Cleveland Public Theater shines with drama, comedy, song at Pandemonium

The doctor stalked the stage, spouting hokum. Three sexy assistants in white lab coats flitted around him, checked his chalkboard theories, and danced to mambo music as they set up a tall ladder near a giant, inert light bulb.

The stage went dark. Performers on the balconies, illuminated by hand-held spotlights, quoted Shakespeare, e.e.cummings, Walt Whitman, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Langston Hughes. The light bulb glowed, and the doctor returned, now an old, bearded man. “Light! Liiiight!” he bellowed, like Dr. Frankenstein celebrating his creation.

That absurdist yet earnest theatrical mishmash set the tone for last night’s Pandemonium, Cleveland Public Theater's fundraiser and performance extravaganza. The introduction illuminated the night’s theme, “Shine” – dedicated, said executive artistic director Raymond Bobgan, to “the artist that shines inside each one of us.” The annual event seems designed to overwhelm patrons with the creativity of CPT-affiliated artists and supporters, with 17 stages hosting comedy, drama, music, spoken word, installation art and dance.

“There’s pressure to see everything,” partygoer Don Pavlish said. But that’s impossible. The most you can do is see a few intimate performances and keep moving at a quick pace.

Orthodox, the former church on CPT’s campus, hosted a rotating vaudeville show, including “Shhh! Alice is watching,” a short play that imagines director Alice Guy-Blache directing a scene from a century-old silent film. It’s played as a farce, with Guy-Blache’s pride at her pioneering accomplishments undercut by her assistant’s slapstick awkwardness and a creeping knowledge that the audience doesn’t know her. The play achieves a retro-magic when a wordless actor and actress take the stage in ashen black-and-white makeup. The assistant manipulates them into place like mannequins, and they pantomine a courtship scene as lights flicker like the sprocketed flashes of silent film.

Outside, on old outdoor staircases attached to the Parish Hall building, Carolyn McNaughton and Dana Hart enacted “The Lighthouse Keeper,” a tale of lost love on the sea inspired by the traditional folk song “House Carpenter.” The lighthouse keeper blew a bosun’s whistle and scribbled notes at the top landing as a young woman in a raggedy dress, in an alcove below, collected messages and objects in a pail. Now and then the lighthouse keeper pulled the pail up by rope and examined the contents for clues to her whereabouts.

At one point the young woman ascended the stairs and handed me a shell. “If you see him, will you give this to him?” she asked. “He needs to know I’m sorry.”

At length the lighthouse keeper descended. I handed him the shell. He gave me a note sealed with wax. “If you see her, give her this,” he said.

Several minutes later, I spied her wandering forlornly through the crowd and gave her the note. “Does he know?” she asked. He does.

Across CPT's campus, in an upstairs room, singer Juliette Regnier also evoked elusive love. Regnier’s French cabaret act ranged from a quirky comedic song about a spurned woman, with the plot explained by cartoon placards, to an emotive version of the ultimate French love song, Edith Piaf’s “La Vie En Rose” – one verse in French, one in English.

Three guys from the comedy troupe Last Call Cleveland – Aaron McBride, Mark McKenzie and Matt Zitelli – entertained on an outdoor stage near the local chefs’ tables. Their act included the least sexy R+B love song ever, a sendup of every seductive crooner of the last 30 years. No one can really make love all night long, the singer admitted, and proceeds to lower his lover’s expectations further and further as he went along. Later, claiming they were running out of time on the bill, two of the guys performed as simultaneous standup comedians, the joke being that almost every standup act is pretty much the same.

The performances ended back in the main theater with Pandemonium’s now-traditional finale: an aerial silk dancer, Heather Hammond of Heliummm Aerial Dance and Entertainment, twirling in knotted sashes to the music of Spectrum and Florence + the Machine.

CPT's Pandemonium dreams

The dreams began before anyone stepped inside Cleveland Public Theater on Saturday night. Sleepers posed in night clothes on the sidewalks, eyes closed, ignoring the hundreds of guests walking past. Others dozed on and near the staircase past the lobby.

