Approaching the halfway mark, the 2007-08 season has thus far been notable for its most dramatic events - both the heartening and the discouraging - occurring behind the scenes rather than onstage.

At the positive end came the recent confirmation that the Hanna's owner, Playhouse Square Foundation, had finalized the deal to cede residency rights at the historic theater (currently undergoing extensive renovation) to Great Lakes Theater Festival. This welcome bulletin means that not only for the first time in its 46 years will GLTF be operating at a state-of-the-art facility, but will more importantly be enjoying the guaranteed stability of a permanent home base it's never known.

Even more to be celebrated is the announcement that monies from Cuyahoga County's cigarette tax, have actually moved from smoke-dream projections to hard-cash pay-outs. Something like $15 million will be parceled out to 68 recipients starting in January, with a similar amount to follow in 2009 and 2010.

As is usual in such open competitions, them that has the most, gets the most. In the theatrical category, Playhouse Square, the Cleveland Play House and GLTF will receive respective grants of roughly $1.5 million, a half-million and a quarter-million. Yet, lesser donations - approximately $180,000 to Beck Center, $150,000 to Karamu, $86,000 to Cleveland Public Theatre (also recently awarded $15,000 for a specific project from the National Endowment For the Arts) - constitute a significant part of those organizations' budgets; and, for even smaller producers, the New Year's gifts can mean the difference between lights up or out.

The not-so-happy flip side of the tax bonanza is the surprising absence from the donee list of two of the area's most venerable and venerated theaters, Dobama and Ensemble, along with the newer but valuable musical specialist, Kalliope Stage - a result, it's said, of each group having fallen short of the granting agency's filing requirements. In Kalliope's case, the funding might have literally pulled the storefront outfit back from the cliff-edge of potential extinction, which it reportedly faces if a sizable sum of emergency contributions is not promptly forthcoming.

Though it's scant evidence, that looming misfortune is one of a trio of developments surfacing this fall that suggest the theatrical community may just be sailing into a patch of economic rough water. Beck abruptly cancelled a scheduled, not particularly expensive November show for stated reasons that seem suspiciously non-compelling; meanwhile, as the disastrous climax of recent offstage dramas, Opera Cleveland announced a drastically curtailed 2008 season, which tacitly proclaimed the de facto dissolution of the Lyric Opera Cleveland half of the group's supposed merger with Cleveland Opera. Despite an imminent $300,000 dole from the tax fund, the OC's wretchedly mismanaged follies of the last couple of years put the very future of opera in Cleveland at considerable risk.

As far as matters on the aesthetic front have fared - and setting aside the plethora of returning holiday blockbusters (which, according to Free Times observers, continue to deliver their promised year-end cheer and profits) - the season to this point has given us little artistically to merit any equally convivial toast of wassail.

A midterm assessment - reached in consensus with critical colleagues Keith A. Joseph and Jean Seitter Cummins - is that we've seen a scattering of huzzah-prompters (PSC's deliriously frothy The Drowsy Chaperone, Kalliope's rare resuscitation of Jerry Herman's Dear World, CPT's contemporarily challenging Osama the Hero and CPH's tradition-validating The Chosen); and some major mishaps (CPH's twin perversions of Man of La Mancha and Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure; identically titled Reflections by Beck and Kalliope which, in order, mangled the legacies of Peggy Lee and cool jazz; GLTF's hoked-up Measure For Measure; PSC's meretricious We Gotta Bingo; and a call-the-exterminator Bug from Akron's Bang and Clatter). The bulk of the remaining 20 or so offerings reviewed in these pages have either been decent productions of less than scintillating plays or the reverse, which resulted in either pleasantly or unpleasantly routine evenings of theater.

If the season continues in a similar fashion, it's likely to go down in the books as far more memorable for its decisive commerce rather than for any incisive art.