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FALL THEATER PREVIEW
LOOKING AHEAD AT THE 2009-10 SEASON
By MILAN PAURICH
vindicator correspondent
With summer drawing to a close, area community theaters are officially gearing up for another bang-up season.
Last year, things didn’t turn out quite as planned.
The Youngstown Playhouse halted operations in late October due to financial problems, effectively putting the kibosh on most of their 2008-09 season (Wherefore art thou, “Big”?).
While everyone put on a smiley face and wished the Playhouse a speedy recovery, the paranoia felt within the Youngstown arts community was off-the-charts (“If it could happen to the Playhouse, it could happen to us”).
Even normally indefatigable Easy Street Productions was forced to cancel a spring production of “Guys and Dolls” because of the lousy economy.
Yet the Playhouse somehow managed to beat the odds, staging a dramatic comeback this summer.
And according to Managing Director Pat Fagan, “We want people to know that the Playhouse is here to stay and coming back stronger than ever. We’ve chosen a fun, upbeat and varied season designed to please longtime fans as well as bring in new audiences. We have some classics — ‘Inherit the Wind,’ ‘Blithe Spirit’ — and several area premieres on our list.”
Among the premieres Fagan is understandably high on are the Kander and Ebb (“Cabaret,” “Chicago”) murder-mystery musical “Curtains,” “The Wedding Singer” (a 2006 musicalization of the Adam Sandler-Drew Barrymore film) and the African-American musical “Fabric of a Man.”
The Oakland Center for the Arts got a jump on everyone by kicking off their season earlier this month with “The Great American Trailer Park Musical.”
But just because they got an early start doesn’t mean the Oakland is growing complacent.
Just ask Brooke Slanina, president of the Oakland’s board of directors.
“I’m the worst person to ask about specific [upcoming] shows because I am 100 percent behind every single show we do,” Slanina said.
“I know how hard the play selection committee works to put together a phenomenal season, so I truly believe that everything we do is going to be the best show ever ...until the next one,” she confessed with a laugh.
“I’m excited about the season ahead because we have a lot of new blood coming in. New directors [John Cox/‘Wit,’ Nathan Beagle/‘Back of the Throat,’ Shawn Lockaton/‘An Adult Evening of Shel Silverstein’]; new actors; new volunteers. This season is a challenge in that we’re now officially staff-free, so we rely on [outside] help more than ever.”
Fortunately, the Oakland just received their first grant in years from the Wean Foundation. Thanks to Wean’s benefaction, Oakland’s Magic Carpet youth theater can go back into Youngstown City Schools and perform.
Oakland MVP Robert Dennick Joki clearly isn’t the type to rest on his laurels.
After the recent box-office and critical smash of his “Reefer Madness” and “Trailer Park,” Joki has already begun work on several more upcoming Oakland spectaculars.
“I’ve been working all summer on the design elements for the ‘Rocky Horror Show’ revival. I think people are going to be really surprised. They’ve seen ‘Rocky’ before, but they’ve never seen it like this,” Joki said.
“I’ve also been rewriting ‘How The Drag Queen Stole Christmas’ and adding new music. Halloween and Christmas at the Oakland are going to be off the hook,” he promised.
Top Hat Productions has a busy season ahead as well.
Besides a spring revival of their perennial Gospel musical “The Earth Trembled,” Brian Palumbo’s Christian Theater Company will be staging the 1998 Stephen Flaherty-Lynn Ahrens musical “Ragtime” this fall, a Nativity play at Christmas and an original dinner-theater production (“The Music Leads Me Home”) written by Palumbo himself in late winter.
According to Palumbo, Top Hat is pulling out all the stops to guarantee that theatergoers have an exciting season.
“We picked productions that demand heavy-hitting vocalists, and already so many are stepping up to the plate. Our season-opener (‘Ragtime’) will alone have a minimum of 30 people on stage,” he enthused.
“One of the chief tenets of our mission statement is to act as a bridge between cultures. So part of my overall excitement stems from the fact that all of our shows this year are so multicultural. “
Over at the Victorian Players, multihyphenate J.E. Ballantyne is putting the finishing touches on his adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” for a Halloween premiere.
“This was a real challenge since I had to build an entirely new subplot around the original Poe story to make it a full-length script,” Ballantyne admitted.
“It’s in rewrites now, so who knows what might happen between now and opening night?”
And while funding for a revival of Ballantyne’s acclaimed 2005 Holocaust epic “Block 5” fell through last season, he expressed confidence that a January production would indeed happen, this time at the Vic.
“This ‘Block 5’ is going to be even more memorable than the original. As good as the original cast was, this cast is even better and stronger overall,” Ballan- tyne said.
If that’s not enough live theater to whet your appetite, there will also be a pair of Shakespearean comedies (“Twelfth Night” at Trumbull New Theatre in January and February’s Youngstown State University production of “As You Like It”), edgy contemporary dramas (“How I Learned to Drive,” “The Shape of Things” and “The Cripple of Inishmaan” at YSU; “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?” at Akron’s Weathervane Playhouse; the Oakland’s controversial, 9/11-themed season-closer, “Back of the Throat”), some beloved old favorites (“Guys and Dolls” courtesy of Lisbon’s Stage Left Players; TNT’s “Bye, Bye Birdie;” New Castle Playhouse’s “Beauty and the Beast”) and even appearances by Sherlock Holmes (the Vic’s “Sherlock Holmes, The Final Adventure”), Dracula (in — what else? — “Dracula” at the Youngstown Playhouse) and Santa Claus (the Playhouse’s holiday production of “Miracle on 34th Street”).
Unfortunately, that latter trifecta of superstars won’t be sharing a stage.
Oh well, maybe next season.