Great Lakes Theater Festival Hires Chief

Thursday, June 06, 2002
By Tony Brown, Plain Dealer Theater Critic

Great Lakes Theater Festival not only hired a new leader yesterday, it entered into what promises to be a partnership with another classical company in a small but dynamic city 2,000 miles west of Cleveland.

The new man is Charles Fee, and his title will also be new: producing artistic director. He will take over Cleveland’s $3.5 million troupe next fall. He replaces artistic director James Bundy, who leaves this month to become dean of the Yale School of Drama.

Fee, 44, will keep his current job as artistic director of the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, a $1.8 million company in Boise. It produces five plays from June through September. Great Lakes operates from September through May. Fee will keep his home in Boise but is expected to buy one in Cleveland as well.

“What I’ve got is one year-round job,” said Fee, whose friends call him Charlie. “It just happens to be in two cities.”

Fee and the boards of both theaters expect it will become something more than that: a loose partnership between the two theaters that could create artistic product superior to what either theater could do on its own.

“One plus one does equal three,” said David P. Porter, presi dent of the Great Lakes board.

Porter said Great Lakes wants to produce more classic plays by writers such as Shakespeare and Shaw. He says it might make sense to develop plays in Cleveland for later production in Boise and vice versa.

Fee said it’s a concept he’s been thinking about and exploring for the past couple of years.

“I create a ‘Hamlet,’ perform it 14 times and then throw it in the garbage can,” Fee said. “That’s just not smart. Classical theater is hard to produce in any of our cities. We need to be thinking of ways to produce it better and smarter.”

Fee said he’s not interested in creating a touring show that would play multiple cities. In fact, such an approach would be impossible. The Boise theater is located in a 610-seat open-air amphitheater that has a thrust stage that extends into the audience. Great Lakes performs in the Ohio Theatre, a traditional, 1,000-seat theater whose audience chamber and stage are separated by a proscenium arch.

“I’m thinking about a different model: build a production of a Shakespeare play, leave it and then rebuild it and recast it with the same director and creative team and make it better the next time,” Fee said.

Fee will get a chance in his very first season to show what he means. Great Lakes announced three of its four main stage shows for the 2002-03 season, leaving the final slot open for the new artistic director. Fee plans to direct Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” a remount of a production he directed in 1997 in Boise.

When Fee arrived in Boise 11 years ago, the Idaho Shakespeare Festival was “a ficus tree in the corner with the last leaf on it,” said Dana Oland, the arts and culture writer for The Idaho Statesman newspaper.

During Fee’s tenure, the theater raised money to build its current $4.5 million home on the banks of the Boise River and doubled the audience to 50,000 a year. Although that is below Great Lakes’ 77,849 attendance record, set in 2000-01, it is far higher percentage of its home city’s population.

With 2.85 million people, Greater Cleveland has more than twice the population of the entire state of Idaho, which has 1.3 million people.

But the Boise metropolitan area, with 230,000 people, was the seventh-fastest growing city in the country in the 1990s, increasing its numbers by more than 46 percent. The Cleveland area grew by 3 percent in the same period.

Fee, who has a master’s degree from Southern California’s La Jolla Playhouse/University of California at San Diego program, regularly brings in inventive directors such as Bartlett Sher, artistic director of Seattle’s Intiman Theatre, whose productions move on from Boise.

Sher’s “Richard III,” for instance, was created at Boise in 1992 and was rebuilt and restaged at Great Lakes in 1998. Sher’s 1998 “Cymbeline” went from Boise to Seattle, the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford, England, and then to an off-Broadway house in New York.

Great Lakes will end the fiscal year later this month with a loss, but it will be more than covered by cash that is in reserve from a money-raising campaign from several seasons ago. The city’s other, larger, nonprofit theater, Cleveland Play House, has announced layoffs to help cope with shortfalls. The Idaho Shakespeare Festival has operated in the black every year since Fee arrived.

Fee, married to Boise State University teacher Lidia Fee and father to 7-year-old Alexa Elisabetta Fee, said he hopes to bring some of the dynamics of his booming city and its Shakespeare festival to Great Lakes and Cleveland. But he also acknowledged that it may be a tall order to fill.

“What I’m hearing in Cleveland is that it’s time for us to get going, to get the energy back into the city,” Fee said. “I’ve never worked in a non-West city, and when I walked around downtown and saw all those empty storefronts there, I was taken by surprise. But you know, those empty storefronts represent nothing but opportunities.”

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:
tbrown@plaind.com, 216-999-4181
© 2002 The Plain Dealer. Used with permission.