Five years ago, in a two-part analysis saluting the long overdue departure of Peter Hackett as the Cleveland Play House’s chief, I painfully reckoned up the myriad failings of his decade-long regime, along with those of the equally ruinous eight-year administration of his predecessor, Josephine Abady.
In doing so, however, I strove to lay the essential blame for the
quarter-century degradation of Cleveland’s most storied theatrical
institution squarely where it so rightly belonged — on the utter
mismanagement of the CPH board of directors and advisory council. At
that time, this august band consisted of 110 [!] worthies whose sole
talents for overseeing an artistic enterprise were presumably
successful business careers or family wealth. A staffer back then said
of this congregation: “There are some good, dedicated people among
them. Still, except as interested patrons, not one of them has any real
artistic experience or background.”
Despite its alarming lack of expertise, the board, with much
self-congratulatory fanfare, hired successive artistic directors
— and, worse, consistently and self-righteously supported their
manifest calamities — whose inept productions went from
pretentious twaddle to trivial commercial pap, and, in the 20-year
process, diminished to a shameful degree whatever lingering reputation
the theater had retained.
But by far the overweening overseers’ most disastrous transgression
came earlier when, in 1983, they decided to pay vainglorious tribute to
their exalted eminence as fat-cat poobahs of the local arts scene by
commissioning world-class architect Philip Johnson to design a
monumental, totally superfluous playhouse to add to CPH’s perfectly
sufficient pair of the Drury and Brooks theaters, and, more
importantly, to provide edificial testament to the board’s pharaonic
magnificence.
Johnson slyly scammed these provincial hicks with the Bolton, a
street peddler’s knockoff of his New York State Theater at Lincoln
Center, with barnlike dimensions that created both acoustic and
financial miseries. What this ludicrously ostentatious expansion really
did, however, was to put CPH in permanent peril of foreclosure by
establishing an annual overhead cost that Abady cited in her day as “$1
million just to open the doors.” Thus was born a white elephant so
mammoth that it deserved the elevated designation of albino
pachyderm.
By Hackett’s midterm, increasing desperation called for the hatching
of pipe-dream schemes to sell the property to public corporations or
the city, or rent out the complex’s theaters as a kind of bush-league
PlayhouseSquare Center — suggestions that all prompted zero
takers. Then the beleaguered boss devised the crafty plot to attempt a
merger with the troubled Great Lakes Theater Festival, gobble up its
assets and donors by subsequently voting it out of existence, and say
bye-bye to its own onerous Babar by settling into the ill-used but
eminently desirable Hanna — something GLTF instead accomplished
after successfully resisting the takeover.
Now, with the recent announcement of an all-but-done deal between
PlayhouseSquare, CPH and Cleveland State University for the latter two
organizations to become joint tenants of a reconfigured Allen Theatre
in the near future, it seems the pachyderm will finally trudge off to
its ancestral graveyard.
Amid the ballyhooed and understandable jubilation attending the
deal, there are a few nagging caveats. The sole restored
PlayhouseSquare theater specifically designed for movie exhibition
— minus any consideration for live productions — the Allen,
as presently constituted, is a shoebox that seats thousands, and
activities on its stage often seem as intimately accessible as the
light from Antares. It’ll take more than simply reducing the number of
chairs in the projected 550-seat portion that CPH will occupy to
eliminate this problem.
A second question is the possibility that the venerable Play House,
a theater fixture here for more than 90 years — if a frequently
shaky one — might lose its specific identity as just one more
component in PlayhouseSquare’s multifarious array of presentations.
It’s a concern allied to the effect of the move on CPH’s true-bluest
patrons, who have a visceral connection to the historic, near-familial
location between Euclid and Carnegie. Will they have any emotional need
to follow the parade a few miles down our main drag to the gaudy bright
lights around 14th Street?
This article appears in Apr 29 – May 5, 2009.
Though the article is riddled with errors and unsubstantiated rumors, I will only comment on one CPH slur regarding the supposed takeover attempt. A few years back, while chatting with an actor in a west coast theater, I learned he had just returned from Cleveland and the GLTF board had offered him the Artistic Director position. He told me that the Cleveland Foundation was forcing the two theaters to merge to simplify it’s money distribution problems. All property belonging to CPH would be sold to cover GLTF debts and pay for a downtown theater renovation. GLTF was to absorb all assets and some personal but all the surviving artistic staff would be GLTF. He would take over both theaters but only GLTF’s name would be on the marquee. I asked him if CPH knew about this plan yet and he said the board would take care of that before he signed the contract. I called some friends in Cleveland and they were surprised because nothing was in the papers.
Eight months later, GLTF selected someone else for A.D.
Two years later, I read a series of articles about the merging of the two theaters and this time the plan was for CPH to keep their building and their artistic staff and GLTF would be the poor pathetic company taken advantage of. The Foundation has been trying to “strongly encourage” the merge of the theaters for years but it sells papers if you only report what you can distort.