2001 - 2002 Season

The Roar of the Greasepaint, The Smell of the Crowd | Private Lives | A Child's Christmas in Wales | Over the River and Through the Woods | The Memory of Water | Who's Afriad of Virginia Woolf?

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (3 Reviews)

'Virginia Woolf' cast sinks teeth into Albee
Actors' Summit performance doesn't shrink from play's dark humor and violent absurdity
By Kerry Clawson, The Akron Beacon Journal

At some point, most people have been unwillingly privy to another couple's ugly argument, or gotten into a loose-lipped, heated debate with folks they hardly know when everybody has been drinking too much at a party.

Those scenarios are taken to the nth degree in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a lashing, biting, brutal specimen of language that nonetheless has plenty of dark humor. The Actors' Summit presentation of the Tony Award-winning play, which opened Friday night in Hudson, superbly draws out the meaty -- albeit sick -- humor that makes this play entertaining.

In less talented hands, Virginia Woolf could be an exhausting downer. But though the characters are drained and broken at the play's end, the audience is not.

This dynamic cast takes us on a wild ride from a very funny first act through successively darker, more menacing second and third acts. No matter how ugly the insults and humiliation get, the nearly three-hour Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? keeps you in anticipation. One wonders how all this mess could possibly be resolved.

At the heart of the play is actor Tom Fulton, who masterfully controls the show in the role of the verbally abused George. George could easily be portrayed as the impotent waste of a human being that Martha views him as.

Yet, through Fulton, we see that he is extremely intelligent, witty and detests hypocrisy. Fulton is captivating as he turns from mockery one moment to seething anger and violent outbursts the next.

As the foul-mouthed, caustic Martha, Paula Duesing is much funnier than one would imagine. Her annoyingly scratchy voice is perfect for Martha's abusive character. This brilliantly written play focuses on unhealthy, abnormal relationships, both with older couple George and Martha, and the younger Nick and Honey. Albee shows us that in different ways, both couples are avoiding the truth.

George and Martha enjoy drawing the younger couple into their sick games of degradation, including ``Humiliate the Host,'' ``Get the Guests'' and ``Hump the Hostess.'' George and Martha thrive on their verbal wars: Ironically, it's what keeps their love-hate relationship going. In an odd way, these two need each other very much.

Duesing and Fulton are thoroughly believable as the sparring couple. One of their funnier moments occurs when they both turn on Nick.

As horrid as George and Martha are, we see that Nick is really the biggest slime. Peter Voinovich's smug, blond Nick cares only about his own ambition. His marriage to his ridiculously childlike wife, Honey (Susanna Hobrath), is as empty as George and Martha's.

Playwright Albee has said that his play is an indictment against an American society that values ambition and progress more than relationships that have respect, meaning and compassion.

Most of Virginia Woolf's humor lies in its violent absurdity. George and Martha call their son a ``little bugger'' and a ``beanbag.'' George makes up a nasty story about Blondie and his Mouse wife (Nick and Honey). In a scary moment, George aims a trick gun at Martha. Later, she tries to bait her husband by openly seducing Nick in front of him.

Albee, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, was denied a Pulitzer for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1962 because its brutality caused so much controversy. Today, it remains shocking but is not appalling.

One of the major themes of the play is the blurred line between illusion and reality. The audience is often left guessing what's the truth -- a big part of what makes this dark comedy so intriguing.

Don't be Afraid of this Virginia Woolf
Actors' Summit Brings Quality Production of American Classic to Stage
David Ritchey, West Side Leader

Actors' Summit Theater is staging "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" through April 21. When the play first opened in New York in 1962, the American theater changed forever. A young, fresh playwright brought an electrifying drama to the stage. And despite the accomplished actors who have played the roles of this dramatic quartet, the star has always been the playwright, Edward Albee. The Pulitzer Prize Committee, in a memorable act of cowardice, did not award Albee its prize for "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" No award was given in drama that year.

During the last years of the 20th century, Albee lost his audience. At the February meeting of the American Theatre Critics Association in New York City, Albee said to the group, "I'm in again. My favor with audiences and critics seems to go in decade-long cycles. Now, I'm popular again."

