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Hopes running high for FusionFest, a first
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By: FRAN HELLER Contributing Writer
If you build upon it, will they come?
Michael Bloom would like to think so.
In the scant two years Bloom has presided over The Cleveland Play House as artistic director, he has brought a new “look” to the 90-year-old theater, starting with a fresh coat of paint, innovative programming, Family Nights, an online newsletter, and wine-tastings.
Attendance, subscriptions, and meeting production goals, he says, are up, up, up.
Bloom’s latest brainchild is FusionFest, a multi-disciplinary performing arts festival that will keep the building’s five theater spaces humming with opera, theater, new play readings, cabaret and dance from May 2-21.
FusionFest is a first
“We are the only regional theater in the country doing this,” Bloom claims.
Bloom has always felt it important for arts organizations to collaborate in order to create a critical mass for performing arts audiences and a safe haven for the production of new work. If you do a festival, maintains Bloom, people are more likely to come to it with a sense of exploration and discovery than they are if you do a world première.
Thus, his emphasis is on new work, as opposed to world premières.
People in Cleveland don’t care if it’s a world première, says Bloom; they care only if a work is good.
Bloom thinks theaters should be focusing on second productions of very good plays. Paul Dresher’s contemporary opera “The Tyrant” is a case in point. It premièred in Seattle last season to rave reviews and will make its Midwest première at The Play House in a co-production between The Cleveland Play House and Opera Cleveland. In an online source, the California-based Dresher credits the wellspring of much of his music to his Jewish upbringing and the music of the synagogue.
Inspired by Italo Calvino’s short story “A King Listens,” “The Tyrant” tells the story of a king who, paralyzed by fear of being overthrown, cannot physically leave his throne; he experiences his kingdom only through sound. As the king listens to his castle, his fears are manifest in each unexpected noise, driving him slowly to madness.
Approximately 12-14 arts organizations will be participating in FusionFest. In addition to Opera Cleveland, they include: VERB Ballets, Cleveland Museum of Art, MOCA-Cleveland, Dobama Theatre, Karamu House, and the JCC.
Area high schools are also involved.
The Cleveland School of the Arts’s New Play Festival, an annual event that takes place at The Play House is now part of FusionFest. The students write, direct and act in their own plays.
The Shaker High School Ensemble Program is likewise part of FusionFest. This, too, is a student-driven original performance piece.
Participants were chosen for FusionFest based on their interest in doing new work. Those “new” works include two world premières, Anthony Giardina’s “Custody of The Eyes” at The Play House and Sarah Morton’s “Night Bloomers” at Dobama; five readings of brand-new plays at CPH’s Next Stage Festival; and a staged reading of the winner of the JCC Dorothy Silver playwriting competition directed by Fred Sternfeld.
Bloom has high hopes for FusionFest, with visions of Spoleto and Edinburgh dancing in his head. While these festivals are much larger and draw visitors worldwide, the idea is the same, says Bloom. “It’s to create community around a series of events.”
Another goal is to cross-pollinate audiences. Bloom hopes that audiences for one art form will spill over to another.
Visions don’t come cheap
The cost for FusionFest is more than $250,000. Funding will come from box-office receipts; corporate sponsorships including National City Bank and The Cleveland Clinic; and Play House board of trustees member Roe Green, who is honorary producing sponsor. “Roe Green really understands collaboration. We could not be doing this without her,” acknowledges Bloom.
Green is a Jewish angel if ever there was one. As a leading Cleveland philanthropist and longstanding arts supporter, Green’s passion for the performing arts coupled with her unstinting tsedakah has helped countless arts organizations both locally and nationwide.
Green is backing FusionFest in a major way because of her unswerving belief in collaboration. “If, in some way, these different groups would collaborate … whether sharing the same space or same administrative costs … or, co-productions … to me, this is very important. Collaboration is the wave of the future,” she says.
The vivacious arts enthusiast agrees that success cannot be measured in terms of economics, but in terms of people coming out to support the event. “Hopefully, the community will support this; that’s what’s going to make it successful,” says Green.
