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July 23, 24, 29, 30, 31,

August 6, 7 & 8

Thurs., Fri. & Sat. @ 7:30 pm

Sun. @ 3:00 pm

Tickets: $8 Adults
$6 Children (12 & under)

Performance Location:

St. Patrick’s Club Building
3606 Bridge Ave.- 3rd Fl.
Cleveland, Ohio

Puchase Tickets

Performed entirely by students
Book, music and lyrics by Jonathan Larson
Musical arrangements Steve Skinner
Original concept/additional lyrics Billy Aronson
Music supervision and additional arrangements Tim Weil
Dramaturg Lynn Thomson
RENT was originally produced in New York by New York Theatre Workshop and on Broadway by Jeffrey Seller, Kevin McCollum, Allan S. Gordon and New York Theatre Workshop

July 23 – August 8, 2010

“There’s only us, there’s only this.
Forget regret, or life is yours to miss.
No other road, no other way. No day, but today.” – Mimi

Jonathan Larson’s Pulitzer Prize winning Broadway musical based loosely on Puccini’s opera La Bohème. In its examination of the lifestyles of the young men and women who inhabit the slums of the Village, the play becomes a celebration of life and the heroic struggle to survive.

The day Jonathan Larson (creator of Rent) died….
“The audience was reaching out to the cast. They were crying and cheering. By the second act, it was no longer contained. It was the full show run full-out. If emotion could have become a physical force, the roof would have blown off, the weather would have changed. The second act ended. There was a huge ovation, the cast slowly left the stage, and the audience stayed in the theater. No one was sure what to do. The cast returned and sat down in the front row. Finally, a single voice called from the audience, ‘Thank you, Jonathan Larson,’ which brought the evening’s loudest, final burst of applause.”

To purchase tickets, call: 216-961-6391

Dale Omori, Plain Dealer file photographDancers rehearse at the Gordon Square Theatre in 2005. The Ohio Department of Development today said it was providing $200,000 for removal of asbestos from the theater's ceiling.

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Federal stimulus money will help with the continued renovation of the Cleveland Public Theatre, in Cleveland’s Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood.

The Ohio Department of Development said today that $200,000 from a new fund to clean up and revitalize historic sites is headed to the theater, for asbestos removal.

The theater is part of the historic Gordon Square Arts District, which has seen a multimillion-dollar redevelopment in recent years.

The new money should pay for asbestos removal in the ceiling of Gordon Square Theatre, one of three performance venues that constitute Cleveland Public Theatre, said general manager Denis Griesmer.

The work is scheduled from January to March, when the Gordon Square Theatre is typically closed, Griesmer said.

The project will not only make the building safer, but will also help in the job-generating restoration of the neighborhood, state development Director Lisa Patt-McDaniel said in a news release.

[Original Article on Cleveland.com] [PDF]

Published: Friday, July 02, 2010, 2:31 PM     Updated: Tuesday, July 06, 2010, 3:34 PM

VINCENT SACCO This scene makes it look as though it might be called “Tony n’ Tina’s Shotgun Wedding,” but it’s actually “Conni’s Avant Garde Restaurant.” And even though it will be performed with a five-course meal next season at Cleveland Public Theatre, Miss Conni Convergence and the Avantgardists dare you to call it dinner theater.

Raymond Bobgan is cool. And five years into his executive artistic directorship of Cleveland Public Theatre, he just keeps getting cooler, mixing sound business decisions with risky artistry at the city’s leading dispenser of cool theater. After finishing the 2009-10 season with the strongest one-two programming punch of the year in Cleveland (“Open Mind Firmament” and “Wanderlust”), Bobgan has just announced the city’s most promising-sounding 2010-11 season. Dig all this:

• Four world premieres, including “Don’t Call Me Fat” by Turkish playwright Ozen Yula and “My Dog Barking” by Cleveland Heights scribe Eric Coble.

• Four Midwest premieres: The second production anywhere (after New York’s Public Theatre) of Pulitzer Prize-winning Suzan-Lori Parks’ latest; an avant-garde dinner-theater (!) offering; and a play co-authored by a creator of the upcoming Broadway musical “Spider-Man.”

• And a beefed-up new works development program to join CPT’s already strong Big Box and Little Box series, including a remount of Chris Seibert and Bobgan’s critically acclaimed one-woman tour de force, “Cut to Pieces,” which will then tour.

