A Team That Plays Together…

Great Lakes Theater Festival celebrates 25 years at Playhouse Square

By Faye Sholiton

Get with the program: The many productions and
players of the Great Lakes Theater Festival, now
celebrating 25 years at the Ohio Theatre in
Playhouse Square.The civic leaders who saved Playhouse Square from the wrecker’s ball three decades ago understood that live performance was the key to vital city life. Looking past the utter decay of Cleveland’s once-glorious theater district, they breathed new life into the spaces by presenting individual artists like Tom Jones and Ella Fitzgerald, and a handful of shows, most notably Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. But grant makers wanted to know that audiences would support the arts on a sustained basis before renovation could begin. Playhouse Square needed a resident company.

Great Lakes Theater Festival (then Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival) answered that call in 1982. The company, started by Lakewood School Board member Dorothy Teare and guided by eminent directors Arthur Lithgow, Lawrence Carra and Vincent Dowling, was looking for a new home.

Complete Works of William
Shakespeare (Abridged), 2004According to longtime Great Lakes trustee Natalie Epstein, the summer troupe had clearly outgrown the Lakewood Civic Auditorium, their home for two decades. Based in a high school, they lacked the most basic amenities: a green room, consistent rehearsal space and air-conditioned dressing rooms. The question was, where to move?

One solution was to build a new facility at Edgewater Park, complete with a Lake Erie backdrop. Then-artistic director Dowling hoped it would complete a “cultural triangle” with the Stratford and Shaw festivals. The project hit a snag, says Dowling, when environmentalists opposed the plan. Their voices were loud enough to send Great Lakes back to the drawing board and, ultimately, downtown.

Epstein, who was board president at the time, recalls her first visit to the Ohio Theatre, where the reconstruction was slated to begin: “The walls had peeling red paint,” she says. “The interior was a total disaster. You had to circle the floorboards so you didn’t fall through, and plaster was falling in chunks.”

But under the decay, she says, lay a gem of a space. Originally a Loew’s property opened in 1921, Thomas Lamb designed the Ohio and its neighboring State Theatre in the Italian Renaissance style. After 1935, the Ohio would begin its decline, first becoming a casino, and then, in the ’40s and ’50s, a movie house. In the early ’60s, it was destroyed by fire. Vandals finished the job with spray paint.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2002The Ohio was the only space built as a legitimate theater and offered Great Lakes everything they could want: fly space, counterweights, trap doors and light positions. The acoustics required no artificial amplification. And who wouldn’t want to follow in the footsteps of Ethel and Lionel Barrymore, the Lunts, the Astaires, Helen Hayes, the Marx Brothers and Spencer Tracy?

When Great Lakes reopened the Ohio on July 9, 1982, the event signaled more than a commitment to live performance in an otherwise blighted area; it confirmed that the visionaries were going to deliver on their promises. In seven years (1980-87), they raised $38 million in combined public and private funds. The State reopened in 1984; the Palace in 1988; the Allen in 1998, making the four houses on Euclid Avenue the second largest performing arts complex in America, after Lincoln Center in New York.

The Great Lakes experiment enjoyed immediate artistic success. First-season triumphs included Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, which was recorded for PBS and won an Emmy Award, and a sold-out run of Nicholas Nickleby, an eight-and-a-half-hour epic that earned national acclaim. Dowling also negotiated the rights to adapt Dylan Thomas’ stories for A Child’s Christmas in Wales, paving the way for a future holiday staple for the company. Dowling, who now lives in the Berkshires, says that, to this day, his favorite portrait features him sitting in an otherwise empty Ohio Theatre, gazing at that memorable stage.

The Reinberger Lobby,
outside the Ohio TheatreThe Great Lakes experiment also proved that a resident company could thrive with the new partnership it had formed with Playhouse Square Center. Other companies would follow suit, taking advantage of operational assistance provided by their landlord. Among the perks cited by Playhouse Square Foundation president and CEO Art Falco: programs, lobby sales, staff for box office, red-coated ticket takers and ushers, and other patron services.

Since 1982, GLTF has encountered its share of challenges. What had initially seemed the perfect venue – a space with more than 1,000 seats – also meant those seats had to be filled, notes GLTF executive director Bob Taylor.

A second challenge, he says, has been branding. “We’re in this successful theater center, but we’re sometimes lost in that. It’s hard to brand our space and our aesthetic, and have permanent name recognition.”

By far the biggest problem – one that dogs every cultural organization – is the bottom line. Even with partially subsidized rent, moving downtown was a costly proposition. From GLTF’s second year downtown, the company has struggled against a deficit.

Financial considerations aside, it was clear that Great Lakes had done its job as the first anchor tenant. As Falco says, “The skeptics were silenced.” And no one questioned the integrity of the art under the next three artistic directors: Gerald Freedman, James Bundy and Charles Fee.

Ohio Theatre’s main chandelierFee has gone one step further. He arrived in 2002 facing a $1 million deficit. Over the past three years, he says, the debt has been erased, and the company is now operating at a surplus.

That success came with significant help from Playhouse Square. GLTF has streamlined operations, moving to more modest administrative quarters in the neighboring Bulkley Building, even sharing some staff. The costume shop, which remained for years in Lakewood, is now across the street, also under the Playhouse Square umbrella.

Under Fee’s exuberant leadership, GLTF has built an audience for its classical repertoire. Many patrons begin as unsuspecting pedestrians on Euclid Avenue, caught off-guard when Queen Elizabeth pulls up in her carriage, royally beckoning them in.

Fee also returned the company to its roots as a rotating repertory theater, cutting costs by co-producing with the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, a company Fee also directs. GLTF’s 46th season opens this month with productions of Arsenic and Old Lace alternating with Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, which both ran this summer in Boise.

In recent years, GLTF has recognized the need to move once again. For a brief time, the board discussed a move to the Cleveland Play House, but they needed a space designed especially for them, with 550 seats, a thrust stage and a marquee that declares who they are. The location was clear: somewhere on Playhouse Square. They are exploring the Hanna Theatre, on East 14th Street, although the project remains in the design stage and any formal announcement is still months away.

With continued help from Playhouse Square and the community, this new home will surely become another dream realized. And this one will also be fit for the Queen.

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