Sat 6/3 @ 11AM-6PM
Jane Bond makes no bones about it. She’s just a theater buff who has always supported live performance. During a stint as Coach House Theater board member and house manager, she realized far too many people remained unaware that Northeast Ohio boasts a hotbed of talented theater companies.
After years of thinking about how she can enlighten residents on all of the offerings they’re missing, Bond came up with the Summit StageFest, which makes its debut Sat 6/3 at Highland Square. The entire day will feature dozens of live performances from a cornucopia of companies showing off their latest productions. Think of it as one-stop gawking for theater lovers. There will also be dozens of artists, vendors and food offerings along West Market Street.
CoolCleveland talked to Summit StageFest event chair Bond about the inaugural affair.
First of all, tell us about Summit StageFest.
We will have a theater festival outdoors — rain or shine — in Highland Square. We have 39 performing groups or individuals. We have an incredible variety of actual performances.
There will be five outdoor stages and three performance areas. What will happen is every hour on the hour a new performance will start on each of the five theaters. And then the street performers will be running between those live shows. The shows will go off on the hour and run for no more than 45 minutes.
What can eventgoers expect to see?
You can see Shakespeare, standup comedy, children’s theater. We’ve got the Lake Effect Poetry doing a poetry showcase. We’ve got ballet. We’ve got improv dance. It’s like a buffet. You get to sample a whole variety of performing groups with the hope you’ll really like what the Rubber City Radio Players offered or the Magic Theater Company offered, and you’re going to see their next performances.
It sounds like the latter is the idea behind the Summit StageFest.
The idea behind it is to promote theater in Northeast Ohio. The organization that’s putting on the festival is the Partners for Theater Inc., which has a larger mission than just doing Summit StageFest. It’s supporting the theater arts in the greater Northeast Ohio area. We want to work on audience development, we want to offer scholarships to theater students. We want to offer workshops such as stage management or stage combat or makeup. People have a tendency to think about theater and just think about the actors. That’s great, but theater needs a huge support system behind those people on the stage so we want to be part of helping that kind of support system to develop. Also, we want to encourage people to look at theater as an option for their entertainment dollar. A lot of people, believe it or not, have never seen a live theater performance. And that just horrifies me. So, I want to start turning that around.
Looking around the country, is there another event similar to Summit StageFest?
No. The way I got the idea was I simply went on the Internet and tried to find something comparable because I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. I couldn’t find anything. The only thing remotely like this is the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland. Other areas have theater festivals where over a week you can go on this day to this venue and another day another venue and so on. It’s just a series of shows at different theaters. Nothing goes on like this where it’s all simultaneous, it’s all in the same location and there’s such tremendous variety.
Considering your background and interest in live theater, it sounds like you created your own Woodstock.
(laughs) I did.
Akron, OH