Bottom line: While most other theaters in the area are sticking to the reduced schedules and calculatedly mainstream productions instituted to cope with the recession, Bobgan and CPT are out at high noon on Detroit Avenue at West 65th Street with avant-garde guns blazing.

Meanwhile, in his spare time, Bobgan is also overseeing CPT’s partnership in developing the Gordon Square Arts District, including the ongoing renovation of CPT’s expansive campus.

So, take a breath and get a gander at what’s up next season at 6415 Detroit. If you want more information, go to cptonline.org or call 216-631-2727. Or you can catch Bobgan re-caffeinating himself several times a day next door to the theater at Gypsy Beans & Baking Co.

Shows open on a Thursday and close on a Saturday unless otherwise noted.

Saturday, Sept. 11: Pandemonium 10: The West Wild Side. CPT’s annual wacky arts, food and beverage fundraiser comes of age.

Sept. 30-Oct. 16: “The Book of Grace.” CPT regular Sheffia Randall Dooley directs Parks’ multilayered confrontation between Buddy, a veteran of the Iraq war, and his estranged father, a Desert Storm vet who now works as a border guard.

Oct. 7-30: “Don’t Call Me Fat.” Yula, who’s at CPT and Cleveland State University on a grant from the Cleveland Foundation, directs his satire about an obese man’s journey from sickbed to talk-show fame.

Oct. 14-30: “Kill Will.” Playing off the title of a Quentin Tarantino movie, husband-and-wife writers Josh Brown and Kelly Elliott edit the Shakespeare canon down to one evening of the Bard’s best fights and murders. Veteran CPT hand Alison Garrigan directs the world premiere.

Friday, Oct. 22 and Sunday, Oct. 24: “Il Tabarro.” CPT collaborates with Opera Per Tutti, a Northeast Ohio company whose name is Italian for “opera for all,” on Puccini’s tale of love, desperation and violent jealousy. Scott Skiba directs.

Nov. 5-7: Y-Haven Project. CPT stages the 11th annual collaboration with residents of an inner-city Cleveland center for homeless men in treatment for drug addiction.

Nov. 11-Sunday, Nov. 21: Little Box series. Staged readings of new plays by local playwrights are followed by audience discussions.

Wednesday, Dec. 1-18: “Conni’s Avant Garde Restaurant.” CPT presents an audience-participation dinner-theater show (a la “Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding,” but way weirder) served up by Miss Conni Convergence and the Avantgardists.

Friday, Jan. 14-Sunday, March 6: Big Box series. Eight weekends of new works as CPT opens its doors to area artists.

March 3-19: “Darwinii.” Glen Berger, now at work with “The Lion King’s” Julie Taymor and U2′s Bono on “Spider-Man,” collaborates with CPT regular Brett Keyser on a play about a thief who’s convinced he’s the great-great-great-bastard-grandson of Charles Darwin.

Friday, March 11-Sunday, March 27: NEOMFA Playwrights Festival. Three new works by students in the Northeast Ohio MFA Creative Writing Program, a collaboration of four area schools.

Thursday, March 24: Women’s Voices. The 12th annual female version of the Y-Haven Project, a collaboration with the Elyria YWCA’s Women’s Campus Project.

April 7-23: “Fever/Dream.” CPT staffer Beth Wood directs the Midwest premiere of Sheila Callaghan’s update of 17th-century Spanish playwright Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s “Life Is a Dream.”

April 7-23: “I Hate This” and “And Then You Die.” Local playwright, actor and director David Hansen presents his two previously produced one-man shows (one about personal loss and the other about personal victory) in repertory. Directed by Garrigan.

April 21-May 7: “Insomnia.” Holly Holsinger (Bobgan’s wife) collaborates with Karin Randoja and Seibert on a new play, starring Holsinger and Seibert and directed by Randoja, about a woman on the brink of something like death, mental collapse or self-discovery.

May 5-Sunday June 5: DanceWorks. Five companies perform world premieres in CPT’s 11th annual dance showcase.

May 12-28: “My Dog Barking.” Jeremy Paul, on loan from Theater Ninjas, directs the latest from Coble, about two lonely people’s lives taking a bizarre turn when a starving coyote appears at their doors.

May 26-June 4: “Cut to Pieces.” Bobgan and Seibert restage their shattering 2009 multimedia adaptation of the Persephone myth to lay bare Seibert’s soul.

