Book Reviews

Showtime in Cleveland: The Rise of a Regional Theater Center. By John Vacha. (Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 2001. 264 pp. Paper. $29.95, ISBN 0-87338-697-3.)

John Vacha has written about fine and performing arts for a variety of scholarly and popular history publications and was an associate editor of the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History/Dictionary of Cleveland Biography.

Vacha's Showtime in Cleveland traces the evolution of "legitimate" theater (live spoken drama) as part of the city's cultural history. The work is a chronological narrative with chapters representing distinct eras in the development of Cleveland theater history. It is not a scholarly history, but a rich narrative account interspersed with photographs and illustrations.

Citing scant surviving evidence, Vacha's story begins with local amateur dramatic productions and visits by a few traveling professional actors in Cleveland's pre-canal early 1820s. Linkage with the Ohio canal system and increased Lake Erie travel late in the 1820s led to the town's first significant population growth and an audience base stable enough for the first ventures into the theater business. Cleveland's earliest theaters were simple frame structures built or adapted to be home bases for stock companies touring a circuit made possible by the expansion of lake traffic. Entrepreneurs like John Ellsler came to the city with touring companies during this period, decided there was sufficient audience support for dramatic troupes to stage productions in their own home buildings, and spent one or more seasons attempting to succeed in the theater business without touring. However, those few stock companies that lasted beyond their first seasons found that economic survival depended on a mix of touring and stock productions.

Vacha relates facets of Cleveland's nineteenth century evolution as a city -- surges in population and infusions of ethnic cultures, economic successes and failures, the growing popularity of public entertainment genres (including theater), and sometimes resistance to such entertainment by churches, newspapers, and prominent civic leaders -- to the proliferation of theaters and shifting of "entertainment" districts geographically within the city. Between the 1830s and 1890s stock companies came and went, depending upon the vagaries of the local and national economy, competition from other entertainment venues, and varying support from local groups and individuals. Cleveland's stock companies also produced nationally notable actors such as Ellsler's daughter, Effie Ellsler, and Clara Morris, whose career stretched into the silent film era. Theater history in the latter part of the century was dominated by the economic and social involvement of prominent local citizens like Mark Hanna and Henry Wick. Meanwhile, resident stock companies declined, giving way to more lavish productions by professional touring (or "combination") companies featuring more polished performances and spectacular sets.

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