.

"The past two seasons, we couldn’t have asked for better PR, great reviews, great community response," Fee said. "We’ve co-produced with Idaho and with Cleveland Public Theatre. We shrank and reconfigured and operated efficiently. We’re virtually out of debt.

"But at the end of the day, none of that has translated into significant growth. Nothing we’ve done has either exploded positively or been disastrously negative. Only when we can turn this into something that can grow can we continue to take artistic risks."

Institutional change of any kind carries its own kind of risks. Remember "New Coke"?

The initial reaction to the Great Lakes summer gamble hasn’t exactly been heartening: Season subscriptions were down at last report to 2,000 from last season’s 2,600, which Fee already thought was half what it could be. But the summer is still young, and Fee hopes that number increases and that single-ticket sales take off.

But hasn’t Great Lakes done the summer thing before?

The company was founded as a summer repertory theater in Lakewood in 1962 and has roots stretching back more than a decade before that. It stayed with the repertory schedule after moving to its current home in the Ohio Theatre at Playhouse Square through the 1985 season. And it continued producing in the summer through 1990.

"Summer was a difficult sell downtown then," said former GLTF managing director Mary Bill. "We were in a desert then. It’s a much more inviting environment to visit now, with everything there is to do downtown."

Fee and May are betting that Clevelanders are ready to go downtown for theater in the summer. Fee argues that he has a larger potential audience in summer because many theatergoers are "snow birds," people who spend the cold months in Florida or Arizona.

But they are also hedging their bets.

First off, it’s not a strictly summer season; it’s a summer-fall season with "A Christmas Carol" tacked on for the holidays.

"Shrew" and "Compleat Works" constitute the first part of the season. After a Labor Day break, Great Lakes will present two more plays in rep through Saturday, Oct. 16. The fall repertory begins with Oscar Wilde’s "The Importance of Being Earnest," opening Friday, Sept. 10, to which Shakespeare’s "Julius Caesar" will be added beginning Friday, Sept. 24.

The fall season will allow Great Lakes to perform extra matinees for schools, which by then will be in session.

The company’s 16th annual production of former artistic director Gerald Freedman’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’ "A Christmas Carol," a sure-fire moneymaker, runs Friday, Nov. 26, through Thursday, Dec. 23.

Luring People Downtown
Next, Great Lakes wants to sweeten the odds of success by creating a true festival atmosphere this summer, to make its plays part of an overall downtown destination.

Tourists stream to Stratford, Ontario, not only to see Shakespeare plays at one of the continent’s largest theater festivals but also to eat in nice restaurants and stay in snug bed-and-breakfast inns. Chicago Shakespeare patrons visit the company’s grand new theater on Navy Pier.

"We don’t have all those advantages," Fee said. "But we do have Playhouse Square, which is in and of itself a national treasure, these four gorgeous theaters lined up along Euclid Avenue."

Performers will entertain on the street. Neighborhood restaurants will open their doors and seat patrons at sidewalk tables. Hotels will offer weekend play-going packages, and Great Lakes is co-promoting with the Cleveland Indians.

An actor has been hired to play Shakespeare, who will roam the city drumming up business, and another (a man) to play Queen Elizabeth I, who will arrive for each performance in a horse-drawn carriage.

And in a public-art project, the "All the world’s a stage" quote from "As You Like It" will be printed on fabric netting and wrapped around the Hanna Building, a gesture that recalls the work of installation artist Christo.

Another project calls for a rendering of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre to be drawn in the intersection of East 14th Street and Euclid Avenue, but city approval has been stalled.

"We’re giving this our best shot to try to galvanize people to try something new," Fee said.

A No-Lose Proposition
Finally, Fee and May believe this is a bet they really can’t lose.

"At this point, even the worst-case scenario, even if we fall on our faces, we can bounce back," May said. "Given the small size of our operation, a complete failure would hurt us but not kill us. Cleveland’s entrepreneurial spirit would keep us alive.

"If we wind up with a mild-case scenario and just kind of stay the same, come in with a whimper but sustain, we’ll all wince. But then we will have gained all the scientific evidence we need. And then we’d try something else."

Fee and May said they remain committed to the summer-fall schedule this season and next, but after that they said they can’t rule out the possibility of a "Plan B." If need be, Great Lakes might try, say, returning to the suburbs, where much of its audience lives, instead of trying to lure that audience downtown. That would bring its own risks in finding a suburban venue that could match the draw of Playhouse Square.

What will it take to declare this a wager won? Fee would like to raise subscriptions above the 5,000 level, but he’s already behind on that goal. May said he would be happy this year with far less.

"If 100 new people came to the theater, 100 people who have never been to see a Great Lakes show, and six decided to come back, that would be a major victory for us," May said. "McDonald’s or Ford might look at that and say, Six new people? That’s nothing.’

"But for us, it would be fabulous. Our product is getting better, but it doesn’t quite have that defining aesthetic. But I’m beginning to see it. People are nodding their heads. And if we can just turn this theater around, maybe we can get there."

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:
tbrown@plaind.com, 216-999-4181
© 2004 The Plain Dealer. Used with permission.