He's right. The winner of three Pulitzer Prizes in drama is back on top. On Broadway, his "The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?" is playing. Off-Broadway, Anne Bancroft has the leading role in Albee's "Occupant." And in Hudson, Actors' Summit is presenting an exciting production of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

The plot involves a late-night party at the home of George and Martha. George is a member of the history faculty at a small New England college. Martha, his wife, is the daughter of the college president. They've invited to their home Nick, a new faculty member, and Honey, his wife.

In most productions, Martha dominates the evening's ribald games. But Neil Thackaberry (director) moved the emphasis from Martha and made George her equal. The production works much better when the two leading roles have equally strong spirits.

Paula Duesing (Martha) seems to make any play come to life with her ability to act and live in the moment. She was remarkable as a dying cancer patient, Vivian Bearing, in "Wit." In this production, Duesing makes Albee's words cut as deep and as painfully as possible. Once again, she makes the stage shimmer with her honesty and her exquisite acting ability.

Tom Fulton (George) doesn't make the history professor a weak husband dominated by a shrill wife. Too often George's weakness becomes a structural problem. Fulton makes George strong and capable of being equal in any fight Martha might start.

Peter Voinovich (Nick) looks and struts like a new faculty member whose Ph.D. diploma still has wet ink on it. He may be new to the faculty, but this Nick knows what he has to do to climb the academic ladder to the administration building. Voinovich makes Nick a university athlete who plans to use his athletic prowess and his combative personality to become a campus presence. Scratch this faculty member, and you'll find a streetwise, tough guy.

Susanna Hobrath (Honey) instigates some of the plot's actions. Unfortunately, Hobrath is at the mercy of a playwright who has almost left her out of the script. The audience is left wondering why Nick married her, even with her substantial bank account.

The stage setting forces the audience into the party. The action is so close to the audience that I was tempted to ask George for a drink as he was serving them to everyone on stage.

This is a first-rate production of the best play written by one of this country's best playwrights.

Albee has the courage to write for adults. He knows adults and he brings them to the stage in their raw, unpolished vulnerability. That elusive "adult ability" is what makes him so appealing as a playwright.

Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?
Ray Berko, Times Newspapers

Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf opened on Broadway on October 13, 1962. That same month, the world seemed poised on the edge of a nuclear war when the United States faced off against the Soviet Union over the presence of nuclear weapons on Cuba. Much like the missile crisis, George and Martha, the play's protagonists, hurl threats, epitaphs, and fight a battle of wills.

Interestingly, though the play is considered to be one of modern America's classics, the script did not win the Pulitzer Prize. The committee actually selected it as the winner. However, the award is overseen by Columbia University, and the trustees decided that the explicit language, interest in "taboo" subjects, and controversial public reception made it the wrong choice. Nonetheless, it won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Tony Award for Best Play that year.

In this era of Jerry Springer and similar television shows which are embraced by the public, the profanity and hateful words between George and Martha that so shocked audiences in the 1960's, now seems commonplace.

The story concerns the relationship between George, a history professor, and his wife, Martha, the daughter of the college's president. It depicts a series of battle games with escalating stakes upon which George and Martha have built their marriage. The proceedings encompass a young couple, Honey and Nick, who are guests in the house.

Director Neil Thackaberry, in a master stroke of interpretation, decided to pull away from the oft-used device of George and Martha constantly shouting at each other. Instead, using a clue from the script in which the characters comment on the fact that they are "numbed enough," he chose to have them underplay their lines. This is not to say the venom is not present. Much like snakes, the couple strikes quickly and often, subtly, with deadly results.

Paula Duesing and Tom Fulton's performances are both astounding and outstanding. They totally understand the nuances of Albee's lines and live their roles. Though his lines are effectively delivered, Peter Voinovich doesn't have the physical presence to play Nick, the young professor who is described as a stallion. In addition, he sometimes feigns feeling with exaggerated facial expressions.

Robert Stegmiller's light and set designs are excellent.

