REVIEW: Legacy of Light @ Cleveland Play House
Saying goodbye to the Drury Theatre
This is supposed to be a review of Legacy of Light , this year’s featured production in Fusion Fest, the Cleveland Play House’s annual spring festival of new and collaborated works. In short, I really enjoyed Legacy of Light and I think you would too. I highly recommend seeing it.
Now what I really want to write about: Legacy of Light is the last production I will see at the Play House’s theaters located near the Cleveland Clinic between Euclid and Carnegie. I have been luckier than most middle class jocks from the other side of town and have probably seen over the years more than sixty productions there. I was first dragged there as a boy by some parents who wanted to make sure their kids grew up with a touch of culture in their otherwise typical middle class suburban lives. I attended a couple of field trips as a student at a high school that had English teachers who thought students needed to see live theater. But I really hit stride when I became one of those teachers, and spent some of the happiest days of a thirty year teaching career taking students to the matinees that both the Play House and the Great Lakes Theater Festival have offered. And as icing on the cake, I have been reviewing plays for the last five or six years, and when it didn’t conflict with my coaching calendar, attending media nights for almost every Play House production over that time. And I have loved all of it, especially being a teacher taking so many students who otherwise would have never seen a professional play to a real live theater.
I have such mixed emotions about the Play House’s move downtown. I know it is the right thing, and for me it is the right thing for two reasons. The first is the cost and upkeep of their current facility is becoming too expensive. The second is the opportunities that will present themselves downtown, especially in their collaboration with Cleveland State. Good things are happening at CSU, and their plans with the Play House, if they pan out, could be wonderful for the school, the theater, and all of Northeast Ohio.
With all positive changes come many good things and a few not so good. I worry about the bartenders and parking lot attendants and other support personnel who will probably not go downtown with the theater. I worry about the older patrons who have enjoyed being dropped off at the door and parking near by. I hope there will be some sort of special valet service for them at the Allen Theater. I’ve really enjoyed going to Stages before the show for a drink or two and some appetizers. What’s going to happen to everyone who works there? How many will lose their jobs?
I hope the Play House keeps offering great programs to the schools and students of the area. I hope they find a way to keep up their Christmas tree decoration tradition. I hope they soon revive The Christmas Story; I’ve seen it each year they’ve produced it and have never grown tired of what has become Cleveland’s Christmas story. I know there are a lot of great places to go before and after a show in the PlayhouseSquare area, but I hope they find a way to have their own place inside the theater similar to Stages.
And I wonder, with the move downtown, will this be the catalyst for the Play House and the Great Lakes Theater Festival to finely become one? I know they have explored it in the past and decided against it, but in these current economic times that don’t look to be getting much better, and now being in the same neighborhood across the street from each other, will it finally happen? This might be the time to be collaborating rather than competing. With their new proximity, why pay for two administrative staffs? Why try to hustle money from the same people and foundations? Why pay for two advertising budgets? There are a lot of egos involved in our theater world — would those egos let something like that happen?
Legacy of Light is running now through Sun 5/1 @ the Cleveland Play House. Get tickets at http://ClevelandPlayHouse.com.
Greg Cielec is a local writer who covers mostly music and sports for a variety of publications and websites. He is also a full time English and creative writing teacher at Streetsboro High School; an adjunct professor at BGSU Firelands College and Lakeland Community College; and a football coach at John Carroll University.
He has published two books of fiction, My Cleveland Story (1998) and Home and Away Games (2006), and the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Michael Heaton has called him “the Mark Twain of Cleveland.” Check out his website and blog at http://www.GregCielec.com.
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