|
|
On Nov. 17, 1994, CityBeat‘s first issue hits the streets with a preview of two “Hot New Theater Companies” in the midst of their first full seasons. Frankenstein Theatre Company is based at Covington’s Carnegie Theatre. The other, Fahrenheit Theatre Company, floats from facility to facility, offering productions of classic texts, especially by Shakespeare: The Taming of the Shrew was produced at Gabriel’s Corner in Over-the-Rhine in July 1994, and in September a rendition of Beowulf happened at Corryville’s Dance Hall.
In CityBeat Vol. 1 Issue 1, Fahrenheit’s production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is the first show in the calendar listings, opening Nov. 25 at Gabriel’s Corner.
Fast forward to April 21, 2004. Almost 500 issues of CityBeat have been published. Theater companies (including Frankenstein) have come and gone. But Fahrenheit — which changed its name to Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival (CSF) in 1997 — has survived the battleground of fledgling arts organizations.
This weekend CSF is going to war to celebrate its anniversary — The Wars of the Roses, to be specific.
The production is a five-day remounting of CSF’s 1998 adaptation/condensation of Shakespeare’s three Henry VI plays into one work. With the biggest cast ever assembled on the company’s stage, Wars is a one-week opportunity for present and former CSF actors and others affiliated with the company to mark 10 years of classical theater in Cincinnati.
The combative tale provides an apt metaphor for several reasons: CSF’s survival for 10 seasons has been no easy victory. In fact, the group’s history reveals a lot about the evolution of Cincinnati’s theater scene during the decade since Fahrenheit and CityBeat began.
Right place, right time
In the early 1990s, theatrical offerings in Cincinnati were pretty slim. Of course, there was Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park (it began in 1960), already a respected regional theater regularly employing members of Actors Equity Association, the professional union for actors and stage managers. Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati (ETC) was launched in 1987; on a smaller scale it too was a professional theater hiring Equity actors from the area.
In CityBeat‘s first issue, however, the slim theater listings cited a show at the Playhouse, productions at four community theaters, three university-based shows and two dinner theaters.
What had caused several young theater majors from Virginia to think Cincinnati was fertile ground for a new theater company? According to one of Fahrenheit’s founders, actress Marni Penning, “Cincinnati was a smaller ‘big’ city that had spread out to the burbs but was just starting to put money back into a revitalization of the downtown area. Since Cincinnati had always been in love with all things classical — classical music, classical art and classical architecture — it surprised us that there was no classical theater. Right place, right time, right niche. And, boom, there we were.”
Penning, Nick Rose and Jasson Minidakis graduated from James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va., in 1993 and 1994. They dreamed of creating a theater company, and Penning and Rose toured with the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express.
Minidakis landed a directing internship in Cincinnati at ETC, where he assisted with the high-profile 1994 production of Brad Frasier’s Poor Superman. During 1993-94 he gathered enough insight into the city to convince Penning and Rose that Cincinnati was where their dream might work.
The intense Minidakis, now artistic director of an Atlanta theater company, still recalls the many factors that influenced their decision.
“Breaking ground on the new Aronoff Center raised the profile of the arts in the city,” he says, then fires off a list of nearly a dozen people and organizations who helped his new company happen — the Fine Arts Fund and its Arts Services Office; supportive companies like Procter & Gamble and Cinergy; encouragement from Ed Stern, the Playhouse’s producing artistic director; positive media attention, including CityBeat and theater writer Jackie Demaline, who came to The Cincinnati Enquirer in 1992; several UC English professors who sent students to see Fahrenheit productions; and arts administrators at Gabriel’s Corner and the Carnegie, where the young company staged its first shows.
Working at ETC, Minidakis met other aspiring interns who wanted to stay in Cincinnati and create a young company. He also made friends with local theater professionals committed to Cincinnati — UC theater professor and director Michael Burnham and veteran professional actors Dale Hodges, Robert Rais, Buz Davis (who managed the Carnegie’s theater at the time) and Shannon Rae Lutz (who also had design skills).
Let’s put on a show!
In its first two seasons, Fahrenheit succeeded on chutzpah. Penning exclaims, “I can hardly believe it’s been 10 years since we got our first $2,500 grant and thought, ‘We’re rich! Let’s do a whole season!’ ”
In fact, Fahrenheit’s early years were premised on hard work and determination. Asked why Fahrenheit survived, Penning says, “We were a dedicated young group of artists who were not only actors but also skilled in the business of theater. From the beginning, we ran CSF as a small business, with a for-profit mentality in a nonprofit setting.”
They were also willing to work for almost nothing. Three years into their adventure they had four people on payroll, each earning $300 weekly. The rest were paid minimal amounts for their involvement. But they believed and kept at it.
The new company reached out to young audiences with school performances but also enticed theatergoers with tickets even students could handle.
“Our first ticket prices were $7.50, cheaper than or the same price as a movie ticket at that time,” Penning recalls. “So not only were we accessible, but affordable, too. That was always one of our mantras, that theater is too expensive. We wanted to keep it in the realm of possibility for families and young people to come to the theater on a regular basis, not just as a special occasion.”