Guests had to take care to walk around the actor-sleepers as they entered Pandemonium, CPT's annual benefit and celebration of creativity. Soon there was no getting around the metaphor. For two hours, actors, dancers and musicians at 24 performance spaces explored the night's theme, dreams and the imagination.

Pandemonium aims to overwhelm. Near the outdoor stages, a Mexican Day of the Dead procession snaked past flamingo-imitating dancers from MorrisonDance. Nearby, five actors and several bemused guests sat at a long table for "The Inventor's Tea Party." A butler turned a giant key in the characters' backs -- they were the inventions, unaware that the party's host had created them.

Downstairs in CPT's Parish Hall building, an actor in a red room read from a giant copy of Jung's Red Book, a journal of the dream theorist's own dreams. "I wanted to throw everything away and return to the light of day," he intoned, "but the spirit stopped me and forced me back into myself."

One of the night's best pieces, "Inquietude," was performed in the "Boogieman's Closet," a tiny room just off the theater lobby, decorated with an eerie mix of found objects. A dozen guests at a time were guided in and made to stand in a rectangle marked on the floor.

Then actor Andrew Gombas entered, stalked around the audience in the near-dark, and with suspense-thriller timing, pulled a sheet off Melissa Crum, crouched in a corner. The nightmarish moments in the characters' dialogue, along with the unnerving light effects and score, created a Blair Witch Project-like menace -- though the lighter moments of their dream evoked child-like play, as when they imagined themselves in a spaceship careening toward Saturn.

Back on the main stage, attorney Fred Nance and his wife Jakki, a past Ohio Arts Council chair, received CPT's Pan Award for support of the arts. Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson and councilmen Joe Cimperman and Matt Zone joined the Nances onstage. But the biggest political star power came from Dennis and Elizabeth Kucinich, who attracted fans' friendly chatter as they moved through the room.

The evening peaked with two surreal annual highlights of Pandemonium, an aerial silk dance (by Leslie Friend) and the arrival of the human dessert trays.

Muses inspire at Pandemonium as Cleveland Public Theater receives $1m grant

The muses flitted onto the stage in sparkling, raggedy dresses, upstaging the proper professor droning on about Urania, the Greek muse of astronomy. “No need to look to the past!” a muse intoned, and the professor beat it, ceding the stage to a multiplying troupe of dancers evoking the leaps of creativity.

“Muses are everywhere,” the lead muse declared. “Be a muse for each other. Remember, the muse is you!”

From there, hundreds of guests fanned out across Cleveland Public Theater’s campus at Pandemonium, the theater company’s annual fundraiser. The event, held Saturday, is one of the biggest parties in Cleveland, and this year, the occasion for the nonprofit's announcement that it's received a $1 million grant.


The theater’s supporters mingled with 250 performing artists, including costumed muses, jesters, black-clad winged fairies, birdmen with beaks angling from their foreheads, Mexican Day of the Dead skeletons, and haunting Mardi-Gras style giant puppets.


Twenty-two indoor and outdoor stages each hosted performances pretty much nonstop for two hours. Early rain sent crowds indoors. In the former orthodox church’s lower level, renamed the Bruise Me Basement, we were turned away from Stephen Farkas’ short play “A Peculiar Case of Execution” by a barbarian with a blood-tinged eye. The prisoners’ cell was very crowded, he explained, but he invited us to return a few minutes later. “We execute them about five times tonight,” he said.

Outside, as the rain died down, Ray McNiece and his band Tongue-in-Groove performed The Revenge of Cleveland, a blend of music and poetry. McNiece’s spoken-word rant, set off by a tiny nouvelle-cuisine dinner in Boston, became a paean to local comfort food, including “a meal as profound and murky as an immigrant cathedral” and a chicken dumpling soup with floating fat globules “like the hundred suns that never shine in gray Cleveland.” Then the full band, including an insistent harmonica and horn, propelled his “Love Song to Cleveland,” which got the Mexican skeletons dancing.

