It's a pretty big deal for Cleveland: professional theatre Downtown in the Summer for the first time in 14 years. And who's responsible? Charlie Fee, who arrived in Cleveland two years to serve as the Producing Artistic Director at Great Lakes Theater Festival, while he remains Artistic Director of the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, the outdoor summer theatre in Boise. Now that GLTF is shifting its schedule to two summer comedies in repertory – The Taming of the Shrew and Compleat Works of Shakespeare (Abridged) previewing on Sat 7/16 thru 8/22 at the Ohio Theatre on Playhouse Square - he’s busier than ever. When you talk with him, you notice one thing right away: he’s an enthusiast. Originally from Seattle, Fee splits his time between two compatible gigs. Read the exclusive Cool Cleveland interview with this theatrical titan by Cool Cleveland theatre correspondent Linda Eisenstein.

Cool Cleveland: It’s been a while since Great Lakes Theater Festival was on a summer schedule. What made you return to it?
Charles Fee: Several reasons. First, I think that the theatre district at Playhouse Square needs a summer event. As the first anchor tenant at Playhouse Square as a resident producer, we played our role for the first 20 years – and now it’s time to expand. Summer is the time of year where there aren’t as many events going on. We were a summer festival until 1990. This is returning to our roots. Second, there’s an awful lot of theater going during on the other parts of the year. We plan to bridge the main theatre season in the fall, with our September-October shows. We didn’t want to give that up, because we have a very strong educational theatre program going on during the school year. We have so many senior and junior high audiences coming to our student matinees, as well as their in-class experiences with our residencies.

I think GLTF has one of the best educational programs going in the country.
Thanks! We think so.

Describe a little about it.
The heart of it is the school residency. We send a team of 2 actor/teachers for a one-week residency to an area junior or senior high school. They teach a full slate of classes every day. They end up reaching the whole grade, in a very deep way. They’re working on the plays that are in the curriculum -– Romeo & Juliet, or Julius Caesar, for example. They read the scenes in class, and talk about the language and issues of the play. Then they get the students into the costumes and act along with them. So in speaking the verse and acting the verse they are engaged with the action of the play in a different way. It becomes experiential learning. We have ten groups of actor/teachers doing this. Over the fall, we’re playing to about 20,000 students a year in the residencies alone, in deep contact. Then 20,000 students will come to see the fall matinee series. For many of the students in a multi-county area they’ll be experiencing both things. Theatres around the country are now licensing our residency workshops.

What are the main reasons behind the pairings of this summer’s repertory shows?
Hamlet & Tartuffe had many thematic parallels. But with Shrew and Compleat Works it’s less about the themes and more about the experience. We wanted to lead with very accessible shows. But Shrew is also politically charged, the way it looks at sexual politics between men and women. It’s broad comedy, but provokes a lot of discussion. Of course it also has terrific leads for two actors here – Andrew May and Laura Perotta.

I remember seeing them in Private Lives earlier this year, and hearing the audience give them Broadway-star applause at their entrances.
Yes! That’s the point of creating a resident company. Audiences want the feeling of rooting for a company, a “home team”. Maintaining a large company isn’t possible anymore. But with two theatres beginning to share an ensemble of actors, other things are possible.

Tell us what it’s like, balancing your work between Idaho and Cleveland.
This is my third season here and now I know a lot more about the community. In my first season, I needed to bring in folks I knew. My goal was always to get to know and develop the Cleveland-based talent.

This summer, you’re going to see virtually an entire Cleveland-based company. There are only 3 actors out of 20 in the company from somewhere else – the 3 guys who are doing Compleat Shakespeare Abridged, and they’ve all worked with us in Cleveland before. We’ve got a phenomenally strong Cleveland company: Andrew May. Laura Perotta. Wayne Turney. Mark Alan Gordon, a wonderful actor who just moved to Case Western Reserve. Ron Wilson, the chair of CWRU graduate theatre program. Scott Plate, Nick Koesters, Dierdru Ring – she’s from New York, but works here so often audiences think of her as local.

The Boise team and Cleveland team have also gotten to know each other. Actors couldn’t care less about the boundaries of cities and things. But for the two city’s audiences, over time, they see 40 actors they’re getting to know instead of 20. Next year I plan to bring Andrew and Laura to Boise – the exchange will go both ways.

