The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Deep diver
Joe Garry puts in the time — seeing shows and reading everything he can about them -- for Playhouse Square’s popular pre-show lectures
There was a time, before he arrived in Northeast Ohio, that Joe Garry had little access to theater.¶ Garry — who would follow a career directing theater works by conducting Playhouse Square’s increasingly popular “Broadway Buzz” lectures that precede most performances in the performing-arts organization’s KeyBank Broadway Series — was born and raised in a small industrial town outside Buffalo New York. ¶ “When I graduated from high school, I chose Baldwin Wallace University, which was the best decision I ever made in my life,” Garry says during a recent telephone interview. “I went there, and it gave me a life.”
While he did some acting while at school, he had intended to move on to law school after attending BW. However, he says, a turning point came when he was doing some work for the late William Allman, a BW theater professor and the founder of the Berea Summer Theatre. Garry was painting the ceiling for the performance space for a fast-approaching summer production when the director backed out of the show.
“The notice had to go out that day, and (Allman) said, “How would you like to direct ‘All the Way Home’?” And I said, ‘I’d love it,’” he recalls. “I did finish painting the ceiling, but that was the beginning of my directing career.”
Garry would go on to have a fascinating career, directing and creating shows in Cleveland and around the world with his professional and life partner, David O. Frazier, who died in 2016.
In Cleveland, Garry is well known for having directed the revue “Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris,” which starred Frazier and was performed in the lobby of Playhouse Square’s State Theater before the complex was renovated. That was a different time. “We had very little money, so we had to create our own shows to do at Playhouse Square,” he says
Garry also directed seven shows at the Cleveland Play House and founded Cleveland State University’s theater department, teaching there for years.
Away from Northeast Ohio, he was involved with many shows. He directed a piece co-written by Frazier — “Conversations With an Irish Rascal,” adapted from the works of Brendan Behan — that took the pair to Scotland and later New York. Later, they traveled the world creating shows aboard cruise ships and then producing a travel-andart show for PBS, “Odysseys and Ovations.”
“That was a wonderful experience,” he says. “It played everywhere except Cleveland, I might add, ironically.”
When that was done, and already having retired from teaching classes at CSU, Garry looked for his next chapter.
“When I came back to Cleveland, I asked Gina Vernaci of Playhouse Square if there was something she might think of that I could do, and so I took over the
‘Broadway Buzz’ program, which then was a very fledgling program and there were very few people coming to the event.”
Years of Garry giving the pre-show talks — he took over as the full-time host during the 2006-07 season — have changed that, the program in recent years shifting from a smaller space to Upper Allen, one of the results of the renovation to the Allen Theatre a few years ago.
“It was perfectly restored, and it’s a brilliant space and seats 700 people — and is one of the great lecture halls of Cleveland,” he says. “We moved there because the audience kept getting larger and larger and larger.”
Perhaps you can chalk that up to Garry being thorough, which starts with soaking up as much theater as he can. He says that he recently has returned from attending the Shaw Theater Festival in Canada, and, following the greatly anticipated run of the smash musical “Hamilton” at Playhouse Square, he will return to our neighbor to the north for the Stratford Festival, before venturing to the Big Apple and London.
But seeing plays and musicals is not enough to do the job well.
“I do an enormous amount of research and preparation,” he says. “These are half-hour lectures. I sit in a chair on a stage, and they light it.
“There’s a very large audience, and I talk to them for a half-hour and they are very engaged and it’s wonderful and very stirring, especially for me,” he continues. “But it’s very humbling because they give their rapt attention, and I feel very obligated to give them as much as I can. I try to make the material as dimensional as I can and not (say) superficial things about the (productions).”
What he wants to avoid, he says, his revealing his opinion of a show.
‘In no way do I want to shade or pressure someone to a point of view about a show,” Garry says, “So I always try to give a sort of insight into the making of a show or what they can look for in a show (to help them have) a unique experience, but allowing them, of course, to make their own value judgement of the show.”
Preparing for “Hamilton” — July 17 through Aug. 26 at Playhouse Square’s KeyBank State Theatre — is no small task. There is “Alexander Hamilton,” the 800-plus-page biography by Ron Chernow from which “Hamilton” mastermind Lin-Manuel Miranda started building the hiphop-influenced musical, as well as myriad written pieces. Oh, and YouTube videos. “There are endless — I mean hours and hours — of YouTube interviews, etc., with each member of the creative (team) involved in the show, all of them giving insight into the show and the making of the show.”
While this run will be the show’s debut in Cleveland, no doubt many in the “Broadway Buzz” audience will be familiar with it from Broadway or listening to the cast recording.
“There’s an audience that’s very sophisticated about ‘Hamilton’ — young kids who love ‘Hamilton’ know every word of the score — so there’s an obligation to be prepared with a massive amount of material and to give them something new, a point of view that will help them enter into this very complex and exciting show.”
His advice for those who’ve us yet to see it? While you don’t necessarily need to read the book, some time with the album wouldn’t hurt.
“It is very dense work — it’s loaded with ideas,” he says. “In rap, you’re speaking four times faster than one speaks in real life, and therefore Lin-Manuel Miranda was able to (include) that much more information and insight, character development, plot complication, in this material. It’s like watching a Shakespearean play — the language is elevated, and it’s extraordinary. So it really does help to hear the recording first.”
Tickets made available for the show in April were scooped up immediately, so your best chance for tickets at this point is a lottery for $10 orchestra seats recently announced by Playhouse Square. To hear Garry talk about the show — specifically its language — the lottery is probably worth a try.
“It’s visually dazzling. It’s emotionally wrenching. It’s staged brilliantly, choreographed brilliantly. But everything starts with the language, as all theater does. It works perfectly in this format,” he says. “It has changed musical theater. So, like the other great works that have done that — like ‘Hair,’ like ‘A Chorus Line’ — it’s that revolutionary musical that makes us reconsider the whole artform.”
Garry doesn’t sound as if he has plans to give up “Broadway Buzz” anytime soon, but he does joke about an agreement he has with his stage manager.
“I’m an old guy, and I do it eight times a week. I said, ‘If you ever see me fumbling around, I’m giving you a gun, and just shoot me. Don’t let me babble.’”
He adds, “They also have a rule: If I say something untrue about a production, they’re going to turn the lights out.”
It’s connecting with people — lovers of theater, especially — that Garry says is his favorite thing about the job.
“It’s very touching, 40 years later, to have someone come back and say, ‘I was in your class in 1982,’ and then I will say to them, ‘You sat in the second row on the right — I remember you exactly!’” he says. “It’s very nice to see that, in some small way, I’ve helped to make some people make theater or the arts a part of their lives. “I think it’s one of the greatest gifts we have to offer.”