Down the theater’s catacomb-like side passageways, one small space hosted back-to-back sorts by local playwrights David Hansen and Eric Coble. Hansen’s “DO DO that VooDoo,” set at Cleveland Heights’ Alcazar Hotel in 1936, is built on actual lines from Plain Dealer theater critic William McDermott’s florid, condescending, deeply ambivalent review of Orson Welles’ all-black Macbeth. (Copies of McDermott’s review were handed out to the audience after the short.) The play imagines Welles, at the Alcazar’s bar, duping a starchy yet tipsy McDermott into handing over a telephone so he and an assistant can dictate the review – an almost believable explanation for McDermott’s writing style.

Coble’s “Waiting For the Matinee,” performed by two actresses sitting in the first row of seats, imagines an audience of two waiting to watch a production of Waiting for Godot. The first and last lines of Samuel Beckett’s absurdist play (“Nothing to be done” and “Let’s go”), and presumably the last stage direction (“They do not move”), frame the short. In between, it’s an entertaining satire of the rewards, trials, hopes and disappointments of frequent theater patrons.

Back in the main hall, executive artistic director Raymond Bobgan shook up the usual acknowledgments and thank-yous with a big reveal. He announced that the Kresge Foundation has awarded CPT a $1 million grant for upkeep on its theaters. The award, part of a $7 million fundraising campaign, addresses the avant-garde company’s challenges in mounting productions amid the Gordon Square Theater’s old-Cleveland run-down grandeur.

CPT staged a bit of political fence-mending as it honored city councilman Joe Cimperman and his wife, ParkWorks associate director Nora Romanoff, with its Pan Award. The theater invited Dennis Kucinich to introduce Cimperman, a surprise move since the councilman, once a young ally of Kucinich, ran aggressively against him for Congress in 2008. Kucinich seized the peacemaking opportunity, praising Cimperman’s sense of community and creativity.


For Pandemonium’s finale, CPT stuck to a successful trio from years past: a performance by an aerial acrobat in a silk hammock, a grand entrance by several human desert tables, and two kitschy-cool sets by singer Lounge Kitty, whose ever-expanding repertoire now ranges from Elvis’ “Suspicious Minds” to Rick James’ “Super Freak.”

Wild things come out at night for CPT’s Pandemonium ‘10

Here’s how Pandemonium, the annual benefit party for Cleveland Public Theater, lives up to its name. For five hours, the whole CPT campus, from the Gordon Square Theater to Parish Hall, fills with overwhelming creativity, more sounds and tastes and sights than any person could take in. A marching band parades past theater tents, a band stage, a busy bar. Ten-foot-tall monsters recreated from Maurice Sednak’s Where the Wild Things Are roam the crowd with a dancing Max. Rappellers from Cleveland Rock Gym, with tiger-stripes painted across their skin, descended the building’s façade. Inside, the city’s top modern dance troupes perform excerpts from their latest shows.

Food overwhelms for the first hour, with table after hors d’oeuvre table from one of the best collections of restaurants outside the Silver Spoons party. (Indian Delight, the new restaurant in CPT’s Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood, stood out with its creamy chicken masala.) Then, guests spread out among 20 stages for entertainment, including dozens of quick one-act plays. New spaces in the theater’s northwest corner hosted a cabaret of acoustic musicians, stand-up comics and one-act plays. Highlights included Cat Kenney's "Not Exactly A Palindrome," in which an awkward blind date begins to repeat itself, the same small talk returning in reverse order, with the actors finding completely different inflections to go with a completely scrambled meaning. (In Parish Hall, where the installation "The Petition Box" was decorated with hanging images clipped from magazines, I was excited to see the photo of jazz pianist Montana Taylor from The Terminal in Cleveland Magazine's June issue.)