Success was a relative thing in the first season or two. People turned out to see Fahrenheit’s shows, but they mustered only 17 subscribers. Nevertheless, expenses were minimal and audiences liked what they saw.
With Minadakis directing, Penning and Rose anchored a resident company of actors who performed regularly in each production.
“Patrons began to pick out their favorite actors,” Penning says. “They loved the idea of seeing the same people over and over again in different roles, watching the actors grow and change.”
Fahrenheit officially became Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival in February 1997. In a CityBeat story that month, Penning told me, “We kept hearing three things over and over when we staged our shows. ‘How long are you going to be in town?’ some asked, thinking we must be a touring group. Others wanted to know, ‘What does your group do?’ since our name didn’t say what kind of theater we do. And then there were people who probably saw us more than once but claimed, ‘I never heard of you guys before.’ ”
In the season following the name change, CSF moved from the Aronoff Center — where they’d sold out the entire two weeks of Macbeth in the Fifth Third Bank Theater in February 1996 and had a well-attended run of Romeo & Juliet in the Jarson-Kaplan Theater in February 1997 — to a vacant movie theater space on Race Street, once the home of The Movies Repertory Cinema. The permanent location enhanced CSF’s presence, kicking up their reputation another notch.
Expanding horizons
Halfway through their first decade, CSF’s success inspired other young theater artists, including some who’d been involved with Fahrenheit in its earliest days. Cincinnati Public Theatre had two seasons in 1998-2000, and one of its founders, Nicholas Korn (who performed with Fahrenheit), began Stage First, which had a five-season run through February 2003. Korn’s smaller group focused on classic works from Greek tragedy and comedy to 20th-century mainstays by Eugene O’Neill, not to mention the occasional Shakespeare play.
Other companies saw the opportunity CSF had fostered. Michael Shooner launched New Edgecliff Theater, reaching back to his time as a student at the now defunct Edgecliff College, which had hosted a professional theater company. Xavier grad Jay Kalagayan launched Know Theatre Tribe in 1999 with an emphasis on newer, multi-ethnic works. A group of serious-minded community theater performers pulled together in 1999 to establish Ovation Theatre Company.
Community theater has many participants in Greater Cincinnati, with more than 20 discrete companies, an exceptional number for a city this size. The standard of work is high at many of these groups — who combine unpaid theatrical performance with enjoyable camaraderie — and many people involved yearn for broader opportunities, even productions that can pay them to perform.
Such a desire led to the creation of Downtown Theatre Classics (DTC) in 1997, which proposed to offer high-end renditions of popular fare often left to community theaters — older musicals and well-known comedies. The company had some initial success at the Aronoff’s Jarson-Kaplan Theater but overextended itself with productions at the massive Taft Theater.
Its swan song came in 2000 when an ambitious but inexperienced young artistic director, Anton Shilov, so stretched the company that it collapsed mid-season in the midst of presenting a touring production of Forbidden Broadway.
Elsewhere, however, theater was thriving in Cincinnati, a fact that CityBeat marked in 1997 with the launch of the annual Cincinnati Entertainment Awards. ETC, under D. Lynn Meyers’ artistic leadership since 1996, had refined its artistic vision to the presentation of local, regional and national premieres of new works. The Playhouse continued to flourish under Ed Stern’s artistic leadership, also nurturing new works with its Rosenthal New Play Prize, which made possible several productions earning national attention, from Jeffrey Hatcher’s oft-produced Scotland Road to Keith Glover’s In Walks Ed, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1997.
Classical vs. contemporary
But Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival most epitomized the theater scene’s rapid growth, with Minidakis at its helm. (I once described him and the theater as the “Energizer bunny” of Cincinnati theater.)
Midway through its first decade, Minidakis and CSF began to spread their wings even further, undertaking productions that pushed well beyond Shakespeare. Waiting for Godot (1999) was the first step, a 20th-century classic that made sense.
In 1999, Minidakis played a role in launching the League of Cincinnati Theatres (LCT), an umbrella organization that focuses on nurturing the scene by fostering a better environment for actors and theater companies. LCT was initially funded by a collaboration grant from the Fine Arts Fund, which Minidakis and Penning played a big hand in writing.
He was LCT’s first vice president and often aggressively pursued strategies he believed would strengthen theatergoing in Cincinnati, including the possibility of launching an awards program that would work on a rolling basis to create ongoing interest in productions while they were still running.
But even as CSF was succeeding, the intense Minidakis was getting restive, drawn to more contemporary work. His 2000-01 season included four Shakespearean shows (The Merry Wives of Windsor, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice and the first and second parts of Henry IV, condensed to one production) and a pseudo-Shakespearean work, The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (abridged). It also offered Harold Pinter’s 1978 drama Betrayal, the regional premiere of Conor McPherson’s The Weir and the debut of Joe McDonough’s A Chance of Lightning, a contemporary tale based on the myth of Prometheus, perhaps a nod to CSF’s classical roots.