Actors' Studio should be justly proud of their mounting of Who's Afriad of Virginia Woolf?. If you like fine modern theatre at its best, see this production.

The Memory of Water (2 Reviews)

Cast shows great promise in farce with serious bent
By Tony Brown, The Plain Dealer

Water, we are told a new study indicates, retains impressions of whatever passes through it. So does the human body. We are, after all, two-thirds water

This remembering by the human being, often unconscious, is the startling theme of "The Memory of Water," a play that deftly segues from outrageous comedy to serious introspection.

It opened last night at Actors' Summit after a preview Thursday.

Shelagh Stephenson's Olivier Award-winning first play has many attributes of a good old-fashioned British bedroom farce.

It is set in a bedroom of a seaside house in Yorkshire.

A coffin gets parked downstage.

Mary's dimwitted married lover enters through a window.

Teresa's flabby husband howls to anyone who's interested that he never, ever liked Woody Allen.

And the funeral for which they have gathered, of the sisters' mother, deteriorates from a shambles into a riot.

But playwright Stephenson has something sneakier in mind here, and from the very first scene introduces a sixth character, the dead woman herself. Not as a ghost, not as an old woman recently dead, but as a middle-aged memory.

The presence of the mother and the shadows of Mary's secrets transform the farcical romp into a bittersweet memory play about the child status we all have with our parents, and the desire many of us have to become parents ourselves.

At Actors' Summit, the play gets a brisk production from artistic director Neil Thackaberry, a warm and homey set and lighting design by Ashland University faculty members Rebecca Misenheimer and Kenneth J. Martin, purposefully garish costumes by Mary Jo Alexander and fine performances all-around.

As of Thursday's preview, these parts had not quite coalesced to produce the burnished comic veneer that makes British farce (or, in this case, British farce-plus) click. But it showed great promise of doing so.

Among the ensemble, Lisa Ortenzi as a dowdy and bespectacled Teresa absolutely steals the second act with a drunken rampage of embarrassing revelations that is both hysterical and wounding.

Sally Groth does a good job uncovering the hidden emotions of Mary, the most difficult role, but isn't irritating enough to help us understand the contempt the English have for people who are successful before they're 50.

Susanna Hobrath steamrolls over everyone as histrionic, pot-smoking Catherine. Alex S. Cikra and Frank Jackman couldn't be more helpless as the menfolk who find themselves lost in a sea of raging female hormones. And Deb Holthus appears briefly, elegantly and with an iron grip on Mary as the memory of mom.

"The Memory of Water" is quite a trick for a writer whose only previous experience was with radio plays. As tricky as it sometimes gets, this small professional theater that is still testing its cozy new home negotiates the choppy waters nimbly.

The Memory of Water saturated with emotion
Potent female roles make Actors' Summit play one to remember
By Kerry Clawson, The Akron Beacon Journal

The play The Memory of Water is not only funny, it also seriously delves into a range of complicated emotions among three sisters and their late mother.

A wonderfully strong female cast at Actors' Summit hits us hard with universal human experiences of grief, guilt, resentment and sibling rivalry, as penned by British playwright Shelagh Stephenson. It's refreshing to see a play that offers four equally meaty roles for women, with two male characters playing secondary parts.

The contemporary play opened in London's West End in 1998 and won the Laurence Olivier Award for best new comedy in 2000. Its American premiere was at the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York City in 1998.

Life, with all its struggles, is both funny and painful. These three sisters, as different as they are, are all needy. They're also more like their mother than they'd like to admit.

The setting is the present, after the death of the sisters' mother, Vi, and takes place in the late Vi's prettily feminine bedroom.

The most melancholy sister is Mary, played with soulful intensity by Actors' Summit regular Sally Groth. She's looking for fulfillment through a relationship with a married man, and harbors a secret of great pain and loss.

The stuffy Teresa, portrayed by Lisa Ortenzi, has the martyr syndrome and knows how to lay on the guilt. She's also looking for emotional fulfillment but realizes her husband is as emotionally inaccessible as her late father.

