“Once” is a pleasant departure from the standard fare of Broadway musicals. It’s a lot simpler and quieter. One usually associates Broadway with blaring, brassy orchestras, dozens of characters and...
It’s incredibly rare that a play succeeds not only in presenting a story filled with sharp wit and thought-provoking themes, but also packaging all of this into a succinct and neatly intermissionless...
“Don’t be afraid.” That’s the advice from Beth Salemi Szpak to non-dancers. It’s advice she took herself.
Szpak started her dance career as a Case Western Reserve University freshman in 1996...
Student actors step onto the blue stage and gather on the tiered set. The Case Footlighters are preparing to present “Merrily We Roll Along,” and will soon know it well enough to perform it backwards...
Eleven women in black dresses are on the stage. Slowly, carefully, they help one another up onto the line of chairs that flow across the stage. The dancers walk, crawl and stretch in languid, yet carefully...
The stage of “Sweeney Todd” inside the Hanna Theater is daunting, dark and miserable. Rafters and beams criss-cross the second floor of the set, illuminating the ground with spider web patterns ready...
This is the third time this season that I am going to write about something put on by the Cleveland Playhouse that was not a play. The first was “Devil’s Music,” a one-man musical piece about the...
Betty the Yeti – directed by Jerrold Scott
October 4-13, 2013
Written by Jon Klein, this eco-fable follows the story of Russ T. a logger whose wife leaves him for the smugly self-righteous and hugely...
One of the defining features of theatre has always been the immediacy of the medium. Neither film nor television enables an audience to watch actors as they perform, live on stage, night after night. Of...
It seems to be a growing trend among Cleveland Playhouse Productions to tell an insightful and often heart-wrenching narrative about some fundamental truth of human nature through comedy. In March, “Good...