In September 2001, Minidakis began his eighth season — with three classical works and six of more recent vintage — with a very contemporary work, David Lindsay-Abair’s oddball drama from 2000, Fuddy Meers. Opening right after 9/11, the show didn’t garner much of an audience, but a June 2002 production of Mia McCullough’s drama Chagrin Falls was much admired, winning recognition as the season’s Best Production in the 2002 Cincinnati Entertainment Awards.
The bottom drops out
For 2002-03, Minidakis announced a season of eight shows clearly tipped in the direction of contemporary work. Only three were by Shakespeare — Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet and the little known Winter’s Tale.
Spurred by the city’s racial unrest, a black/white production of Romeo & Juliet sold reasonably well despite the continued hesitation of many area residents to come downtown a year after the April 2001 riots. But then the bottom dropped out: Minidakis’ next two shows — Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train and Dael Orlandersmith’s The Gimmick, running in repertory — sold a combined total of about 500 tickets, not nearly enough to sustain the company of actors, staff and ambitious operations he’d built.
After extended discussions with the theater’s board, which was firm about returning to CSF’s original commitment to the classics, Minidakis decided to step down in November 2002. At that time, CSF Board Chairman Dick Westheimer told me, “We didn’t attend as well to our trademarks and what our patrons had come to expect from us. We’re changing that.”
Rose, a familiar actor from many shows, including CSF’s annual holiday production of Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol, had left Cincinnati for Atlanta the previous summer. Minidakis called him, asking that he return and fill the artistic director position. Rose accepted the challenge.
“I immediately said ‘Yes, of course,’ ” he told me at the time. (See Sea Change: Shakespeare Festival Returns to Its Roots, issue of Nov. 27-Dec. 3, 2002.)
Joining him as associate artistic director was actor/director Brian Isaac Phillips, who, like Minidakis, had come to Cincinnati as an intern at Ensemble Theatre. (Phillips was at ETC in 1998-99.)
Getting back on track
Rose and Phillips revised the second half of the season while paring the budget from $820,000 to $560,000, about what the company spent to operate five years earlier. Several of Minidakis’ edgier productions were scrapped and more palatable fare inserted, including Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors and A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Molière’s Tartuffe.
The lone “modern” work was Lanford Wilson’s 1969 tale of a mixed race marriage, The Gingham Dog.
Rose and Phillips partnered to assemble a 10th anniversary season for 2003-04 that indicated a clear return to classical theater, including the pairing of Hamlet with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, its doppelganger by Tom Stoppard that had been promised during Minidakis’ final season.
Stable finances returned by the season’s opening production, The Taming of the Shrew, Fahrenheit’s first show in July 1994. Rose directed this time, and it featured Penning, now acting professionally in theaters on the East Coast, in the lead role.
Later in the fall, Rose — who joked that his job for a year was “to bite my nails 24/7” — decided he was eager to devote his energy to acting full time, and Phillips stepped into the artistic director’s role. (See Back to the Basics, issue of Oct. 29-Nov. 4, 2003.)
Phillips, who’s been with CSF for half of its 10-year life, mostly as a much-admired actor, is quick to set the record straight regarding Minidakis’ 2002 departure.
“I’ve heard the rumors that Jasson got fired,” he says. “To be historically accurate, that’s not true at all. He was very interested in doing contemporary work, not classical, but he did everything he could to keep this place alive. That transition wasn’t him throwing up his hands and Nick and me coming in.”
Phillips says Minidakis used his nine years of experience with the company to facilitate conversations about the best options for the future. What’s more, Phillips explains, “He sacrificed his own pay and his own job at the end by laying himself off to help us.”
In fact, Minidakis and two other administrators gave up their positions and Phillips and Rose worked for actors’ salaries.
Minidakis has landed squarely on his feet. His recent production at Actor’s Express in Atlanta, the regional premiere of Edward Albee’s The Goat, earned critical raves — one review termed it a “knock-out” and another described it as “the most gripping, emotionally charged play of the season.”
He keeps a close eye on the Cincinnati theater scene.
“The (CSF) company has one of the most loyal patron bases in the city,” Minidakis says, “and they continue to work to grow and diversify that base. The personnel are very talented and dedicated to the growth and stabilization of the company, which continues to bring in outstanding new artists to join and expand the ensemble. I think they have an amazing future.”
Phillips reports that things at CSF are on a decidedly even keel financially.
“It’s not even an issue anymore,” he says. “Oh, we still have to be financially responsible, that’s for sure.”
The current season is selling extremely well, he says, noting that every show has exceeded the earnings goal the company set for it.
Asked why he thinks things have improved, Phillips says, “Well, we’re doing Shakespeare! It’s easy to look in the paper and see Shakespeare Festival is doing The Taming of the Shrew. It makes more sense. We’re doing what it is people fell in love with us for. New audiences aren’t confused.”
Phillips also believes there’s a new attitude among Cincinnati residents.
“People who live around here, after hearing about the troubles, don’t want to see this place die,” he says. “I’ve heard people say, ‘I haven’t been in a couple of years. Maybe I should come back and give it a try.’ We’re getting a lot of subscribers who haven’t been with us for two or three years.”