Dates to be announced: Developing works. They include “My Hemisphere and Your Hemisphere Live Across the Street,” “People4Change” and Bobgan’s own “Rusted Heart Broadcast,” which he described as “a radical new play with an ensemble cast [that] re-examines religion, art and community in the heart of America.”

And, “I think it takes place in a tent and travels like a revival.”

How cool is that?

By Tony Brown, The Plain Dealer

May 20, 2010, 6:00AM

View full sizeSteve WagnerScholar Barton Friedman (John Stuehr, left) writes about Irish hero Cuchulain (Ray McNiece) and poet W.B. Yeats (Brett Keyser) in “Open Mind Firmament.”REVIEW Open Mind Firmament What: Cleveland Public Theatre presents a play based on the works of W.B. Yeats and Barton Friedman, adapted and directed by Raymond Bobgan.When: Through Saturday, June 5. Performances at 7 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays. Matinee at 3 p.m. Sunday; 7 p.m. performance Monday.Where: Cleveland Public Theatre’s Gordon Square Theatre, 6415 Detroit Ave.Tickets: $10-$21. Go to cptonline.org or call 216-631-2727, ext. 501. “I want to create for myself an unpopular theater.”

So said William Butler Yeats, the Irish poet, playwright, politician and playboy (1865-1939).

Cleveland Public Theatre’s “Open Mind Firmament” is nothing of the sort, yet is also true to Yeats’ vision of “a mysterious theater” that is more “a memory and a prophecy” than realistic.

Engrossing, hypnotic and viscerally literary, this homage to both Yeats and Cleveland State University Yeats scholar Barton Friedman entailed a year’s worth of hard physical and mental work by an ensemble of 14 performers led by CPT executive artistic director Raymond Bobgan.

Bobgan specializes in this sort of thing, having produced original adaptations of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, “Summer and Smoke” and plays by Gao Xingjian.

As brilliant as those were, it is tempting now to say that “Open Mind Firmament” surpasses them all. But let’s just say it is everything theater ought to be but so rarely is: revelatory.

Yeats, determined to write plays about Ireland’s heroic age to compensate for what he saw as the portrayal of his countrymen as buffoons by other Irish playwrights, produced a six-play “Ulster Cycle,” five about legendary Celtic hero Cuchulain.

None of these plays is staged today because their pure poetry makes them all but unplayable.

Bobgan and company mix excerpts of the plays and Yeats’ muscular poetry, the subtle gestures of the Japanese Noh theater that fascinated Yeats, and the lectures and written works of Friedman (1935-2009).

The resulting swirl of words and actions — moistened by water, heightened by ladders, shrouded in sheer scarves, and lighted in stark lights and darks by designer Trad A Burns – is a dreamlike melange of playfully sensuous allures.

The story arc, if there is one, emerges from several directions and eventually builds itself into a meditation on the nature of the writer as hero of his own work, author of his own life and anticipator of his own death. Yeats is Cuchulain — and so is Friedman.

The ensemble functions as an organic, protoplasmic whole that ebbs and flows and oozes on the Gordon Square arena stage. But it has four ringleaders.

Brett Keyser‘s Yeats has both dignity and mischief in his eye. Chris Seibert casts spells as Cathbad (the chief druid of Irish mythology) and as a blind seer. Raymond McNiece embodies Cuchulain’s physical and poetic prowess. And John Stuehr haunts the sidelines as Friedman.

If you know little or nothing about Yeats and his work, just let the production pour over your senses, and afterward pick up one of the informative limited-edition programs ($5) in the lobby, take it home and pore over it. Then go to the library and get some actual Yeats (the cast whispers some recommendations to the audience at the end of the show).

Yeats finished his wish for an “unpopular theater” by saying he also wanted “an audience like a secret society, where admission is by favor.”

Do yourself a favor, experience “Open Mind Firmament” and become a member of Yeats’ secret society.

[Original Cleveland.com Article] [PDF]

LITTLE BIG SHOWS

We get our share of big, big shows in Northeast Ohio, especially since PlayhouseSquare is the country’s second-largest performing-arts complex. But sometimes the action shifts to a slightly smaller scale. Take “Wanderlust: A History of Walking” at Cleveland Public Theatre, right. New York-based director Matthew Earnest has crafted a world-premiere show from a nonfiction book by Rebecca Solnit that is in fact a history of walking. But the play is much more than that, theater critic Tony Brown insists — “a nonstop, highly choreographed dance-theater piece” realized by an “indefatigable” ensemble of seven. Through Saturday, May 29, at CPT’s Gordon Square Theatre, 6415 Detroit Ave. Tickets are $10-$21. Go to cptonline.org or call 216-231-2727.

