Exit Stage Right

If you spontaneously break into song during conversations today, you'll be hooked up to a Thorazine drip by nightfall. Which explains why we love musicals.
Most of us with a gram of imagination are attracted to the completely daft idea of people singing their innermost thoughts. And last year was a treasure trove of noteworthy musicals.

Kalliope Stage: Baby traced the breeding rituals of various couples with a spectacularly talented cast, and, in an icily decadent production of Cabaret, this outstanding company proved that all musicals aren't just grinnin' and croonin'. Anyone who attended Cabaret probably still gets goose bumps recalling the last-scene stunner.

Playhouse Square: Cathy Rigby soared, with or without wires, as she gave a macho gloss to Peter Pan, overcoming an ordinary turn by Captain Hook and a ship set that looked to have been pirated from a high school production. On the other end of the musical spectrum, Love, Janis (which is still playing the Hanna) is like mainlining the 190-proof essence of Janis Joplin; you'll be on your feet screaming at the finale, just like Janis herself.

Jewish Community Center/Cuyahoga Community College: Fred Sternfeld's staging of South Pacific was studded with great voices (Tom Fulton and Joan Ellison), energetic dancing (choreographed by Martin Cespedes), and lively comic performances, especially by Cheryl E. Campo as an irrepressible Bloody Mary.

Beck Center: Beauty and the Beast, another great Sternfeld production, is maxing out the talents of an exceptional cast to wring laughs and tears from this durable Disney property (it's playing -- and sold out -- through December 31).

Worst Sports Play: Rounding Third at the Play House. The script, laden with unlikely character reversals, traded credibility for cheap laffs.

Most Sporting Players: The whole gang at Convergence-Continuum. They consistently put together interesting and edgy new works that you're not going to see anywhere else.

"In a world where so many people are breaking things, we're making things." -- Don Bianchi, co-founder of Dobama Theatre
Locals who do the heaviest lifting in the creative process are those who put their fragile ideas on paper and then on stage. Whether or not the shows are entirely successful, they deserve our thanks for their effort and guts. So a thousand huzzahs to Nina Domingue (Mo Pas Connin -- or Torment), Eric Coble (Ten Minutes From Cleveland, T.I.D.Y. ), Sarah Morton (4 Minutes to Happy), Dianne McIntyre and Michael Medcalf (Daughter of a Buffalo Soldier, the Life and Legacy of Marjorie Witt Johnson), all the children who wrote plays in the Marilyn Bianchi Kids' Playwriting Festival, Last Call Cleveland (Last Call Cleveland Stole My Bike!), and Linda Eisenstein and Michael Sepesy (Holiday Hotline).

And to everyone in the theater community -- all the actors, directors, and backstage people who are constantly making things that blossom brilliantly for a couple weeks and then vanish into the maw of time -- a deep bow of respect and thanks. You make our lives far richer than you know.