The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Lakeland Civic Theatre’s Martin Friedman reflects
Martin Friedman is directing his 50th show at Lakeland, and, as so often has been the case, he’s enjoying that it’s Sondheim
Friedman is reflecting on 20 years directing shows for Lakeland Civic Theatre and, more notably, 50 shows.
“I believe that if a show works, it’s the actor’s doing, and if it fails, it’s my fault — and I don’t think it’s just because I’m Jewish and guilt and all that,” says Martin Friedman, ending a sincere thought with a joke. ¶ Wearing glasses, a beard and his kind smile, the gentle-voiced Friedman is reflecting on 20 years directing shows for Lakeland Civic Theatre — the professional theater at Lakeland Community College in Kirtland — and, perhaps more notably, 50 shows. ¶ On this recent Monday evening, he soon will guide his cast and crew through an early rehearsal for “A Little Night Music,” which boasts music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by Hugh Wheeler and runs Sept. 7 through 30 in Lakeland’s Dr. Wayne L. Rodehorst Performing Arts Center.
Teaching theater and directing shows long ago was attractive to Friedman, who grew up in Cleveland Heights and Beachwood. After starting his college education at the University of Cincinnati, he discovered Emerson College, in the Boston area, would better suit his needs.
Post-graduate degrees at the University of Michigan followed.
He returned to Northeast Ohio to begin his career and, when he couldn’t find a school, went back to school. He was, he says, the first artist to go through Case Western Reserve University’s Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences.
“I felt that I could better sell myself if I could tell a board of trustees that I was fiscally responsible, and that’s what it taught me,” Friedman says.
That apparently is what got him a gig early on with the Cleveland Ballet, where, he says, he worked for a year.
“I ran their school. I knew nothing about ballet, but I could balance a checkbook,” he says, “and those were the days of their profligate spending.”
He began teaching and directing around Northeast Ohio, which landed him at Lakeland.
“I liked the idea of a two-year school,” he says. “I liked the idea because it was a different kind of education. Working at a fouryear school is more inward.
“Community college is exactly what it says — it’s community. It’s part of the community.”
These days, Lakeland Civic Theatre produces two plays annually. Back then, though, the school was on the quarters system, Friedman says, which mean four productions per year.
“It’s amazing that we had the budget to do that,” he muses.
Lakeland Civic Theatre being Lake County’s only professional theater traces back to Friedman’s attempt to get the program more attention.
“I started to look outward into the community (for actors),” he says. “It became clear, also, that to get reviewed, we had to look at being professional, and so I started paying my actors. I’d always paid my designers and technicians, but I started to pay the actors.”
Students sometimes have earned parts — they audition like everyone else — but largely have gained experience behind the scenes on productions.
That brings up a fond memory for Friedman. When he did what he says was a well-received production of “Pride and Prejudice,” an actress he’d cast overslept the day of a matinee performance. A student in the crew told him she could do the part, so they put her in the character’s dress, which was designed for the shorter actress. Still, the show went on.
“This was right out of ‘42nd Street,’” Friedman says. “It was pretty funny, but she knew all the lines, and she knew the blocking, and she stepped in — and it was great.”
That show also was one of many in which Friedman has directed Mitchell Fields, a member of Actors Equity Association for more than four decades and, long ago, the former’s high school teacher.
“As he writes in his bio,” Friedman says, “‘this should teach everybody to be nice to your students, because they’re going to hire you someday.’”
Friedman recalls their work a few years ago in the drama “Proof” — a successful production that, he says, earned actress Liz Conway raves for her work in the four-person cast — and many others
“With Mitchell, I did all the great plays,” he says. “We did ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” and he taught me that you can’t be afraid of the great plays. They’re great for a reason; you have to really screw it up to make them not great.”
Fields is sitting out “A Little Night Music.”
