VIDEO: Any Summer Night’s Dream
Discovering Cain Park
Every year a few more life-long Clevelanders discover Cain Park, even though the place has been entertaining people from near and far, in numerous ways, for nearly 75 years. One year it’s a Sheryl Crow concert that brings in newcomers; another year it’s Lyle Lovett, or Judy Collins, or the Beach Boys, or Spyro Gyra. Cain Park started 73 years ago with a production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in what was then 22 acres of woods and a ravine. Today Cain Park is a real park, with green spaces and amenities including tennis and basketball courts, jogging and bike paths, a skate park, playground and picnic tables.
But it also is the home of two great performing spaces. The Evans Amphitheater is a 2,500-seat outdoor, but mostly covered, venue that presents summertime concerts by national and local musical artists of almost every genre – folk, jazz, rock and ethnic – plus dance concerts, children’s programming and more. Like Blossom Music Center it has a covered pavilion and a lawn-seating area, but the Evans is about one-eighth the size of Blossom, so there are really no bad seats here. The Alma Theater is a 262-seat semi-outdoor theater, in which the park also presents concerts of all kinds, as well as musical theater productions, such as this year’s offering, Dreamgirls.
Cain Park kicked off its 2011 series Saturday 6/11/11 with a sold-out show by Bela Fleck & the Flecktones. And there’s plenty more to come, through late August. Ksenia Roshchakovsky is the longtime marketing and PR Manager for Cain Park. Cool Cleveland correspondent David Budin caught up with Ksenia on the Evans stage to ask her about this season’s shows and some new innovations Cain Park is offering this summer. Watch the video here.