The Play House is co-producing FusionFest, which means assuming half the risk and cost of the opera, VERB Ballets, and international cabaret singer Astrid Hadad. It is also absorbing the entire cost of “Custody of the Eyes,” the final production of the 2005-06 season.
Conversely, The Play House is “presenting” Dobama, as opposed to producing, which means Dobama assumes production costs. The Play House is also producing the benefit with Karamu House, featuring legendary actress Ruby Dee in a staged reading of Bridgette Wimberly’s “St. Lucy’s Eyes.” Both Dee and Wimberly are Cleveland natives.
Separate tickets must be purchased for each event. They run the gamut from $10 to the top price of $50.
The biggest challenge for Bloom was convincing people in the community that FusionFest could be done. “The great thing that has happened is that so many arts organizations have been interested in being involved in it. Artistic directors understand the need for it in all the genres.”
The Cleveland Play House is the oldest and one of the largest regional theaters in the country; it is also a facility that is woefully underutilized. With five performance spaces going at full steam, FusionFest will create a critical mass of entertainment and, hopefully, crowds and excitement never before experienced at The Play House.
Bloom admits the undertaking is a significant financial risk. It’s a logistical risk as well, he adds, comparing the details of putting it all together with the same staff over the past one-and-a-half years to simultaneously implementing a second season.
In charge of coordinating events and creating the schedule for FusionFest is Seth Gordon, associate artistic director at The Play House and associate producer of FusionFest. Gordon also serves as liaison between The Play House staff and the different participating organizations.
The moniker FusionFest was Gordon’s idea. He took the thesaurus off his shelf and searched for synonyms of the word collaboration. One of them was fusion; hence the title.
On a typical day, anywhere from four to seven events will take place in the building. One of Gordon’s responsibilities is to make sure that audiences as well as cast and crew know where they are to go.
Gordon credits the excellent CPH staff (nearly 100) for helping make it all happen. The biggest challenge for Gordon is planning all this without precedent. Everything at this point is theory, he says.
Bloom, Gordon and Green concur that the advantages of FusionFest are significant. One is the unique opportunity to cross-pollinate audiences. Another is that it raises the profile of Cleveland arts organizations and gets arts organizations working together.
Roe Green sees it as a win-win situation that will lift all boats, including the city of Cleveland. She cites Bilbao, in Spain, an erstwhile gritty city under great economic duress. “Here’s a city that was falling apart, and what did they do? They built an art museum. I say, play to your strengths. We have all these wonderful cultural things in this city. For $10, a person can hear the reading of a new play that could be produced regionally in years to come or even go to Broadway.”
A self-described optimist, Green envisions FusionFest as an annual event, which she likens to Humana and its annual Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Ky. She is especially looking forward to seeing the world première of Anthony Giardiana’s provocative new drama “Custody of the Eyes.” It’s about a young priest whose vows are compromised and his faith challenged when he tries to help a mother and her severely impaired son.
“Exposure to new work is key,” says Green.
Associate producer Gordon thinks there are two main payoffs for this kind of collaborative enterprise. “First, a lot of people are going to be in this building enjoying the arts. The first step toward gaining a loyal audience is getting them in the building and having them enjoy what they see.”
Secondly, Gordon has discovered that Cleveland is not the most collaborative of cities in terms of the arts community. “I’m hoping that this festival will prove that it is possible for collaboration to be a fruitful enterprise for people.”
While Gordon shares Bloom’s vision of a Spoleto-like festival taking hold in Cleveland, he says the main thing for him at the moment is that Cleveland gets very excited about this. “I think once we’ve accomplished that, it would be very exciting to have the United States become very excited about this.”
Across the country, festivals are “in.” Even in Cleveland, with a stagnant economy and zero population growth, there are now two festivals, Ingenuity and FusionFest.
Each of these festivals has a very particular focus. Whereas Ingenuity (taking place this summer) is the intersection of arts and technology, FusionFest is a multi-disciplinary festival of new work. Bloom feels the two festivals are very different — with room for both.