I’m hearing rumors about some street theatre you’re doing in relation to the shows. Tell, tell.
We want there to be a larger experience for the community than a play on the stage. The minute you arrive at Playhouse Square, you need to feel like you’re part of an event. We’ve been working with the city, with Playhouse Square, and with local actors to create a street festival feeling at Euclid & 14th. It’s not just that all the restaurants will be open, with café tables on the street. There’ll be performance pieces on the street – musicians, jugglers. Before every performance there’ll be the arrival of Queen Elizabeth I in a horse drawn carriage – “she” will talk about Cleveland and England.

And William Shakespeare, our mascot, will be making public appearances all over Cleveland – at an Indians game, walking downtown at lunch, at corporate events. We’ll see him on a bike, on a bus, at the airport. We’re planning a contest with WKYC Channel 2 called “Where’s Will?” People can spot him around town and call in for free tickets.

What have you learned about Cleveland’s artistic community since you’ve been here? Pluses and minuses.
The pluses are obvious. I got here during a crisis of funding that created an incredible opportunity in the arts. All the companies were talking with each other. Not just the formal attempt with the Play House. I also immediately found a community from Dobama to Cleveland Public to Charenton -- on-and-on. Our partnership with CPT over Nickel and Dimed came naturally out of everyone’s discussion on what we can do.

Everyone’s excited, talking, looking to the future. We’re all trying to turn Cleveland’s image of itself around. We’re at the beginning of a real renaissance in the arts, business, and the universities all working together in a proactive way. That means getting away from the old way of doing things, where a complacency has set in. It’s still tough, though. It still hasn’t translated into a deep excitement of our audiences and a confidence in the future.

What have you learned about Cleveland’s audiences?
The irony is that they’re much like Seattle, or Boise, audiences – they’re incredibly warm. Almost all Boise actors were in Cleveland for the first time. We were very worried -– especially with the risks we took with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. [Note: Last year’s Dream was a frothy romp accompanied by Beatles’ tunes.] We found that played exactly the way it did in Boise, except with a roof over us. Audiences here are hungry for classical work and experimentation and life on stage.

An example: For Hamlet & Tartuffe, 1/3 of single tickets were sold to students. That’s outside the student matinees! That’s been a significant change in our sales. You could feel it from the last few days of Much Ado, to Midsummer Night’s Dream, to Hamlet & Tartuffe – how we’ve built a new younger audience. The sound in the house has changed – more hooting and hollering, which is great!

There’s another thing we need to build: the audience that is resident in downtown Cleveland. You want to make sure that the folks that live downtown –- young professionals and empty nesters -– get into see these shows.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a downtown restaurant, a hotel, a theatre – the suburban lifestyle that has grown up in Northern Ohio is a tough thing to battle. You know: “I work downtown –- I go home to Solon -– and I don’t want to get back in the car and go back downtown.” That’s something you really have to work on. If you can’t get the suburban audience back, you’ve got to get a new audience.

Folks will come downtown if it’s Cirque du Soleil or Mamma Mia -– they discover that it’s not that hard. This is an incredibly easy downtown to navigate. Restaurants and parking are accessible -– it’s safe -- and it doesn’t take long to get here. The more people get used to coming to events, the more they realize it’s easy and fun.

Name your top 5 favorite places in Cleveland.
Ohio City. The Market. Parker’s Restaurant. And I absolutely love this downtown. I grew up on the west coast, and this downtown is so easy to get around in. It’s great to walk around in. The big ticket places, of course -– the museum and orchestra. And the lake is so beautiful. I walk by it every morning, in Edgewater Park – that place where you look at the downtown from the park is gorgeous.

What’s the first place you take your new folks to see?
Playhouse Square Center. You know, there’s nothing like this anywhere else in the country! Just to walk through all these spaces is absolutely mind-blowing.

What’s been your biggest surprise?
That it has been harder to build an audience than I really expected.

Why? Economy, lifestyle, politics of Cleveland?
All of the above.

Thanks for your time.
You know, I love Cool Cleveland. Everybody in Boise reads it, to keep up with what’s happening here.

Interview by Linda Eisenstein Linda@coolcleveland.com (:divend:)