Changes Are Paying Off for Innovative Great Lakes

Sunday, July 24, 2005
By Tony Brown, Plain Dealer Theater Critic

There’s always Plan A.

When producing artistic director Charles Fee sought to revitalize Great Lakes Theater Festival by switching it from a school-calendar season in 2003-04 to a summer repertory/fall repertory schedule later in 2004, a quarter of his subscribers got up and left.

So Fee started floating contingency plans and found one he liked even better than his initial proposal. With an infectious zest typical of Fee, he started persuading key board members and contributors even before the first show of that first summer/fall season had opened.

All Fee had to do was get through a second helping of the initial proposal as promised – the 2005 season opens Friday with a preview of Shakespeare’s farcical Falstaff comedy, “The Merry Wives of Windsor” – and the obsessive-compulsive innovator was free to whip up a new variation for ’06.

And then it happened. When you least expect it: success.

Season ticket sales for 2005 are up sharply, 23 percent, almost enough to make up for last summer’s shellacking at the box office. Individual ticket sales have started climbing, too.

“Who can complain that they’re selling tickets?” Fee said. “People don’t like change, but we’re seeing them come around. We’re just trying to see what works best for everybody.”

For now, Fee’s bird-in-the-hand philosophy means this season will operate much as last year’s did.

“Merry Wives” will run two weeks on its own before being joined in “rolling rep” – the same cast of actors performing two shows at alternating performances – on Friday, Aug. 12, by the great Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman comedy “You Can’t Take It With You.”

The season continues in late summer with the fall rep.

Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus,” the Tony and Academy Award-winning story about Mozart and mentor/rival Salieri, begins previews Friday, Sept. 16. Two weeks later, on Friday, Sept. 30, the fall cast will begin switching between it and Shakespeare’s “all the world’s a stage” comedy about romance, “As You Like It.”

“A Christmas Carol” remains in its usual holiday slot.

If the format of the season looks much like last year, so does much of the personnel. It’s largely a mix of the best of Cleveland’s best professional actors and those from Idaho Shakespeare Festival, an outdoor summer theater in Boise, where Fee is also producing artistic director.

Expect more of the same in the future. Fee wants to strengthen and formalize a relationship he fostered between the two theaters that has sent shows from the upper Rockies to the Great Lakes and vice-versa. Much of the Great Lakes board will go to Idaho this summer for the full Boise.

Plan B and a half
One of Fee’s still-possible Plan B variations involves moving Great Lakes to a spring rep/fall rep split, allowing the theater to better capture students while they are in school.

And it would also enable Great Lakes’ two spring shows to travel to Idaho for the first part of the Boise season, while the final two shows from the Idaho summer would come to Cleveland in the fall.

Or perhaps all the shows could launch in Boise, where Idaho Shakespeare has plentiful set and costume shops, and come to Cleveland only when they’ve been buffed up during what amounts to a double-wide rehearsal period.

Either way, Fee said, “for the actors and me, it’s like one theater company with two venues, just not in the same state.”

Meanwhile, continue to expect more new wrinkles from the innovation-itchy Fee.

For instance, Great Lakes recently won a two-year wage concession from Actors Equity Association that also allows the company to hire more nonunion performers to fill out smaller parts in big-cast shows such as “Merry Wives,” which will put 31 actors on stage.

And Great Lakes, which now performs in Playhouse Square’s 1,000-seat Ohio Theatre, still hankers after a smaller, more intimate home more readily identifiable with the company.

Former artistic director James Bundy campaigned early and often for the rights to renovate Playhouse Square’s Hanna Theatre into a thrust stage, which puts the actors into the same room with the audience.

Fee has continued that campaign since his arrival in 2002, but with more subtlety and less pressure in the press.

It’s an idea that might be gaining traction with Playhouse Square president Art Falco, his board and some of the city’s leading arts donors. Playhouse Square Foundation has failed to repeat the success of its first Hanna production, “Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding,” so the theater is empty much of the time.

More support for switch
Meanwhile, Playhouse Square programming director Gina Vernaci has made it little secret that she would like to have more free dates for smaller touring shows in the Ohio, Playhouse Square’s busiest venue.

But if Falco and his board are taking Fee’s overtures at all seriously, they haven’t lost their poker faces. Like Sgt. Schultz, they know noth-ink.

For the nonce, the Ohio is still home, and the acting company grows more familiar every season Fee sticks around, and he recently signed a five-year contract. Andrew May, Great Lakes’ associate artistic director, will appear in three of the four 2005 shows.

“Merry Wives,” one of Shakespeare’s most accessible comedies, will be directed by Sari Ketter, who created the production last season in Idaho. She’s setting the punchiest comedy in the tony northeast suburb of Windsor, Conn. May plays the jealous Master Ford to Kathryn Cherasaro as his mistress. Paul Kiernan will be Falstaff. Ketter, Cherasaro and Kiernan are making their Great Lakes debuts.

Drew Barr, taking his fourth directing credit at Great Lakes since Fee’s arrival, will be in charge of the madcap “You Can’t Take It With You.” May will play the Russian Kolenkhov. Meg Chamberlain, one of Cleveland’s most gifted nonunion actors when it comes to comedy, will also appear.

In the fall, Boise State prof and Great Lakes newcomer Gordon Reinhart will direct “Amadeus,” with May as Salieri, whom some suspect of poisoning Wolfgang Amadeus. And Risa Brainin, who scored a big success last season with her first Great Lakes show, will direct an “As You Like It” set in a fictional nowhere land.

May? He’ll be across the street, casing the Hanna for Fee, who at last report was furiously at work on a Plan C. You never know when you won’t need one.

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