Dobama Theatre’s final production of its season is the world première of Sarah Morton’s play “Night Bloomers.” It is being presented at The Cleveland Play House in conjunction with FusionFest, May 12-June 4.
“Night Bloomers” imagines a post-apocalyptic world after another 9/11-type event. The title of the play refers to a flower-loving protagonist who, despite the danger and heightened Homeland Security, travels across country to view a unique plant that only blooms once a century.
It has always been part of Dobama’s mission to try to produce a new play by a Cleveland playwright, explains artistic director Joyce Casey.
Award-winning Cleveland director Fred Sternfeld, who also serves as theater consultant and producer for the JCC arts and culture program, is directing the professionally staged reading of “Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One” for FusionFest. The play is by New York playwright Judy Klass, winner of the 2006 Dorothy Silver Playwriting Competition.
The competition has been in existence more than 25 years. This year, 115 scripts were submitted by playwrights worldwide.
“Stop Me….” is a family comedy about a TV writer who reluctantly visits his parents in Florida for the Passover seder. There he finds a solution to his writer’s block, romance, and a renewed understanding of his family and of his Jewish identity.
The reading will take place May 21 in the Brooks Theatre at 2 p.m. A post-performance discussion with playwright Klass will follow the reading.
“Whatever we can do to promote new work and get audiences excited about new and challenging work is critical,” says Sternfeld.
The JCC approached The Play House about participating in FusionFest.
“We just felt that that was a great opportunity for us to reach broader audiences and do a fabulous collaboration,” says Anne B. DesRosiers, project manager for the JCC arts and culture program.
Whereas FusionFest is responsible for the costs of production, the JCC is assuming appropriate marketing costs. The trade-off, explains DesRosiers, is that FusionFest retains all ticket revenues.
Sternfeld feels that there is not only room for Ingenuity and FusionFest, but a hunger for them. He credits the vision of James Levin and Thomas Mulready (co-founders of Ingenuity) and now Michael Bloom and Seth Gordon for making it happen.
Award-winning radio personality Bill Rudman and award-winning director Victoria Bussert have combined their prodigious talents to create “Musical Theatre NOW!” a showcase of narrative and song highlighting the best contemporary composers of musical theater.
Heirs to the Rodgers and Hammerstein legacy include Richard Rodgers’s grandson, Adam Guettel, who wrote the score (music and lyrics) for the Tony Award-winning musical “The Light in the Piazza.” (It is coming to Playhouse Square Center in their 2006-07 season and is still running on Broadway at Lincoln Center.)
“Musical Theatre NOW!” is being co-hosted by Rudman and Bussert, who will present the songs in a narrative context. The songs will be performed by Bussert’s graduating senior class at Baldwin-Wallace College, with Nancy Maier accompanying on piano.
Rudman, who approached Bloom about participating in FusionFest, is very excited about its potential.
“It’s all about synergy,” he explains. “When you put all that stuff together and let it bounce off each other, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts; it creates something very concentrated, very explosive, in a short period of time.
“For three weeks in May, The Play House is gonna rock.”
Bussert, director of the musical theater program at the Conservatory of Music at Baldwin-Wallace College, is excited about the cross-pollination of different arts programs at FusionFest.
She acknowledges that many of us grew up in the tradition of Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Lowe and haven’t been updated in terms of current musical theater. “There’s a whole new generation of composers and writers and new material that people don’t know about,” she says.
As artistic director at Cain Park, Bussert has always been at the forefront of the new musicals, many of which have been produced at Cain Park’s Alma Theatre. Selections from these musicals, such as “BatBoy,” “Side Show,” “Avenue X” and “Tick! Tick! Boom!” are part of “Musical Theatre NOW!”
Bussert is optimistic about FusionFest’s success. Anybody in Cleveland who has any interest in the arts will be there, she says. “I hope this ends up being an annual event.”
For a complete listing and schedule of events, visit www.clevelandplayhouse.com. Brochures about FusionFest are also available at The Play House.