The youngest sister, Catherine, is the most extreme, mainly because she's always fighting for attention.

"Why does everyone in this house have to be oblique and sneery?" Catherine asks.

Susanna Hobrath delights us in this role as the vivacious and outrageous sister. Whether she's doing head stands or throwing a fit about being dumped by her boyfriend, we like her.

Hobrath has totally switched gears for this show. She rehearsed for the wild, pot-smoking Catherine at the same time she played the sunny ingenue Caitlin in Over the River and Through the Woods, Actors' Summit's last production.

Swept into each sister's personal drama are Teresa's husband Frank, played by Frank Jackman, and Mary's boyfriend Mike, played by Alex Cikra. Both are solid in their roles.

Each sister's idiosyncrasies add to the play's humor. Teresa chants recipes to help relieve stress. Catherine talks to the phone as if it were alive, willing it to ring. And as vitriolic as Mary can be, her putdowns are funny. When Catherine asks her how her very short minidress looks, Mary says, "Apart from the fact you can see your ovaries, it's fine."

Stephenson draws us in with her down-to-earth language and recognizable situations of bickering among sisters. The first act of this play is quite comical, while the second takes a darker tone.

The second act drags a little, leaving us wondering more than once how and when the sisters will resolve their conflicts.

Although actress Deb Holthus speaks at length only twice as Vi, her presence is elegantly powerful. Vi bares her soul to Mary, and we learn of her pain at being shut out of her daughter's life.

We realize nothing is black and white. The sisters disagree even about memories of their mother and their childhood.

The play's title carries a beautiful symbolism: As diluted as the sisters' memories of their mother are, the fact remains her inescapable influence will always be real in their lives.

Over the River and Through the Woods

Grandma's house is a delight with charming seniors
By Linda Eisenstein, The Plain Dealer

Sometime during the second act of "Over the River and Through the Woods," a silver-haired actor announces: "We're all old. We're adorable." That could be the tag line for the Actors' Summit production of Joe DiPietro's sweet, funny play about inter-generational family ties. For it would be difficult to find a more adorable quartet of grandparents gracing an area stage or a play that so thoroughly pleases and connects with its audience.

Like the tune, "Over the River and THrough the Woods," the play is about a series of trips to Grandmother's house: in this case, the homey dining room of the passionatly traditional Gianelli family of Trenton, NJ, where 20-year-old Nick (Peter Voinovich) has Sunday dinner with both sets of grandparents each week.

It opens with a crisis: Nick has been offered a promotion that necessitates a move to Seattle, which would leave the elderly grandparents on their own. The course of the play charts the riotous course of their high-stakes machinations: guilt trips, hurried matchmaking and family revelations to keep Nick from leaving.

At Actor's Summit, the success of DiPietro's commercial comedy/drama, which in structure tacks frequently between sitcom and sentimentality, rests squarely on the performaces director Neil Thackaberry gets from his elder actors: Glen Colerider, Jean Colerider, Robert Snook and Lenne Snively. They're charmers all, but Thackaberry isn't content to let them coast on charm. It's the deeper character revelations and truths that elevate the drama and earn all the laughs and tears.

Although the cast is more WASP than convincingly Italian, that doesn't matter a whit: DiPietro's play examines a shift in values that crosses ethnic lines, and his "3 Fs: family, faith and food" clearly resonate in suburban Hudson.

As the stoic Nunzio, who struggles with whether he should reveal a serious illness, Robert Snook alone is worth the drive to Summit County. With bristling white mustache, a spine bent with age, sad hound-dog eyes and impeccable comic timing, he makes the second-act Trivial Pursuit game into a brillint "who's on first" routine. Snook's understated performance is breathtaking. Glen Colerider contrasts nicely as the stormy paternal grandfater Frank, whose immigrant reminiscences are more complex than they first seem. Petite Jean Colerider, hair in tight apricot curls, is spot-on as the food-obsessed grandma Aida, and Lenne Snively has a brassy charm as Nunzio's hearty wife Emma.