So as a tumultuous decade winds up, has CSF hit its stride?
“We’re 10 years old, we’re still young,” Phillips observes. “We have almost 1,000 subscribers. But that’s only maybe 500 households. That’s not a lot of people knowing who we are. It’s very difficult to try to sell yourself to people who don’t know you when you’re doing Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train and Fuddy Mears.”
He’s convinced that the diversion into modern plays a few years ago was a distracting detour, and he’s likewise convinced that CSF’s recommitment to classical work is the right road now.
“Our early audiences fell in love with us because of the classical work,” he says. “When we started doing (newer works), it was maybe not the thing they could bring their kids to any more. If we had started as a premiere theater like ETC, it probably wouldn’t have been an issue. But having said we were Cincinnati’s classical theater, that became treacherous.”
Going to war
Phillips believes The Wars of the Roses, which former CSF member R. Chris Reeder adapted from three of Shakespeare’s lengthy history plays for CSF’s fifth season in 1998 — is the perfect capstone to CSF’s 10th anniversary season.
“It’s the biggest thing the company has had to battle,” Phillips marvels, “that many scenes, that many characters. There are 40-plus characters!”
Reeder’s adaptation was made for 12 actors. This week’s production uses about twice that number, many of them familiar faces from the past — including former CSF members Reeder, Toni Rae Brotons, Giles Davies, Jeff Groh, Keland Scher, Jim Stump, William Sweeney and Eric Topham. Penning can’t be in town (she’s in The Comedy of Errors at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.), but her recorded voice will narrate some of the action.
Most of the current company will also be onstage — from veterans Rose, Corinne Mohlenhoff, Chris Guthrie, Matt Johnson, Taylore Mahogany Scott and Phillips himself to Young Company members Bhavesh Patel, Kathyrn Lawson, Kevin Pierson, Christopher Zorker, Nancy Eyermann and Zack Whittington. Additionally, Reeder, now artistic director of the St. Croix Theatre Festival in Wisconsin, will be staging the production, and fight choreography will be provided by Regina Cerimele-Mechley, who acted with Fahrenheit in its early days.
“This was an opportunity to invite as many people back as possible,” Phillips says. ” Because of the scope of it, it was very ambitious, which is what a 10-year-old company should be doing, with the opportunities for the new and the past to come together and play. I love the play and what Reeder did with it. I love working on it now.”
He says this production is both a “thank you” for the past 10 years and a chance to say “goodbye” as CSF moves forward.
“One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced as artistic director is that I was an actor in the last five years of the company,” he says. “So I’m not a brand new person, and it’s not this new guy’s vision. Right now there’s still a whole bunch about the past.”
Artists in theater community
Phillips today has a clear vision of CSF’s future.
“In the next five years,” he suggests, “CSF will be known as the classical theater in this region. I don’t mean just Cincinnati — I mean all around here. There’s nothing standing in our way from becoming the next Steppenwolf (the renowned Chicago ensemble company) — that idea of an ensemble, a base of artists in a community that takes and gives in that community and raises their families there.”
Phillips sees Cincinnati on the cusp of even more theater activity after several years affected by an adverse economy. He cites Know Theatre’s success last summer with Corpus Christi. He observes that at New Edgecliff Theatre, largely dormant for a season, Shooner has brought on board a new associate artistic director, Elizabeth Harris (who, it happens, interned with Phillips at ETC).
“Those are two very positive signs,” Phillips says. “CSF getting back on its mission is a very positive sign. I don’t know if we’re going to be seeing brand new companies popping up as much as we might see some companies that have been here for the last couple of years really take some steps forward, just discovering what they are, what they do. I don’t think we’re going to have a burst of new theaters on the scene, as much as those of us that are still here will probably all be moving forward toward more of an established theater scene.”
Nevertheless, new entities are making a difference on the local scene. The Women’s Theatre Initiative screens plays during the year (regular Tuesday evening readings happen at Kaldi’s in Over-the Rhine) and mounts one production during the summer: Last July’s In Flame by Charlotte Jones featured Phillips and Mohlenhoff in a little seen but critically praised performance.
And less than a month from now (May 12-23), the Cincinnati Fringe Festival will offer more than 70 performances by at least 30 different groups, some from Cincinnati and some from farther afield. It should surprise no one that the Fringe Festival is happening under the wing of Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival.
Phillips says he’s young enough — he’s not yet 30 — to have the energy to make CSF work.
“We’re not tired, we’re not done, we’re all still stupid enough to believe that we can change the world,” he says. “We’re going to give it a go and do the classics. That’s what I think will make this one of the most remarkable theaters in the United States.”