Michael Bloom would like to think so.
In the scant two years Bloom has presided over The Cleveland Play House as artistic director, he has brought a new “look” to the 90-year-old theater, starting with a fresh coat of paint, innovative programming, Family Nights, an online newsletter, and wine-tastings.
Attendance, subscriptions, and meeting production goals, he says, are up, up, up.
Bloom’s latest brainchild is FusionFest, a multi-disciplinary performing arts festival that will keep the building’s five theater spaces humming with opera, theater, new play readings, cabaret and dance from May 2-21.
FusionFest is a first
“We are the only regional theater in the country doing this,” Bloom claims.
Bloom has always felt it important for arts organizations to collaborate in order to create a critical mass for performing arts audiences and a safe haven for the production of new work. If you do a festival, maintains Bloom, people are more likely to come to it with a sense of exploration and discovery than they are if you do a world première.
Thus, his emphasis is on new work, as opposed to world premières.
People in Cleveland don’t care if it’s a world première, says Bloom; they care only if a work is good.
Bloom thinks theaters should be focusing on second productions of very good plays. Paul Dresher’s contemporary opera “The Tyrant” is a case in point. It premièred in Seattle last season to rave reviews and will make its Midwest première at The Play House in a co-production between The Cleveland Play House and Opera Cleveland. In an online source, the California-based Dresher credits the wellspring of much of his music to his Jewish upbringing and the music of the synagogue.
Inspired by Italo Calvino’s short story “A King Listens,” “The Tyrant” tells the story of a king who, paralyzed by fear of being overthrown, cannot physically leave his throne; he experiences his kingdom only through sound. As the king listens to his castle, his fears are manifest in each unexpected noise, driving him slowly to madness.
Approximately 12-14 arts organizations will be participating in FusionFest. In addition to Opera Cleveland, they include: VERB Ballets, Cleveland Museum of Art, MOCA-Cleveland, Dobama Theatre, Karamu House, and the JCC.
Area high schools are also involved.
The Cleveland School of the Arts’s New Play Festival, an annual event that takes place at The Play House is now part of FusionFest. The students write, direct and act in their own plays.
The Shaker High School Ensemble Program is likewise part of FusionFest. This, too, is a student-driven original performance piece.
Participants were chosen for FusionFest based on their interest in doing new work. Those “new” works include two world premières, Anthony Giardina’s “Custody of The Eyes” at The Play House and Sarah Morton’s “Night Bloomers” at Dobama; five readings of brand-new plays at CPH’s Next Stage Festival; and a staged reading of the winner of the JCC Dorothy Silver playwriting competition directed by Fred Sternfeld.
Bloom has high hopes for FusionFest, with visions of Spoleto and Edinburgh dancing in his head. While these festivals are much larger and draw visitors worldwide, the idea is the same, says Bloom. “It’s to create community around a series of events.”
Another goal is to cross-pollinate audiences. Bloom hopes that audiences for one art form will spill over to another.
Visions don’t come cheap
The cost for FusionFest is more than $250,000. Funding will come from box-office receipts; corporate sponsorships including National City Bank and The Cleveland Clinic; and Play House board of trustees member Roe Green, who is honorary producing sponsor. “Roe Green really understands collaboration. We could not be doing this without her,” acknowledges Bloom.
Green is a Jewish angel if ever there was one. As a leading Cleveland philanthropist and longstanding arts supporter, Green’s passion for the performing arts coupled with her unstinting tsedakah has helped countless arts organizations both locally and nationwide.
Green is backing FusionFest in a major way because of her unswerving belief in collaboration. “If, in some way, these different groups would collaborate … whether sharing the same space or same administrative costs … or, co-productions … to me, this is very important. Collaboration is the wave of the future,” she says.
The vivacious arts enthusiast agrees that success cannot be measured in terms of economics, but in terms of people coming out to support the event. “Hopefully, the community will support this; that’s what’s going to make it successful,” says Green.
