By Andrea Simakis, The Plain Dealer | Posted Dec 28, 8:00 AM
CLEVELAND, Ohio — The Chinese proverb that good things come in pairs was abundantly true on Cleveland stages in 2019. As we began compiling our list of favorite shows, we noticed a pattern of distinguished duos. Here’s hoping 2020 will bring similar double happiness.
Best tour de force: “The Taming of the Shrew” and “Julius Caesar.”
Sara Bruner’s double dose of Shakespeare at Great Lakes Theater was so entertaining, it was easy to forget what an artistic tour de force it truly was. The actor turned auteur brought her love of the Bard and sharp humanist sensibility to her tight, streamlined productions that crackled with fresh energy, reinvigorating classics we only thought we knew.
In March, Bruner helmed “The Taming of the Shrew,” a play that celebrates female obedience in an age more interested in female rebellion. That takes nerve. She was more than up to the challenge.
Her wickedly smart, funny “Shrew” had a little something for everyone, wrote guest critic Beth McGee: “Some bawdry (an imaginative use of bum padding and codpieces), some slapstick (how many uses can one make of an area rug?), some madcap tomfoolery (confetti used in oh-so-many ways), and so many characters pretending to be someone else that you almost needed a scorecard to keep up with the madness.”
Bruner returned with her thrilling “Julius Caesar” in the fall, a production that treated women in power as a fait accompli with the casting of the great Carole Healey as the doomed Roman autocrat and Laura Welsh Berg, one of the company’s strongest actors, as chief conspirator Cassius, another role ordinarily played by a man.
Healey’s Caesar was a charming despot, an intriguing interpretation that explained why a noble dude like Mark Antony would show such devotion to a dictator. Bruner’s staging of her murder was breathtaking. As senators took turns plunging their knives into Caesar’s body, they pulled long crimson ribbons from the wounds. In the gorgeous, gory tableau, the dying ruler appeared trapped at the center of a bloody web, as though tethered there by entrails.
Best adaptations: “Stupid F—ing Bird” and “An Iliad.”
In “Stupid F—ing Bird,” Aaron Posner doesn’t so much adapt Anton Chekhov’s Russian masterpiece “The Seagull” as put it through a meat grinder, producing a leaner, funnier, more flavorful dish aimed at the contemporary American palate.
The cast of seven (boiled down from Chekhov’s 13) in the Dobama Theatre production was sublime, particularly Laura Perrotta as Emma, one of the most unapologetically self-absorbed creatures to ever tread the boards. In Perrotta’s hands, she was a mesmerizing narcissist, lassoing lovers and lacerating rivals with Chekhov’s immortal dialogue, made more lethal by Posner.
Director Nathan Motta layered cheeky, meta detail throughout his wry, wonderful show to link Chekhov’s text to Posner’s contemporary version: One old guy even made himself a White Russian. What a way to toast Dobama’s 60th season.
As Homer’s peripatetic Poet in “An Iliad” at the Cleveland Play House, Tarah Flanagan proved the hypnotic power of good storytelling by captivating us with a tale more than 2,700 years old.
In the spare, rollicking adaptation by Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare, Flanagan narrated the events of the Trojan War, playing some 54 characters, from the fearsome Greek warrior Achilles to his nemesis, Hector, a prince of Troy. She was accompanied by 17-year-old wunderkind Eva Rose Scholz-Carlson on cello. (Scholz-Carlson never said a word, but her inventive score captured the ineffable, including the sound of a soul winging its way to the house of death.)
Fine-boned, with the small, compact frame of a gymnast, Flanagan transformed the nearly empty stage into a raging battlefield steeped in blood and bone, using little more than her body and her voice, giving us the season’s most pulse-pounding, transporting adventure.
Best world premieres: “Rastus and Hattie” and “Tiny Houses.”
In a genius move in “Rastus and Hattie,” Cleveland playwright Lisa Langford deposited a freakish, little-known artifact from the last century — a servile robot developed by Westinghouse in the 1930s, with dark skin, called “Rastus” — into our own era. (You could almost hear her voice in your head: Just when you thought America’s racist past couldn’t get more bizarre and offensive, check this out.)
