p>IT’S INTERMISSION TIME for the area’s 2005-06 theatrical season, and the buzz in the metaphorical lobby is that the first half of the show smells like a commercial winner, while artistically the scent is less sweet with success.

In contrast to last year’s near financial debacle of an opening half, which saw most theaters desperately scrounging for customers, playhouses around town are presently toting up very respectable fall-into-winter box-office receipts. Gifted, for example, with an unprecedented choice of 18 professional holiday offerings, theatergoers apparently continue to go a-wassailing in the merriest of numbers. The Cleveland Play House struck such a bonanza with its stage version of the locally idolized cult film, A Christmas Story, that it might well become a perennial Yuletide fixture. “We’re definitely considering it,”says artistic director Michael Bloom. “It’s a big show, and bringing it back will be costly. We’ll have to do as well as this year to cover the expense, but the reaction has really been exceptional.” Just as encouraging, the remainder of CPH’s initial productions — which bravely included I Am My Own Wife, a chancy transvestite monologue — also exceeded financial expectations.
Beck Center boss Scott Spence is likewise caroling that the current outstanding mounting of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast “is set to become the third-biggest grosser in our history.” He glowingly adds that, of the season’s other theatricals, “Both Urinetown and Topdog/Underdog did 25 per cent over projections, and T.I.D.Y. held its own.”
The major gusher of a surprise is Playhouse Square Center’s Love, Janis, the songfest biography of rock legend Janis Joplin, which already had a decent area run with its CPH debut several years ago, had suffered an aborted New York outing, and seemed to be simply a stopgap booking to keep the empty Hanna warm for a while. Instead, it has incredibly been selling out, and promising enough more profitable nostalgia to extend its occupancy through February 15. Also improbably long-legged is PSC’s next-door Menopause the Musical, which evidently continues to ring up more than mere chump change by joshing the Change.

While not in the same blockbuster category, Cleveland Public Theatre’s effort to refresh its dwindled coffers by combining David Sedaris’ seasonal one-elf standard, The Santaland Diaries, with a return engagement of the theater’s 2003 antic hit, Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge, did eminently well enough to justify the strategy. Similarly, Great Lakes Theater Festival managed to squeeze sufficient milk out of its annual cash cow, A Christmas Carol, to just meet hoped-for goals. There is, however, a persistent rumor that — because of reduced subscriptions and, even more, the loss of lucrative student matinees — GLTF will revert next year from its present radical summer-fall agenda to a traditional fall-through-spring schedule.
Tiny home-owned venues like Kalliope Stage and convergence-continuum, even sporting non-holiday-specific programming, generally do not feel the need to concern themselves with boffo box-office. But smaller rental outfits do, and Ensemble Theatre, for one, discouragingly broke no attendance records with its idiosyncratically chosen first two shows, the difficult Anna in the Tropics and the unexciting Bravo, Caruso! On the other hand, co-renter Dobama shared in the spectator stampede by unexpectedly selling out the final stages of the run of its sole fall 2005 offering, Edward Albee’s The Goat.
This last is a perfect exemplar of the dichotomy of the year’s theatrical record thus far: a well-attended, superb production of an awful play. To this point, the monetarily rosy season is artistically fairly thorny. It must be gratefully trumpeted that Beck’s two shining musicals, Urinetown and Beauty and the Beast (both substantially reliant on the sterling contributions of choreographer Martin Cespedes), already have doubled 2004-05’s one triumph, Ragtime from JCC. But more pertinently, there has been an accompanying stream of sharp disappointments of selection and/or execution — from JCC’s South Pacific, CPH’s Room Service, GLTF’s Amadeus, Beck’s Topdog, CPT’s The Designated Mourner, to Karamu’s female version of The Odd Couple. True, there was  a scattering of acceptably entertaining and interesting stagings — GLTF’s As You Like It, CPH’s I Am My Own Wife and Charenton Theater Company’s A Day in the Death of Joe Egg — but nothing so exceptional as to risk a valued friendship by passionately recommending it. Still, 2005-06 may yet earn artistic as well as fiscal solvency by virtue of a number of promising projects scheduled for its second half.
Of potentially more lasting consequence, however, are recent developments that took place offstage. November brought three significant administrative resignations involving local arts organizations. The chronically troubled Charenton lost an able manager with producing director Mindy Childress’ departure; Cleveland Opera’s first-year general director Robert Chumley, after conducting an acclaimed opening production, abruptly and puzzlingly abdicated his post; and, in only his second season leading Cleveland Public Theatre, Randy Rollison announced he’d be retiring as artistic director come April l.
Likely at founder and former head James Levin’s urging, Raymond Bobgan, long associated with CPT in various capacities, was swiftly chosen as Rollison’s successor. Among other changes, the selection may portend a shift in programming policy. One of the few area theaters with a relatively defined constituency — largely concerned with social, political, minority, feminist, gay and lesbian issues — CPT has not invariably and equivalently emphasized aesthetics. So, Rollison’s partially achieved aim in his short tenure to “professionalize” and improve the artistic qualities of productions was widely welcomed. Though Bobgan has publicly pledged to pursue the same commendable goal, his major experience and seeming preference is as an experimental theater director, particularly of Eastern-influenced works. There’s no indication that he would weightily program to suit that preference; but if he should, it might raise questions about whether that was the best way to simultaneously excite his audience and dig CPT out of the considerable deficit in which it’s currently mired.
Once, however, all the downers have been thoroughly downed with and drowned in some fortified eggnog, the economic bottom line is that Santa has munificently emptied his sack this Xmas ’05 on the doorsteps of a slew of North Coast playhouses.