THE WARS OF THE ROSES will be presented Thursday-Sunday. Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival then presents its “Big 10 Bash” anniversary celebration and raffle at 6-9 p.m. Sunday at Sycamore Place at St. Xavier Park, 634 Sycamore St., Downtown. Admission is $20, which includes entertainment, light hors d’oeuvres by Elegant Fare and a cash bar. Tickets: 513-381-BARD or
On Nov. 17, 1994, CityBeat‘s first issue hits the streets with a preview of two “Hot New Theater Companies” in the midst of their first full seasons. Frankenstein Theatre Company is based at Covington’s Carnegie Theatre. The other, Fahrenheit Theatre Company, floats from facility to facility, offering productions of classic texts, especially by Shakespeare: The Taming of the Shrew was produced at Gabriel’s Corner in Over-the-Rhine in July 1994, and in September a rendition of Beowulf happened at Corryville’s Dance Hall.
In CityBeat Vol. 1 Issue 1, Fahrenheit’s production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is the first show in the calendar listings, opening Nov. 25 at Gabriel’s Corner.
Fast forward to April 21, 2004. Almost 500 issues of CityBeat have been published. Theater companies (including Frankenstein) have come and gone. But Fahrenheit — which changed its name to Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival (CSF) in 1997 — has survived the battleground of fledgling arts organizations.
This weekend CSF is going to war to celebrate its anniversary — The Wars of the Roses, to be specific.
The production is a five-day remounting of CSF’s 1998 adaptation/condensation of Shakespeare’s three Henry VI plays into one work. With the biggest cast ever assembled on the company’s stage, Wars is a one-week opportunity for present and former CSF actors and others affiliated with the company to mark 10 years of classical theater in Cincinnati.
The combative tale provides an apt metaphor for several reasons: CSF’s survival for 10 seasons has been no easy victory. In fact, the group’s history reveals a lot about the evolution of Cincinnati’s theater scene during the decade since Fahrenheit and CityBeat began.
Right place, right time
In the early 1990s, theatrical offerings in Cincinnati were pretty slim. Of course, there was Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park (it began in 1960), already a respected regional theater regularly employing members of Actors Equity Association, the professional union for actors and stage managers. Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati (ETC) was launched in 1987; on a smaller scale it too was a professional theater hiring Equity actors from the area.
In CityBeat‘s first issue, however, the slim theater listings cited a show at the Playhouse, productions at four community theaters, three university-based shows and two dinner theaters.
What had caused several young theater majors from Virginia to think Cincinnati was fertile ground for a new theater company? According to one of Fahrenheit’s founders, actress Marni Penning, “Cincinnati was a smaller ‘big’ city that had spread out to the burbs but was just starting to put money back into a revitalization of the downtown area. Since Cincinnati had always been in love with all things classical — classical music, classical art and classical architecture — it surprised us that there was no classical theater. Right place, right time, right niche. And, boom, there we were.”
Penning, Nick Rose and Jasson Minidakis graduated from James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va., in 1993 and 1994. They dreamed of creating a theater company, and Penning and Rose toured with the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express.
Minidakis landed a directing internship in Cincinnati at ETC, where he assisted with the high-profile 1994 production of Brad Frasier’s Poor Superman. During 1993-94 he gathered enough insight into the city to convince Penning and Rose that Cincinnati was where their dream might work.
The intense Minidakis, now artistic director of an Atlanta theater company, still recalls the many factors that influenced their decision.
“Breaking ground on the new Aronoff Center raised the profile of the arts in the city,” he says, then fires off a list of nearly a dozen people and organizations who helped his new company happen — the Fine Arts Fund and its Arts Services Office; supportive companies like Procter & Gamble and Cinergy; encouragement from Ed Stern, the Playhouse’s producing artistic director; positive media attention, including CityBeat and theater writer Jackie Demaline, who came to The Cincinnati Enquirer in 1992; several UC English professors who sent students to see Fahrenheit productions; and arts administrators at Gabriel’s Corner and the Carnegie, where the young company staged its first shows.
Working at ETC, Minidakis met other aspiring interns who wanted to stay in Cincinnati and create a young company. He also made friends with local theater professionals committed to Cincinnati — UC theater professor and director Michael Burnham and veteran professional actors Dale Hodges, Robert Rais, Buz Davis (who managed the Carnegie’s theater at the time) and Shannon Rae Lutz (who also had design skills).
Let’s put on a show!
In its first two seasons, Fahrenheit succeeded on chutzpah. Penning exclaims, “I can hardly believe it’s been 10 years since we got our first $2,500 grant and thought, ‘We’re rich! Let’s do a whole season!’ ”
In fact, Fahrenheit’s early years were premised on hard work and determination. Asked why Fahrenheit survived, Penning says, “We were a dedicated young group of artists who were not only actors but also skilled in the business of theater. From the beginning, we ran CSF as a small business, with a for-profit mentality in a nonprofit setting.”
They were also willing to work for almost nothing. Three years into their adventure they had four people on payroll, each earning $300 weekly. The rest were paid minimal amounts for their involvement. But they believed and kept at it.
The new company reached out to young audiences with school performances but also enticed theatergoers with tickets even students could handle.
“Our first ticket prices were $7.50, cheaper than or the same price as a movie ticket at that time,” Penning recalls. “So not only were we accessible, but affordable, too. That was always one of our mantras, that theater is too expensive. We wanted to keep it in the realm of possibility for families and young people to come to the theater on a regular basis, not just as a special occasion.”