As the protagonist/narrator, Peter Voinovich does well with a role that is mainly reaction. Susanna Hobrath plays Nick's blind date Caitlin with an odd combination of syrupy sweetness and brittleness.

Robert Stegmiller's superb set - a comfy living room, dining room and protch - feels so real you could live in it. It's exactly right, down to the choice of doilies, afghans and procelain kickknacks.

Private Lives

Actors' Summit Delights With Coward's Private Lives
By Roy Berko, The Times Newspapers

Noel Coward is the crown prince of humor and elegance in the theatre. His plays, though well enmeshed with British slants on life, are delightful if well done. It takes special timing, an understanding of British understatement and wit to make his plays come alive.

Fortunately, Actor's Summit, one of the few professional theatres in the area (the others are The Cleveland Play House and the Great Lakes Theatre Festival) has assembled the perfect cast, which has been finely honed by director MaryJo Alexander.

The pacing is right on, the exaggerations kept under control, and the characterizations clear. The show demands intimacy and Actors' Summit's new home, in which no member of the audience is more than 6 rows from the action, is a perfect staging area for this work.

Coward's humor comes forth in a combination of action and beautifully written lines. Some of his famous inscriptions include, "Trust your instincts. If you have no instincts, trust your impulses," "Wit ought to be a glorious treat, like caviar. Never spread it about like marmalade," and "I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me." This plays contains such gems as, "Honeymooning is an overrated amusement" and "The woman should always retain mystery from the man."

The basic story line concerns four people, Elyot and Amanda who have been previously married to each other and their new spouses, Sybil and Victor. The couples ironically wind up having adjoining suites as they honeymoon in Deauville, France. Elyot and Amanda accidentally meet on their shared balcony, renew their past relationship, and sneak away together. They are followed by their new spouses to a flat in Paris. A battle of love and hate follows with riotous results.

A. Neil Thackaberry is properly pompous. British accent perfect, he poses, yells and taunts, leading to audience delight. Maryann Nagel, as his former wife, switches quickly from shrew to charmer. The two show the extremes of love and hate with ease. Their wrestling scene is right out of the World Wide Wresting Federation repertoire.

Greg Violand, as the uptight Victor, Amanda's new husband, blusters and is wonderful as an "overblown gas bag." Though her voice gets a little too shrill, Tonya Beckman is quite acceptable as Elyot's new wife.

If you like British comedy, if you are a Coward devotee, if you appreciate good acting and a well conceived production, PRIVATE LIVES, Actors' Summit version, will delight you!!!

Production spotty, but still pleasing
By Linda Eisenstein, The Plain Dealer

Full of fizz, glamour, and sly wit, Noel Coward's "Private Lives" is a comedy so smartly written, it's practically unbreakable - even a middling-good production has undeniable pleasures. Which is what you see on stage at Actors' Summit: a professionally designed, capably acted production, that nevertheless doesn't quite ignite with the divine chemistry that could make it soar.

Written in 1930 for himself and Gertrude Lawrence to perform, Coward's "intimate comedy" is an archly subversive romp about a battling couple who find each other's explosive temperaments irresistible. Divorced for five years, Elyot (A. Neil Thackaberry) and Amanda (Maryann Nagel) find themselves cheek-by-jowl in an unexpected intimacy. On their honeymoons with new spouses, they quickly discover they are sharing more than adjoining hotel balconies. Neither is particularly inspired by their conventional new mates, and seeing each other brings out a burst of longing. They impetuously run off to Paris together, leaving their appalled spouses to pursue them.

Coward's ironic take on intimacy is that lovers' chemistry is based in part on a furious irritation: you can tell who belongs together more by how passionately they quarrel, rather than how they bill and coo. It's also a paean to unconventionality: what Elyot and Amanda have in common is a sensibility outside the lines of proper British society. You need to feel that they mirror each other's quirky attitudes and sense of humor as well.