Though the plays and dances and music were all new, CPT finished the night with a few highlights from last year. The evening’s third act began with an “aerial dance” by Rina Nouveau, a Cirque du Soleil-esque performance in which she wrapped and unwrapped herself in two long silk sashes suspended from the ceiling, rose and fell and spun sensually through the air. As the crowd in the theater applauded her, the human dessert tables entered the room, dressed in dark Goth stylings and carrying trays of little pastries at waist height.

Lounge Kitty, Cleveland’s queen of kitsch, sang from the balcony. “If you’re feeling artsy-fartsy, say yah-uh!” she exclaimed, then launched a bolero-y rendition of “Like A Virgin.” The Gordon Square Theater transformed into a huge dance floor. And soon it became obvious this was no average dance crowd. A gang of six or so young dancers were executing professional-looking twirls, poses, moves, and flirty top-hat exchanges among the guests. They were member of the Inlet Dance Theatre troupe, off-duty after performing their piece “BALListic” earlier that night. They were still dancing joyously at quarter to midnight as the event’s end neared.

Amid the arty-stylish crowd, which ranged from guys in hipster T-shirts to women in strapless dresses and feathers in their hair, I spotted several politicos – city councilmen Jeff Johnson, Matt Zone, and Joe Cimperman, county executive candidate Ken Lanci – urban-art figures such as Terry Schwarz of the Cleveland Urban Design Center, and performers such as comedian Mike Polk.

Pandemonium at CPT

My date had never been to Pandemonium, but she knew it by reputation. "It's one of the best parties in Cleveland!" she said -- then admitted she let out a little cheer at her desk at work when I e-mailed to say we were going.

She's right -- and the 2009 version of Cleveland Public Theater's fundraiser on Saturday exceeded even my memory of the event from a few years ago.

A stage full of actors introduced this year's theme, "Forbidden Knowledge," by peeling duct tape from their mouths, slipping heavy headphones from their ears, and shouting out their forbidden thoughts, which ranged from Marquis de Sade quotes to a fervent defense of Judy Blume's Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret (from a guy!). As the scene broke up, a woman in a Mardi Gras mask appeared next to me and asked me my secret. I demurred and asked hers. She whispered it so quietly, no one around us heard. (I shall not post the secret here.)

Short plays broke out all across the CPT campus: in an alley, an upstairs attic-like space, the Parish Hall and Orthodox buildings near the main theater, and on the lawn between them. I expect a mix of successes and disappointments from a crowded schedule of performances, but the quality was consistently high. From a fortune-teller who proves that human life is both predictable and mysterious to a happy, happy woman singing an ode to the anti-depressant Cymbalta to a teacher keeping a secret at a high school reunion, the plays were almost all funny and spirit-lifting. Readers perched in Parish Hall's second-floor window declaimed from banned books for the party-goers below. (The transition from D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover to William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch was a bit jarring.) Across the lawn, Vodka and Scotch, a Ukrainian and Scottish folk music duo, played fierce acoustic music from a story-tall platform, beckoning guests back toward the main theater.

After the Pan Award was given to Brian E. Hall -- by Mayor Frank Jackson, among others -- came a "helium aerial dance," or "solo silk act." To Leonard Cohen's "I'm Your Man," Lisa Natoli performed sultry acrobatics on long green sashes hanging from the light beams (pictured). As she came back to earth, the wildest play on the evening's theme entered the room: human dessert tables. Actors dressed like trees, with circular trays at their hips, held apples in one hand and beckoned guests with the other.

I caught glimpses of the mayor, in an open-collar button-down shirt, watching the aerial dance and then walking by one of the dessert tables. I could only imagine what he was thinking, but it was probably something like, No one invited me to parties like this when I was on city council!

The evening ended with Lounge Kitty and her band playing from the balcony above. Kitty sang the best kitchy tunes in her repertoire, from "Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves" to "I Will Survive," and even added a decent version of "Thriller," which inspired several in the crowd to try to imitate Michael Jackson's zombie video moves.

(Photo by Sarah Zilka)