Success was a relative thing in the first season or two. People turned out to see Fahrenheit’s shows, but they mustered only 17 subscribers. Nevertheless, expenses were minimal and audiences liked what they saw.
With Minadakis directing, Penning and Rose anchored a resident company of actors who performed regularly in each production.
“Patrons began to pick out their favorite actors,” Penning says. “They loved the idea of seeing the same people over and over again in different roles, watching the actors grow and change.”
Fahrenheit officially became Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival in February 1997. In a CityBeat story that month, Penning told me, “We kept hearing three things over and over when we staged our shows. ‘How long are you going to be in town?’ some asked, thinking we must be a touring group. Others wanted to know, ‘What does your group do?’ since our name didn’t say what kind of theater we do. And then there were people who probably saw us more than once but claimed, ‘I never heard of you guys before.’ ”
In the season following the name change, CSF moved from the Aronoff Center — where they’d sold out the entire two weeks of Macbeth in the Fifth Third Bank Theater in February 1996 and had a well-attended run of Romeo & Juliet in the Jarson-Kaplan Theater in February 1997 — to a vacant movie theater space on Race Street, once the home of The Movies Repertory Cinema. The permanent location enhanced CSF’s presence, kicking up their reputation another notch.
Expanding horizons
Halfway through their first decade, CSF’s success inspired other young theater artists, including some who’d been involved with Fahrenheit in its earliest days. Cincinnati Public Theatre had two seasons in 1998-2000, and one of its founders, Nicholas Korn (who performed with Fahrenheit), began Stage First, which had a five-season run through February 2003. Korn’s smaller group focused on classic works from Greek tragedy and comedy to 20th-century mainstays by Eugene O’Neill, not to mention the occasional Shakespeare play.
Other companies saw the opportunity CSF had fostered. Michael Shooner launched New Edgecliff Theater, reaching back to his time as a student at the now defunct Edgecliff College, which had hosted a professional theater company. Xavier grad Jay Kalagayan launched Know Theatre Tribe in 1999 with an emphasis on newer, multi-ethnic works. A group of serious-minded community theater performers pulled together in 1999 to establish Ovation Theatre Company.
Community theater has many participants in Greater Cincinnati, with more than 20 discrete companies, an exceptional number for a city this size. The standard of work is high at many of these groups — who combine unpaid theatrical performance with enjoyable camaraderie — and many people involved yearn for broader opportunities, even productions that can pay them to perform.
Such a desire led to the creation of Downtown Theatre Classics (DTC) in 1997, which proposed to offer high-end renditions of popular fare often left to community theaters — older musicals and well-known comedies. The company had some initial success at the Aronoff’s Jarson-Kaplan Theater but overextended itself with productions at the massive Taft Theater.
Its swan song came in 2000 when an ambitious but inexperienced young artistic director, Anton Shilov, so stretched the company that it collapsed mid-season in the midst of presenting a touring production of Forbidden Broadway.
Elsewhere, however, theater was thriving in Cincinnati, a fact that CityBeat marked in 1997 with the launch of the annual Cincinnati Entertainment Awards. ETC, under D. Lynn Meyers’ artistic leadership since 1996, had refined its artistic vision to the presentation of local, regional and national premieres of new works. The Playhouse continued to flourish under Ed Stern’s artistic leadership, also nurturing new works with its Rosenthal New Play Prize, which made possible several productions earning national attention, from Jeffrey Hatcher’s oft-produced Scotland Road to Keith Glover’s In Walks Ed, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1997.
Classical vs. contemporary
But Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival most epitomized the theater scene’s rapid growth, with Minidakis at its helm. (I once described him and the theater as the “Energizer bunny” of Cincinnati theater.)
Midway through its first decade, Minidakis and CSF began to spread their wings even further, undertaking productions that pushed well beyond Shakespeare. Waiting for Godot (1999) was the first step, a 20th-century classic that made sense.
In 1999, Minidakis played a role in launching the League of Cincinnati Theatres (LCT), an umbrella organization that focuses on nurturing the scene by fostering a better environment for actors and theater companies. LCT was initially funded by a collaboration grant from the Fine Arts Fund, which Minidakis and Penning played a big hand in writing.
He was LCT’s first vice president and often aggressively pursued strategies he believed would strengthen theatergoing in Cincinnati, including the possibility of launching an awards program that would work on a rolling basis to create ongoing interest in productions while they were still running.
But even as CSF was succeeding, the intense Minidakis was getting restive, drawn to more contemporary work. His 2000-01 season included four Shakespearean shows (The Merry Wives of Windsor, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice and the first and second parts of Henry IV, condensed to one production) and a pseudo-Shakespearean work, The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (abridged). It also offered Harold Pinter’s 1978 drama Betrayal, the regional premiere of Conor McPherson’s The Weir and the debut of Joe McDonough’s A Chance of Lightning, a contemporary tale based on the myth of Prometheus, perhaps a nod to CSF’s classical roots.