Director MaryJo Alexander finds those mirroring moments now and then - the first act has a marvelous spark, and the third act "let's all have a proper coffee together" scene is hilarious - but her ensemble casting makes for some odd pairings. Thackaberry isn't the typical, elegantly understated Elyot. He's large and balding, with a flippancy so waspishly curt, especially with his cow-eyed bride Sybil, the audience gasps with each laugh. He's best when he's lobbing bon mots, but the chemistry with Nagel's glamorous but vulnerable Amanda doesn't ring true. Whether they're dancing, fighting, or love-making, it too often feels professionally choreographed.

Tonya Beckman's Sybil manages to be sympathetic as well as silly, as she shriek-sobs her frustration. Greg Violand plays "poor, dull Victor" with a straight-forward American realism that turns out to be a mistake; it makes him colorless and uninteresting, rather than stuffy-funny.

But even though it's not a home run, this production is still a crowd-pleaser. The champagne-like dialogue, Alexander's delicious costumes, and Robert Stegmiller's pink stucco villa and burnished Paris apartment with oriental rug and shawl-draped piano make you want to time-travel to Coward's version of paradise, where the jokes sparkle like jewels, the moonlight makes magic, and even a quarrelsome marriage is impossibly gay.

The Roar of the Greasepaint, The Smell of the Crowd
(2 Reviews)

Bravura performance elevates new theater's opening show
By Tony Brown, The Plain Dealer

The occasion: Actors Summit christened its new theater in a warehouse on the outskirts of the downtown residential section of this quaint Summit County town.

The vehicle: "The Roar of the Greasepaint, the Smell of the Crowd," an oddball 1960s attempt at existentialist musical theater, opened in the company's versatile "black box" performance space this weekend.

The best reason to go: As Sir, the rules-changing symbol of the ruling classes who cheats poor Cocky out of crumbs of bread, Wayne Turney transforms every giggle, every supercilious glance, every husky note into a carefully placed building block in a truly monumental and sinister performance.

All in all, it's a happy event for Actors' Summit, a small professional company that was started three years ago and has been looking for a home ever since. The new theater has limitations, including a noisy ventilation system and a lack of overhead space from which to fly in scenery. But it can be configured in any number of permutations to match a director's vision.

For "Roar," director Neil Thackaberry arranges the audience on three sides of set designer Robert Stegmiller's simple series of platforms and steps. It's a rather bleak, bare-bones affair, appropriate to the stalwart morals of the material.

First performed in England before coming to Broadway in 1965, "Roar" is an attempt by actor-writer Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse (who had earlier collaborated on "Stop the World, I Want to Get Off") to marry the pessimistic existentialism of Samuel Beckett with the melodies of traditional musical theater. Playing their worldly board game, Sir and Cocky resemble not only Vladimir and Estragon in "Waiting for Godot," but they also have much in common with Beckett's whip-snapping Pozzo and slave Lucky in the same play. And there are references to Broadway musicals, most obviously to "Fiddler on the Roof" and "My Fair Lady."

Today the show is largely a curiosity, an archaeological artifact, a relic. With its Everyman themes, it anticipates the far more popular "Pippin" and "Godspell." The same sort of Brechtian burlesque at work in "Roar" can be seen now in the Broadway musical "Urinetown." Turney, his baritone booming, his shirt stuffed and his beady eyes peering out over the top of reading glasses, immediately establishes himself as the ringmaster of this little circus act and doesn't flag a whit as the symbolism grows heavier than greasepaint.

This is a master-class on playing the conniving villain, not with a dark sneer, but with a light and sardonic laugh. It's the caliber of performance one would expect to find at Cleveland Play House, where Turney was a member of the ensemble for many years.

As Turney's foil, Play House and Great Lakes Theater Festival veteran Greg Violand stretches his face into grimaces of pain as a captivatingly Chaplinesque Cocky. But some of the upper ranges of the Act 1-closing "Who Can I Turn to" are just beyond his vocal abilities. Darryl Miller, a music-education undergrad at Kent State University, makes a brief but indelible impression in his one song, "Feeling Good" as the Black (originally The Negro) who helps liberate Cocky. Kari Kandel leads the urchin chorus and appears as Sir's sexual plaything. And, just as Newley both directed and appeared as Cocky in his own show, so Actors' Summit founder and artistic director Thackaberry stomps about in an unbilled cameo.

