Great Lakes Theater Festival
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| Formation | 1962 |
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| Type | Theatre group |
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Artistic director(s)
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Charles Fee |
| Website | www.greatlakestheater.org |
Great Lakes Theater is Cleveland, Ohio's professional classic theater company. Founded in 1962, Great Lakes is the second-largest regional theater in Northeast Ohio. It specializes in large-cast classic plays with a strong foundation in the works of Shakespeare and features an educational outreach program. The company performs its main stage productions in rotating repertory at its state-of-the-art new home at the Hanna Theatre, Playhouse Square, which reopened on September 20, 2008. The organization shares a resident company of artists with the Idaho Shakespeare Festival. On its main stage and through its education programs, GLT connects approximately 85,000 adults and students to the classics each season.
GLT's artistic directors have included Arthur Lithgow, Lawrence Carra, Vincent Dowling, Gerald Freedman, James Bundy (present Dean of the Yale School of Drama) and Charles Fee, who engineered the company's production-sharing partnership with the Idaho Shakespeare Festival).
In 2010, Great Lakes Theater completed a $19.2M dollar capital campaign to renovate the Hanna Theatre as a new and permanent home for Great Lakes while creating an endowment for the theater company - preserving the legacy of the classics in Cleveland. The honorary chair of the campaign was actor Tom Hanks, who credits the Great Lakes Theater Festival for beginning his acting career.
Great Lakes Theater was formerly known as Great Lakes Theater Festival, which continues to be its legal name. “Festival” was dropped from the classic theater company’s business name to better reflect its September through May season, and programming format.
Arthur Lithgow started what was going to be Great Lakes in the 1950s at Antioch College, in Yellow Springs, Ohio. During the few years in Antioch, all of Shakespeare's plays were performed. The company traveled for performances at Stan Hywet Hall in Akron, the Toledo Zoo, and Cuyahoga Falls. In 1961, Lithgow made an arrangement with Ohio Board of Education President Dorthy Teare, creating the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival. GLSF premiered July 11, 1962 with As You Like It. It continued at the Lakewood Civic Auditorium performing that play and five others in rotation.
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