The Play House is co-producing FusionFest, which means assuming half the risk and cost of the opera, VERB Ballets, and international cabaret singer Astrid Hadad. It is also absorbing the entire cost of “Custody of the Eyes,” the final production of the 2005-06 season.
Conversely, The Play House is “presenting” Dobama, as opposed to producing, which means Dobama assumes production costs. The Play House is also producing the benefit with Karamu House, featuring legendary actress Ruby Dee in a staged reading of Bridgette Wimberly’s “St. Lucy’s Eyes.” Both Dee and Wimberly are Cleveland natives.
Separate tickets must be purchased for each event. They run the gamut from $10 to the top price of $50.
The biggest challenge for Bloom was convincing people in the community that FusionFest could be done. “The great thing that has happened is that so many arts organizations have been interested in being involved in it. Artistic directors understand the need for it in all the genres.”
The Cleveland Play House is the oldest and one of the largest regional theaters in the country; it is also a facility that is woefully underutilized. With five performance spaces going at full steam, FusionFest will create a critical mass of entertainment and, hopefully, crowds and excitement never before experienced at The Play House.
Bloom admits the undertaking is a significant financial risk. It’s a logistical risk as well, he adds, comparing the details of putting it all together with the same staff over the past one-and-a-half years to simultaneously implementing a second season.
In charge of coordinating events and creating the schedule for FusionFest is Seth Gordon, associate artistic director at The Play House and associate producer of FusionFest. Gordon also serves as liaison between The Play House staff and the different participating organizations.
The moniker FusionFest was Gordon’s idea. He took the thesaurus off his shelf and searched for synonyms of the word collaboration. One of them was fusion; hence the title.
On a typical day, anywhere from four to seven events will take place in the building. One of Gordon’s responsibilities is to make sure that audiences as well as cast and crew know where they are to go.
Gordon credits the excellent CPH staff (nearly 100) for helping make it all happen. The biggest challenge for Gordon is planning all this without precedent. Everything at this point is theory, he says.
Bloom, Gordon and Green concur that the advantages of FusionFest are significant. One is the unique opportunity to cross-pollinate audiences. Another is that it raises the profile of Cleveland arts organizations and gets arts organizations working together.
Roe Green sees it as a win-win situation that will lift all boats, including the city of Cleveland. She cites Bilbao, in Spain, an erstwhile gritty city under great economic duress. “Here’s a city that was falling apart, and what did they do? They built an art museum. I say, play to your strengths. We have all these wonderful cultural things in this city. For $10, a person can hear the reading of a new play that could be produced regionally in years to come or even go to Broadway.”
A self-described optimist, Green envisions FusionFest as an annual event, which she likens to Humana and its annual Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Ky. She is especially looking forward to seeing the world première of Anthony Giardiana’s provocative new drama “Custody of the Eyes.” It’s about a young priest whose vows are compromised and his faith challenged when he tries to help a mother and her severely impaired son.
“Exposure to new work is key,” says Green.
Associate producer Gordon thinks there are two main payoffs for this kind of collaborative enterprise. “First, a lot of people are going to be in this building enjoying the arts. The first step toward gaining a loyal audience is getting them in the building and having them enjoy what they see.”
Secondly, Gordon has discovered that Cleveland is not the most collaborative of cities in terms of the arts community. “I’m hoping that this festival will prove that it is possible for collaboration to be a fruitful enterprise for people.”
While Gordon shares Bloom’s vision of a Spoleto-like festival taking hold in Cleveland, he says the main thing for him at the moment is that Cleveland gets very excited about this. “I think once we’ve accomplished that, it would be very exciting to have the United States become very excited about this.”
Across the country, festivals are “in.” Even in Cleveland, with a stagnant economy and zero population growth, there are now two festivals, Ingenuity and FusionFest.
Each of these festivals has a very particular focus. Whereas Ingenuity (taking place this summer) is the intersection of arts and technology, FusionFest is a multi-disciplinary festival of new work. Bloom feels the two festivals are very different — with room for both.