“He’s waiting,” Friedman says. “He wants to do ‘King Lear.’ I’m not sure that would be a big sell here, but he says, ‘You gotta do it while I can still carry Cordelia on stage,” adds a laughing Friedman.
Speaking of “A Little Night Music,” it is one of 11 Sondheim shows Friedman has done at Lakeland, and he readily admits he has a real “jones” for the composer’s work, something for which he gets teased by friends and family. (He recounts a recent mocking text message from his brother, who’d just seen a performance of the smash Broadway hit “Hamilton” at Playhouse Square: “It’s no Sondheim haha.”
Friedman”s experience with both Sondheim and Broadway theater traces this “A Little Night Music,” back to its original 1970s Broadway production, he says.
“I had never been to Broadway, and to hear this music …,” he says. “I couldn’t understand how music could convey longing and joy at the same time. It moved me a great deal. And for some reason, Sondheim — his music — has moved me. He looks at things differently.”
Friedman is so fond of Sondheim, in fact, that he’s been revisiting the composers works. For instance, he produced “A Little Night Music” at Lakeland in summer 2000. (And, according to a news release, this new production will see actress Mary Jane Nottage again play the role of Madame Armfeldt.)
In February at Lakeland, he did Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along,” which in 1981 opened on Broadway to largely negative reviews and ran only a handful of performances.
“(The Lakeland show) was a huge success, and I got it! I had directed it 18 years prior — I did it at John Carroll (University), and I didn’t know what I was doing,” he says. “All I knew was it had run (16) performances and failed miserably, but I loved the music and loved what it was about: friendship.”
He says that Fields, who had seen the original Broadway production because a former student was in the cast, told Friedman that if his 2018 approach had been how the original show had been done, it would have succeeded.
“Because he’s told me when things of mind don’t work, I’ll take that to the bank,” Friedman says.
Friedman has revisited more than Sondheim. He talks of doing Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” roughly two decades ago, with Fields as Willy Loman, and relating to one of Willy’s sons. About six years ago, however, he directed it again and found more in common with the father.
These 50 shows with Lakeland have him reflecting on more than age. Mostly, he says, he thinks of other people he’d worked with repeatedly, singling out Trad A Burns, a prominent area theater designer. He recalls first working with him several years ago on Sondheim’s dark thriller “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” Friedman’s first show after suffering a medical scare.
“That really changed the way I looked at theater,” he says. “(Burns) encouraged me as a collaborator to look outside — not outside-outside, but outside the box. Look at the big picture.”
He says the show was a hit and calls Burns’ set “incredible,” complete with plenty of blood for the actors to slide through.
He also lauds Burns’ work on “Light in the Piazza,” in which the set was composed largely of huge re-creations of sketches by Leonardo da Vinci by a local artist, but soon returns to another Sondheim show. They produced “Assassins,” which, Friedman says, is traditionally set on a minimalistic set but which the pair staged on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
“And it was fraught with anger,” Friedman says. “My rabbi came and was upset that I did the show — he felt that it was provoking people. I guess that’s what art is supposed to do — provoke people.”
More than once during this conversation, Friedman talks of seeing Lakeland Civic Theatre as being a “window” to the college.
“You don’t think, ‘Wow, what a great nursing program,’ when you’re driving by Lakeland. You’re thinking about Chuck Frank leading the (Lakeland Civic) Band. You’re thinking about the orchestra concerts. You’re thinking of Christmas concerts. You’re thinking of the Gallery (at Lakeland). And, I hope, they’re thinking of the plays we do. And so we are the window to the college — or the most visible window, anyway.”
“Anyone who knows Martin knows that he is overthe-moon passionate about what he does,” says Marris Beverage Jr., the school’s president, in an email.
He may not have 50 more shows in him, but Friedman plans to continue directing for now, striving to have those actors take possession of his shows.
“It’s hard not to look back when you’ve done 50 shows, not to look back at the people you’ve worked with because that’s what theater is: It’s people — it’s collaboration with people — and I’m nothing if not a collaborator.”