Dobama Theatre, a small but feisty off-Euclid company, is wowing ‘em with “Humble Boy,” which critic Brown calls a “thoughtful production of a brilliant play that buzzes with intelligence and packs a sordid sting.” Full of family dysfunction and black humor, Charlotte Jones’ play concerns a group of five characters in the backyard of a dead British beekeeper stung to death by his own hive. There’s a big pot of gazpacho, too. Through Sunday, May 30, at Dobama, 2340 Lee Road, Cleveland Heights. Tickets are $10-$22. Go to dobama.org or call 216-932-3396.

Viktor Schreckengost was Cleveland’s quintessential Renaissance man, an “artist, teacher and industrial designer who transformed America through his own work and that of the generations of students he taught at the Cleveland Institute of Art,” as art critic Steven Litt wrote in 2008, when Schreckengost died at 101. Now the region’s first posthumous exhibit devoted entirely to his work is here, called “From Jazz to Design: The Art of Viktor Schreckengost” in the modest confines of Bonfoey Gallery. On view is a sampling of the master’s work in a wide range of media: industrial designs, sculpture, pastels and watercolors. Through Saturday, June 5, at 1710 Euclid Ave., Cleveland. Go to bonfoey.com or call 216-621-0178. Free.

By Plain Dealer staff May 16, 2010, 12:25AM

[Original Cleveland.com Article] [PDF]

Steve WagnerJonathan Ramos, left, Kevin Charnas, Adam Thatcher and Trae Hicks take a stroll through “Wanderlust: A History of Walking” at Cleveland Public Theatre.

REVIEW

Wanderlust: A History of WalkingWhat: Cleveland Public Theatre presents the world premiere of a play, adapted and directed by Matthew Earnest.

When: Through Saturday, May 29. Performances at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays. Special performances: 3 p.m. this Sunday and 7:30 p.m. Monday.

Where: CPT’s Gordon Square Theatre, 6415 Detroit Ave.

Tickets: $10-$21. Go to cptonline.org or call 216-631-2727.

The mind of Homo sapiens sapiens evolved, over most of the 200,000 years since the emergence of the subspecies we call human, to collect and process data at about 3 mph.

That’s the speed of walking — you know, where you use your legs, feet and a little arm pumping to navigate from place to place.

In ancient times, some of our forebears began to be pulled in chariots by horses and others began riding the beasts, which today can gallop at up to 30 mph.

But it has been only in the past couple of centuries — with the advent of the practical steam locomotive, the automobile and the airplane — that we’ve demanded our brains catch up in a hurry to exponentially faster processing speeds as we go faster through the world.

This fascinating observation is but one of a multitude made in “Wanderlust: A History of Walking,” which opened last weekend in Cleveland Public Theatre’s Levin Theatre.

It’s a work adapted by New York-based director Matthew Earnest, who’s getting to be a regular around Cleveland. He’s worked at Porthouse Theatre, the Beck Center for the Arts (where he will work again next season) and now Cleveland Public Theatre, where his visual, physical style is most at home.

In an unusual wrinkle, Earnest worked from a nonfiction book, Rebecca Solnit’s fascinating history of walking. Although the book is a delightful read, putting such a scholarly tome on the stage runs the obvious risk of didacticism.

But in these inventive hands, it’s a nonstop, highly choreographed dance-theater piece in which an indefatigable ensemble of seven walks this way, talks this way on a set (by Earnest and Curtis Young) consisting of a stage of dirt and a wall-size chalkboard on which history is writ.

From the bones of “Lucy” (a hominid who lived more than 3 million years ago and whose pelvis indicates she was bipedal) through Aristotle’s Greece and the Middle Ages to modern-day Las Vegas, Earnest and crew set a perpetual human machine in motion for 100 minutes.

It’s an impressive and extraordinarily entertaining education with every member of the cast pitching in: Kevin Charnas, Alexis Generette Floyd, Trae Hicks, Nicole Perrone, Jonathan Ramos, Pandora Robertson and Adam Thatcher.

Walk, don’t drive, to the box office.

By Tony Brown, The Plain Dealer

[Cleveland.com Article] [PDF]

Near West Theatre Puts Community, sense of belonging at center of its art

The Plain Dealer
Thursday, May 17 2007
*Click article to enlarge and read