The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
7. Playing it safe
Cleveland Play House’s “Disney’s Freaky Friday” represents an unfortunate rash of creatively safe screen-to-stage musicals that offer highly improbable conflicts with highly predictable solutions attempted by incompetent adults and archetypical teens. CPH’s production came pre-packaged from the Disney factory with much of the original cast and the entire creative team from the recent New York production. From the opening moment to the final curtain, the show more closely resembled the highgloss national tours found in Playhouse Square’s Connor Palace next door than the homegrown artisan productions typically found in CPH’s Allen Theatre.
6. A romantic-comedy mulligan
Everything that was so wrong about “Freaky Friday” was quickly off-set by all that was so right about CPH’s production of the screen-to-stage dramedy “Shakespeare in Love.” The show, under Laura Kepley’s direction, was gorgeous, brilliantly performed, thoroughly entertaining, hopelessly romantic and absolutely engrossing. It began with a hilarious pre-show announcement by the ensemble that warned us to turn off our cell phones but served to set up the playfulness that would persist for the next two hours.
5. The best-laid schemes
Anjanette Hall, as Nora, and Abraham Adams, as Thorwald, perform in Mamai Theatre Company’s “A Doll’s House.” The production was the last for the women-centric company. Maurice Cole, left, Jeremy Gladen, Steve Oleksa, Tony Zanoni, George Roth, Bryant Carroll, Katherine DeBoer and Bevan Haynes perform in Beck Center for the Arts’ “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
The good folks attending “Of Mice and Men” at Coach House Theatre in Akron knew they were in for a memorable experience the moment they opened their playbills to see John Steinbeck’s classic was being performed by members of Akron’s Ohio Shakespeare Festival that it is impossible to see the performer in the performance.”
4. Three times a charm
Contemporary playwright Yasmina Reza reproduces on stage mundane moments in our lives and leaves audiences to draw their own conclusions about the meaning. In the course of one of her works, “Life x 3” — a one-act opus on unpleasantness that takes place during a dysfunctional dinner party — the events of the evening are repeated, twice, with subtle changes in the interpersonal dynamic that slightly alter the course of the play’s vicious undercurrent. Each variation in this Cesear’s Forum production was a master class in performance by Brian Bowers, Tricia Bestic, Dana Hart and Julia Kolibab and an opportunity to engage in communal schadenfreude.
3. By George!
As mental patient Dale Harding in Beck Center’s production of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” local actor extraordinaire George Roth put on display an absolutely intriguing assortment of spasmodic tics and disturbing behavioral tendencies while his character worked hard at feigning normalcy. This was a particularly remarkable acting feat considering that George had been fighting weakness and physical limitations due to his recently diagnosed multiple sclerosis. His absence during a three-year hiatus was felt, and his first step onto the Mackey Theater main stage was triumphant.
2. The square root of pie
The story that drives the musical “Waitress,” the national tour of which was launched in October at Cleveland’s Playhouse Square, is a blue-plate special: marginally nutritious fare doled out in pre-measured portions that are hardly out of the ordinary, with a side of pie. But the gorgeous songs by Grammywinning composer and lyricist Sara Bareilles and their brilliant performance by everyone in the cast offer insight into the hopes and dreams of the show’s central characters and, by doing so, lend pitch-perfect voice and a gorgeous melody to our own expectations and aspirations. Starting with the show’s opening “What’s Inside,” every song airlifts the storytelling that surrounds it. And us along with it.
1. The door slam in ‘A Doll’s House’
Four years ago, the new Mamai Theatre Company declared its mission of creating relevant classical theater that showcases women’s stories, its vision of featuring Cleveland’s topfemale storytellers and its propensity for calculated risk-taking by staging a modernized “Medea.” It closed its 2017 season, its last, in the same vein. No one knew that when Anjanette Hall, as Nora, walked out of and famously slammed the door in the final scene of the theater’s celebrated production of Henrik Ibsen’s landmark 1879 melodrama “A Doll’s House” that it would mark the moment Mamai would be leaving for good, as well.
Here’s to more memorable theater moments in the year to come and to you witnessing every one of them for yourself.