In September 2001, Minidakis began his eighth season — with three classical works and six of more recent vintage — with a very contemporary work, David Lindsay-Abair’s oddball drama from 2000, Fuddy Meers. Opening right after 9/11, the show didn’t garner much of an audience, but a June 2002 production of Mia McCullough’s drama Chagrin Falls was much admired, winning recognition as the season’s Best Production in the 2002 Cincinnati Entertainment Awards.
The bottom drops out
For 2002-03, Minidakis announced a season of eight shows clearly tipped in the direction of contemporary work. Only three were by Shakespeare — Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet and the little known Winter’s Tale.
Spurred by the city’s racial unrest, a black/white production of Romeo & Juliet sold reasonably well despite the continued hesitation of many area residents to come downtown a year after the April 2001 riots. But then the bottom dropped out: Minidakis’ next two shows — Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train and Dael Orlandersmith’s The Gimmick, running in repertory — sold a combined total of about 500 tickets, not nearly enough to sustain the company of actors, staff and ambitious operations he’d built.
After extended discussions with the theater’s board, which was firm about returning to CSF’s original commitment to the classics, Minidakis decided to step down in November 2002. At that time, CSF Board Chairman Dick Westheimer told me, “We didn’t attend as well to our trademarks and what our patrons had come to expect from us. We’re changing that.”
Rose, a familiar actor from many shows, including CSF’s annual holiday production of Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol, had left Cincinnati for Atlanta the previous summer. Minidakis called him, asking that he return and fill the artistic director position. Rose accepted the challenge.
“I immediately said ‘Yes, of course,’ ” he told me at the time. (See Sea Change: Shakespeare Festival Returns to Its Roots, issue of Nov. 27-Dec. 3, 2002.)
Joining him as associate artistic director was actor/director Brian Isaac Phillips, who, like Minidakis, had come to Cincinnati as an intern at Ensemble Theatre. (Phillips was at ETC in 1998-99.)
Getting back on track
Rose and Phillips revised the second half of the season while paring the budget from $820,000 to $560,000, about what the company spent to operate five years earlier. Several of Minidakis’ edgier productions were scrapped and more palatable fare inserted, including Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors and A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Molière’s Tartuffe.
The lone “modern” work was Lanford Wilson’s 1969 tale of a mixed race marriage, The Gingham Dog.
Rose and Phillips partnered to assemble a 10th anniversary season for 2003-04 that indicated a clear return to classical theater, including the pairing of Hamlet with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, its doppelganger by Tom Stoppard that had been promised during Minidakis’ final season.
Stable finances returned by the season’s opening production, The Taming of the Shrew, Fahrenheit’s first show in July 1994. Rose directed this time, and it featured Penning, now acting professionally in theaters on the East Coast, in the lead role.
Later in the fall, Rose — who joked that his job for a year was “to bite my nails 24/7” — decided he was eager to devote his energy to acting full time, and Phillips stepped into the artistic director’s role. (See Back to the Basics, issue of Oct. 29-Nov. 4, 2003.)
Phillips, who’s been with CSF for half of its 10-year life, mostly as a much-admired actor, is quick to set the record straight regarding Minidakis’ 2002 departure.
“I’ve heard the rumors that Jasson got fired,” he says. “To be historically accurate, that’s not true at all. He was very interested in doing contemporary work, not classical, but he did everything he could to keep this place alive. That transition wasn’t him throwing up his hands and Nick and me coming in.”
Phillips says Minidakis used his nine years of experience with the company to facilitate conversations about the best options for the future. What’s more, Phillips explains, “He sacrificed his own pay and his own job at the end by laying himself off to help us.”
In fact, Minidakis and two other administrators gave up their positions and Phillips and Rose worked for actors’ salaries.
Minidakis has landed squarely on his feet. His recent production at Actor’s Express in Atlanta, the regional premiere of Edward Albee’s The Goat, earned critical raves — one review termed it a “knock-out” and another described it as “the most gripping, emotionally charged play of the season.”
He keeps a close eye on the Cincinnati theater scene.
“The (CSF) company has one of the most loyal patron bases in the city,” Minidakis says, “and they continue to work to grow and diversify that base. The personnel are very talented and dedicated to the growth and stabilization of the company, which continues to bring in outstanding new artists to join and expand the ensemble. I think they have an amazing future.”
Phillips reports that things at CSF are on a decidedly even keel financially.
“It’s not even an issue anymore,” he says. “Oh, we still have to be financially responsible, that’s for sure.”
The current season is selling extremely well, he says, noting that every show has exceeded the earnings goal the company set for it.
Asked why he thinks things have improved, Phillips says, “Well, we’re doing Shakespeare! It’s easy to look in the paper and see Shakespeare Festival is doing The Taming of the Shrew. It makes more sense. We’re doing what it is people fell in love with us for. New audiences aren’t confused.”
Phillips also believes there’s a new attitude among Cincinnati residents.
“People who live around here, after hearing about the troubles, don’t want to see this place die,” he says. “I’ve heard people say, ‘I haven’t been in a couple of years. Maybe I should come back and give it a try.’ We’re getting a lot of subscribers who haven’t been with us for two or three years.”