Dobama Theatre’s final production of its season is the world première of Sarah Morton’s play “Night Bloomers.” It is being presented at The Cleveland Play House in conjunction with FusionFest, May 12-June 4.
“Night Bloomers” imagines a post-apocalyptic world after another 9/11-type event. The title of the play refers to a flower-loving protagonist who, despite the danger and heightened Homeland Security, travels across country to view a unique plant that only blooms once a century.
It has always been part of Dobama’s mission to try to produce a new play by a Cleveland playwright, explains artistic director Joyce Casey.
Award-winning Cleveland director Fred Sternfeld, who also serves as theater consultant and producer for the JCC arts and culture program, is directing the professionally staged reading of “Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One” for FusionFest. The play is by New York playwright Judy Klass, winner of the 2006 Dorothy Silver Playwriting Competition.
The competition has been in existence more than 25 years. This year, 115 scripts were submitted by playwrights worldwide.
“Stop Me….” is a family comedy about a TV writer who reluctantly visits his parents in Florida for the Passover seder. There he finds a solution to his writer’s block, romance, and a renewed understanding of his family and of his Jewish identity.
The reading will take place May 21 in the Brooks Theatre at 2 p.m. A post-performance discussion with playwright Klass will follow the reading.
“Whatever we can do to promote new work and get audiences excited about new and challenging work is critical,” says Sternfeld.
The JCC approached The Play House about participating in FusionFest.
“We just felt that that was a great opportunity for us to reach broader audiences and do a fabulous collaboration,” says Anne B. DesRosiers, project manager for the JCC arts and culture program.
Whereas FusionFest is responsible for the costs of production, the JCC is assuming appropriate marketing costs. The trade-off, explains DesRosiers, is that FusionFest retains all ticket revenues.
Sternfeld feels that there is not only room for Ingenuity and FusionFest, but a hunger for them. He credits the vision of James Levin and Thomas Mulready (co-founders of Ingenuity) and now Michael Bloom and Seth Gordon for making it happen.
Award-winning radio personality Bill Rudman and award-winning director Victoria Bussert have combined their prodigious talents to create “Musical Theatre NOW!” a showcase of narrative and song highlighting the best contemporary composers of musical theater.
Heirs to the Rodgers and Hammerstein legacy include Richard Rodgers’s grandson, Adam Guettel, who wrote the score (music and lyrics) for the Tony Award-winning musical “The Light in the Piazza.” (It is coming to Playhouse Square Center in their 2006-07 season and is still running on Broadway at Lincoln Center.)
“Musical Theatre NOW!” is being co-hosted by Rudman and Bussert, who will present the songs in a narrative context. The songs will be performed by Bussert’s graduating senior class at Baldwin-Wallace College, with Nancy Maier accompanying on piano.
Rudman, who approached Bloom about participating in FusionFest, is very excited about its potential.
“It’s all about synergy,” he explains. “When you put all that stuff together and let it bounce off each other, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts; it creates something very concentrated, very explosive, in a short period of time.
“For three weeks in May, The Play House is gonna rock.”
Bussert, director of the musical theater program at the Conservatory of Music at Baldwin-Wallace College, is excited about the cross-pollination of different arts programs at FusionFest.
She acknowledges that many of us grew up in the tradition of Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Lowe and haven’t been updated in terms of current musical theater. “There’s a whole new generation of composers and writers and new material that people don’t know about,” she says.
As artistic director at Cain Park, Bussert has always been at the forefront of the new musicals, many of which have been produced at Cain Park’s Alma Theatre. Selections from these musicals, such as “BatBoy,” “Side Show,” “Avenue X” and “Tick! Tick! Boom!” are part of “Musical Theatre NOW!”
Bussert is optimistic about FusionFest’s success. Anybody in Cleveland who has any interest in the arts will be there, she says. “I hope this ends up being an annual event.”
For a complete listing and schedule of events, visit www.clevelandplayhouse.com. Brochures about FusionFest are also available at The Play House.
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