Great Lakes Theater Archives - Cleveland Classical

Great Lakes Theater: Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George (Sept. 27)

September 30, 2025 by Kevin McLaughlin

by Kevin McLaughlin

Great Lakes Theater opened its fall season at the Hanna Theatre with Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George. I saw the performance on September 27. In a house of just over five hundred seats, the show feels almost purpose-built for intimacy: audiences sit close enough to hear breaths behind every phrase and to see the small adjustments of light and posture that bring French Neo-Impressionist artist Georges Seurat’s world into focus.

Winner of the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Sunday resists conventional structure. Its first act imagines the years Seurat spent creating his pointillist landmark, La Grande Jatte. Sondheim and Lapine do not present the artist as genial or approachable. He is exacting, self-absorbed, forever chasing the perfect dot of color at the expense of his personal relationships. The cost is clear: his model and lover, another Dot, leaves him, unable to compete with the canvas.

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Great Lakes Theater goes Into the Woods (Sept. 28)

October 10, 2024 by Peter Feher

by Peter Feher

This season, Great Lakes Theater is uniquely positioned to put on a near-perfect production of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods.

The regional company, in residence at the Hanna Theatre, has time and again mounted some of the most appealing shows at Playhouse Square — more intimate than the Broadway tours that stop just down the street but no less lavishly performed.

You could say it was all for the best that the recent New York revival of Into the Woods — with its rotating celebrity cast paying larger-than-life tribute to Sondheim, who died in 2021 — never made it to Cleveland. [Read more…]

CIM Opera’s engaging Puccini double bill prompts both laughs and tears (Nov. 7)

by Stephanie Manning

The three one-act operas that make up Giacomo Puccini’s Il trittico (The Triptych) are typically connected by theme, rather than location. Although the trio of works take place in 13th-century Paris, 17th-century Siena, and 20th-century Florence respectively, they all deal with keeping someone’s death a secret — whether tragically or comedically.

CIM Opera Theater’s recent production of two-thirds of the triptych brought the action into one particular place and time, as director Dean Southern moved both Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi into 1918’s New York City. What stood out more, however, were the impressive performances from across the large cast, which I heard on November 7 in Kulas Hall.

[Read on…]

Oberlin Orchestra with the Poiesis Quartet in Finney (Oct. 31)

by Daniel Hathaway

Fresh from winning the grand prize at the prestigious Banff Competition on the last day of August, the Poiesis Quartet (Sarah Ying Ma & Max Ball, violins, Jasper de Boor, viola, and Drew Dansby, cello) took a late October victory lap at the Oberlin Conservatory, returning to their place of birth as an ensemble to give master classes and solo with the Oberlin Orchestra.

Judging from the turnout in Finney Chapel on Friday, it might not have been a prizewinning idea to schedule a major orchestra concert on a college campus on Halloween, but there was nothing slim about the sound that the stage full of musicians produced. Brilliantly scored works by Carlos Simon, John Adams, Angélica Negrón, and Zhou Tian, were conducted with precision by Rafael Jiménez.

[Read on…]

Cleveland Orchestra makes a sinister showing of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (Nov. 5)

by Peter Feher

A violin bow is an unlikely murder weapon. But in the hands of composer Bernard Herrmann, the slashing motion of a string instrument seems almost one and the same with the stabbing knife onscreen in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic Psycho.

The infamous soundtrack to secretary Marion Crane’s final moments in the shower — and also to private investigator Milton Arbogast’s stumbling death down the stairs later in the film — is horrifyingly simple. A series of screeching down-bows begins in the first violins and then stacks in dissonant intervals as the remaining string sections join in. The gesture is more like a Foley effect than music per se, evoking something between a human scream and the shriek of metal against metal.

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