So as a tumultuous decade winds up, has CSF hit its stride?
“We’re 10 years old, we’re still young,” Phillips observes. “We have almost 1,000 subscribers. But that’s only maybe 500 households. That’s not a lot of people knowing who we are. It’s very difficult to try to sell yourself to people who don’t know you when you’re doing Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train and Fuddy Mears.”
He’s convinced that the diversion into modern plays a few years ago was a distracting detour, and he’s likewise convinced that CSF’s recommitment to classical work is the right road now.
“Our early audiences fell in love with us because of the classical work,” he says. “When we started doing (newer works), it was maybe not the thing they could bring their kids to any more. If we had started as a premiere theater like ETC, it probably wouldn’t have been an issue. But having said we were Cincinnati’s classical theater, that became treacherous.”
Going to war
Phillips believes The Wars of the Roses, which former CSF member R. Chris Reeder adapted from three of Shakespeare’s lengthy history plays for CSF’s fifth season in 1998 — is the perfect capstone to CSF’s 10th anniversary season.
“It’s the biggest thing the company has had to battle,” Phillips marvels, “that many scenes, that many characters. There are 40-plus characters!”
Reeder’s adaptation was made for 12 actors. This week’s production uses about twice that number, many of them familiar faces from the past — including former CSF members Reeder, Toni Rae Brotons, Giles Davies, Jeff Groh, Keland Scher, Jim Stump, William Sweeney and Eric Topham. Penning can’t be in town (she’s in The Comedy of Errors at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.), but her recorded voice will narrate some of the action.
Most of the current company will also be onstage — from veterans Rose, Corinne Mohlenhoff, Chris Guthrie, Matt Johnson, Taylore Mahogany Scott and Phillips himself to Young Company members Bhavesh Patel, Kathyrn Lawson, Kevin Pierson, Christopher Zorker, Nancy Eyermann and Zack Whittington. Additionally, Reeder, now artistic director of the St. Croix Theatre Festival in Wisconsin, will be staging the production, and fight choreography will be provided by Regina Cerimele-Mechley, who acted with Fahrenheit in its early days.
“This was an opportunity to invite as many people back as possible,” Phillips says. ” Because of the scope of it, it was very ambitious, which is what a 10-year-old company should be doing, with the opportunities for the new and the past to come together and play. I love the play and what Reeder did with it. I love working on it now.”
He says this production is both a “thank you” for the past 10 years and a chance to say “goodbye” as CSF moves forward.
“One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced as artistic director is that I was an actor in the last five years of the company,” he says. “So I’m not a brand new person, and it’s not this new guy’s vision. Right now there’s still a whole bunch about the past.”
Artists in theater community
Phillips today has a clear vision of CSF’s future.
“In the next five years,” he suggests, “CSF will be known as the classical theater in this region. I don’t mean just Cincinnati — I mean all around here. There’s nothing standing in our way from becoming the next Steppenwolf (the renowned Chicago ensemble company) — that idea of an ensemble, a base of artists in a community that takes and gives in that community and raises their families there.”
Phillips sees Cincinnati on the cusp of even more theater activity after several years affected by an adverse economy. He cites Know Theatre’s success last summer with Corpus Christi. He observes that at New Edgecliff Theatre, largely dormant for a season, Shooner has brought on board a new associate artistic director, Elizabeth Harris (who, it happens, interned with Phillips at ETC).
“Those are two very positive signs,” Phillips says. “CSF getting back on its mission is a very positive sign. I don’t know if we’re going to be seeing brand new companies popping up as much as we might see some companies that have been here for the last couple of years really take some steps forward, just discovering what they are, what they do. I don’t think we’re going to have a burst of new theaters on the scene, as much as those of us that are still here will probably all be moving forward toward more of an established theater scene.”
Nevertheless, new entities are making a difference on the local scene. The Women’s Theatre Initiative screens plays during the year (regular Tuesday evening readings happen at Kaldi’s in Over-the Rhine) and mounts one production during the summer: Last July’s In Flame by Charlotte Jones featured Phillips and Mohlenhoff in a little seen but critically praised performance.
And less than a month from now (May 12-23), the Cincinnati Fringe Festival will offer more than 70 performances by at least 30 different groups, some from Cincinnati and some from farther afield. It should surprise no one that the Fringe Festival is happening under the wing of Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival.
Phillips says he’s young enough — he’s not yet 30 — to have the energy to make CSF work.
“We’re not tired, we’re not done, we’re all still stupid enough to believe that we can change the world,” he says. “We’re going to give it a go and do the classics. That’s what I think will make this one of the most remarkable theaters in the United States.”
THE WARS OF THE ROSES will be presented Thursday-Sunday. Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival then presents its “Big 10 Bash” anniversary celebration and raffle at 6-9 p.m. Sunday at Sycamore Place at St. Xavier Park, 634 Sycamore St., Downtown. Admission is $20, which includes entertainment, light hors d’oeuvres by Elegant Fare and a cash bar. Tickets: 513-381-BARD or www.cincyshakes.com.
This article appears in Apr 21-27, 2004.