The friendship of two women is strained when one of them gets some new household help — robots Rastus and Hattie, who act and dress like slaves right out of “Gone With the Wind.”
The marvelously acted production at Cleveland Public Theatre was corrosively funny with a shocking, tragic denouement. Best of all, it forced us to confront our own, unexamined biases. With its collision of history, sci-fi and satire, the play is just begging to be HBO’s next “Watchmen.”
“Tiny Houses,” Chelsea Marcantel’s irresistible, tartly sweet romantic comedy about finding a home that debuted at the Cleveland Play House, does what so many new plays try to do but never quite achieve: It captures the moment we are living in RIGHT NOW by immersing us in the tiny-house movement.
Bohdi (Peter Hargrave) and Cath (Kate Eastman) embody a generation looking to simplify their lives and right-size their footprint. As the story unfolds, we watch the couple, with an assist from a pair of quirky buddies and a squad of swift, silent production staffers, build a tiny house onstage, complete with insulation, a roof and a working door. There’s even a cheerful picture window festooned with Christmas lights.
The scene shop is one of the theater’s strongest assets, but director Laura Kepley’s “Tiny Houses” represents a bravura moment for the team.
Best of Broadway in our own back yard: “Once” and “Kinky Boots.”
“Once,” the eighth annual collaboration between the Beck Center for the Arts and Baldwin Wallace University’s music theater program, might be their finest yet.
The unlikely 2012 Broadway smash about Guy, a brokenhearted Irish busker, and Girl, the no-nonsense Czech immigrant who becomes his muse, requires a troupe of triple threats — performers who can act, sing and play a host of instruments — to produce. Finding the talent isn’t easy in New York, let alone Cleveland.
But director Victoria Bussert, who heads up BW’s music theater program, had to look no further than her ever-versatile students. The luminous production bested the Broadway tour that visited Playhouse Square in 2013.
In November, BW became the first college in the country to produce the 2013 Tony Award-winning best musical “Kinky Boots” in a sold-out run at Berea’s Kleist Center for the Arts.
No small show to mount, “Kinky” features sequined drag revues, a boxing match, a massive shoe factory and a half-dozen corseted, limber divas known as “Angels” who sing backup for Lola, a drag queen in need of a heel that can hold up to the demands of her fabulous self and zealous floor show.
Watching Bussert’s production, I had to remind myself I wasn’t back at Broadway’s Al Hirschfeld Theatre, taking it in for the first time, from the eye-popping set by Jordan Janota to costumes by Charlotte Yetman, whose scrumptious, shiny red patent leather boots almost walked away with the show.
Best immersive experiences: “WanderLust” and “Every Brilliant Thing.”
“Shadow of the Run Chapter 1: WanderLust” — set in historic Bedford and inspired by Cleveland’s infamous unsolved Torso murders that so bedeviled Eliot Ness — took audiences into the new world of immersive theater this summer.
Ticketholders went back in time to Northeast Ohio as the Great Depression loomed, following characters through a maze of historic sites searching for clues to solve the disappearance of a girl yearning for a life outside her sleepy hometown.
The experience was engrossing, creepy and moving and left audiences jonesing for Chapter 2 — “Calloused.” The next installment, say co-creators Adam Kern and Beth McGee (who moonlights as our sometime guest critic), will premiere in late 2020, with a pop-up teaser in January. (For tickets, visit shadowoftherun.com.)
There was no better time than the dark of December to stage the bright, bittersweet gem “Every Brilliant Thing,” the one-person show at the Cleveland Play House that exists to remind us why it’s good to be alive without a hint of sentimentality.
The magical Alex Brightwell, a third-year student in the Case Western Reserve University/Cleveland Play House MFA program, played Alex, who, at age 7, began compiling a list of every brilliant thing about the world he could think of to convince his mother not to kill herself. Though not as intense an immersive as “WanderLust,” “Every Brilliant Thing’s” audience members were active participants in the storytelling, becoming characters in Alex’s life, ad-libbing and improvising like pros. We left warmed by camaraderie and good feeling, a glow that lasted for days.
