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Three theatrical productions open today, each of them unique yet all equally savory.
Here’s where you’ll find all the details.
The familiarity of “Fiddler” is due in large part to its excellence, but there’s also a devil in the details.
A genius-level devil named Jerome Robbins, the man who first directed it in 1964.
Every time a community theater or an Equity playhouse decides to do the play, they get Robbins’ notes about how the sets must look and how the actors must move about the stage.
Civic Theatre executive director Phillip Colglazier choreographed the play in the early 1980s for then-Civic-chief Dick Casey.
In July, Colglazier saw the actor Topol play the lead role of Tevye in a farewell tour of “Fiddler” that came through Chicago. Colglazier compared the two productions and concluded that “every single thing” was the same.
You can’t argue with timelessness.
“Fiddler on the Roof,” which opens Saturday at the Civic, ran for 3,242 performances at two Broadway theaters during its initial run and has since become a beloved community theater staple.
It is a theatrical tradition about traditions: when to cherish them and when to break them.
Colglazier says the musical, about a man trying to maintain traditions in an environment that becomes increasingly hostile to them, is still the sort of play that tends to attract several generations of families.
“It is really a great show for grandparents and parents and kids to come to together,” he says.
The family feeling in the plot often infuses the cast and crew as well, Colglazier says.
“It really does give you a sense of family to work on this piece,” he says.
To describe “A Walk in the Woods” as a play about the Cold War is to make it sound dated. To describe it as a play about two rival politicians who sneak away from the media glare so they can have a normal conversation makes it sound timely, even prescient.
Although the two diplomats in the play are brought together by nuclear urgencies that have shifted somewhat since the ’80s, Thom Hofrichter, First Presbyterian Theater minister of drama, believes the play has a lot to say about our culture today.
Hofrichter says a climate of partisanship, sensationalism and Balkanization of opinion has made it impossible “for anyone to be civil with each other” in conversation.
Hofrichter saw an opinion poll recently in which 63 percent of people claimed they disliked the tenor of discourse in this country. But he doesn’t think most people are willing to do what they need to do to change it.
“Turn off Fox News,” Hofrichter says. “Turn off MSNBC. Stop rewarding the people who turn important issues into sport.”
In “A Walk in the Woods,” loosely based on arms reduction talks between Ronald Reagan and Yuri Andropov, a young American arms negotiator and his more seasoned Soviet counterpart slip away into the woods to have the sort of conversation that they could not have where the eyes of the world are upon them.
Hofrichter believes argument has a different meaning today than it had in the past.
“One of my biggest problems with society right now is our inability to argue,” he says. “Argument can be a good thing. But it’s not just about being able to present your own points. You have to listen to information from the other side. If someone is not capable of change in an argument, then it’s not an argument. It’s a fight.”
Hofrichter is not only co-directing this production with Beth Peter, he is starring in it as the Soviet diplomat.
It’s been three years since his last acting job.
“It made me realize that I either need to do it more often or give it up entirely,” he says. “It is a skill that deteriorates.”
In 2003, the mother of local playwright and teacher Ruth Tyndall Baker died, and Baker decided to move back into her childhood home off West Main Street.
In that house where she had celebrated so many birthdays and holidays, Baker says she began to fully appreciate her family heritage, perhaps for the first time.
She also began to wonder whether something artistic could be made from this new appreciation.
“It is in my nature to always be chasing the next idea,” she says. “I always tell my students to write what’s under their own noses.”
Baker subsequently celebrated her first Christmas alone in that house, and the result is “A Christmas Key,” an original play opening today at the theater in the downtown Allen County Public Library.
This all for One production concerns an aging mother trying to cope with the news that her daughter must spend Christmas away from her. A terrible tragedy that binds them together in silence will be revealed and (perhaps) healed before the play’s end.
Director Lauren Nichols says “A Christmas Key” is a Christian play but not a preachy one.
Still, “it is probably the most overtly Christian play we have done,” she says.
Baker says the Christmas season doesn’t tend to be a time for Christian theater, so perhaps there is room for a play like hers.
“A Christmas Key” is ultimately about forgiveness, Baker says, the forgiveness of God as embraced by – and applied among – family members.
Baker has had extraordinary success for a Fort Wayne-based playwright.
Readings and full productions of her plays have happened in New York, Chicago, Indianapolis, Houston and Nashville, Tenn.
Baker says she recently signed with a New York theatrical agent.