"Roar of the Greasepaint" is a silly but entertaining bit of slightly out-of-date frippery. Its hearty theatricality, made even heartier by Turney's bravura performance, makes for a fun and fitting opening of a new theater.

Playhouse, Actors' Summit Debut New Stages With Different Results
By Roy Berko, Times Newspapers

The Cleveland Play House and Actors' Summit both opened their 2001 seasons in new facilities. CPH, America's first permanently established professional theatre company, presented Frank Langella's CYRANO on its Baxter Stage, while Actor's Summit, which has been searching for a permanent home for many seasons, has established itself in downtown Hudson. Their opening production is THE ROAR OF THE GREASEPAINT THE SMELL OF THE CROWD. Both facilities feature thrust stages in which the audience encloses the action on three sides. The similarities between the facilities and the productions ends there.

Ironically, the much less funded Actors' Summit has the more audience pleasing facility and a better opening production.

The Baxter's 300-seat facility is supposed to provide an intimate setting where no audience member is more than 8 rows from the stage. . . .

The Actors' Summit facility is much more pleasant. It's more intimate..150 seats, and there are at leas! t two aisles for easy access to seats for each section. An added attraction is the theatre's connection to an antiques mall which is open before curtain and at intermission. Free parking is immediately adjacent to the theatre.

ROAR ENCHANTS AT ACTORS' SUMMIT

On the other hand, THE ROAR OF THE GREASEPAINT THE SMELL OF THE CROWD glistens. One of the two smash hits penned by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newl! ey (the other is STOP THE WORLD, I WANT TO GET OFF), the seldom-done show takes a special set of leading actors to make it come to life. And, in Wayne Turney and Greg Violand, the theatre has found the perfect duo.

Written in the mid-60s the story centers on the lead characters playing the Game of Life and asks the question "is the game played on stage actually a metaphor for real life, or, is it really just a game?" It does so with humor, pathos, and a combination of enchantment and drama. The wondrous score includes "On a Wonderful Day Like Today" which receives a rousing production number, "Where Would You Be Without Me," "My First Love Song," and "Nothing Can Stop Me Now." The most famous song from the show is the poignant "Who Can I Turn To."

Wayne Turney, who plays Sir, the game's rule setter, is well known to area audiences. He was a long time member of the Cleveland Play House's acting company. He is nothing short of perfect as Sir. The twinkle in his eye, his ability to pull the audience in through direct comments, winks and smiles, makes Sir live. He has a pleasant singing voice and commands the stage.

Greg Violand is his equal. Violand, who has made a career out of playing leading men in such local productions as SIDE SHOW, A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC and THE MUSIC MAN transforms himself into a pathetic, almost comic character as the taken-advantage-of Cocky. He is the perfect Hardy to Turney's Laurel. Each of his vocal solos was met with strong audience applause.

Special attention must be give to C. J. Bonde, Lora Eves, Caitlin Morris, Jason Brown, Dale Kennedy and Eryn Murman, the youngsters playing the Urchins. Often children on stage are puppet-like. These kids, under the adept direction of Neil Thackaberry, are wonderful. Also wonderful was Sasha Thackaberry's choreography which was both intricate and creative. Darryl Miller's brief appearance as The Black was highlighted by a powerful rendition of "Feeling Good."

Praise also to musical director Evie Morris and set and lighting designer Robert Stegmiller. One suggestion. The orchestra, which does an excellent job of backing up rather than drowning out the singers, should have been listed by name in the program credits.

THE ROAR OF THE GREASEPAINT THE SMELL OF THE CROWD, Actors' Summit version, is a delightful, entertaining, enchanting evening of theatre. What a way to premiere a new home!

Actors' Summit is a professional, not for profit, 501-c-3 professional arts organization. We are seeking volunteers and board members. For more details, email us or call MaryJo or Neil at 330-342-0800.

Actors' Summit is working under a developmental agreement with Actors' Equity Association (the Union of professional Actors and Stage Managers.)