Charles Fee

2009 MARTHA JOSEPH PRIZE

Theater artists tend to revere ghosts, and Charles Fee, producing artistic director of Great Lakes Theatre Festival for the past seven seasons, is no exception. Not the boo-scary kind of ghosts, mind you; rather, the palpable presence of great but deceased individuals whose memorable contributions to theater came as playwrights or producers, actors or innovators, directors or designers or, well, divas.

Ask Fee to elaborate on his affinity for history, and he’ll point to his, his board’s, and his company’s deep love for classical theater, first and foremost. GLTF’s mission has been and will be to produce the classics: Shakespeare predominantly, as expected, but the likes of Chekov, Coward, Goldsmith, Moliere, Shaw, Sondheim, and Wilde, as well.

“I stand on the shoulders of the founders of the company and previous artistic directors who have all brought extraordinarily good work to this company and built a real tradition of producing the classics in Cleveland,” Fee says.

Holder of a bachelor’s degree from the University of the Pacific and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego, Fee has worked with such companies as The Old Globe Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, and the Los Angeles Shakespeare Festival. He also served as artistic director of the Sierra Repertory Theatre in northern California.

Hired by GLTF as Producing Artistic Director in 2002, Fee welcomed the significant challenge of restoring the theater to financial health and a place of theatrical prominence in Northeast Ohio. His innovative approaches to producing theater, including joint productions with the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, where he has worked as Producing Artistic Director since 1991, have rescued GLTF from serious financial instability that once threatened the survival of downtown Cleveland’s primary classical theater since 1980.

Kathleen A. Cerveny, program director of The Cleveland Foundation, admires Fee’s strategic efforts to bring Great Lakes to solvency with no loss in artistic quality. “Great Lakes is one of few performing arts organizations in Cleveland to not only balance its budget each year, but also maintain a level of working capital that safeguards it against incurring short-term debt and supports necessary artistic risk-taking,” she says. “The consistent positive reviews and the Theatre’s growth in audience numbers over time is testament to the quality and excitement that Charlie has advanced.”

Nevertheless, the culmination of his passion for theater’s past stands in his diligent efforts to lead a nearly $20 million campaign to renovate PlayhouseSquare’s Hanna Theatre into an intimate, audience-friendly space with the latest in high-tech production capabilities such as hydraulic lifts to raise and lower all or part of the thrust stage has helped revitalize the historic Broadway show house into a model for theater in the 21st century. In doing so, Fee has also energized GLTF’s future in its new home.

True to his theater roots, Fee is overjoyed to have set his company’s future firmly atop the resplendent history of the Hanna’s past. He believes that the space has a distinguished provenance that is rarely matched in the American theater. Built in 1921, its stage hosted such theatre royalty as Alfred Lunt and his wife Lynn Fontanne, Noel Coward, and Stanislavski and his Moscow Art Theatre company.

“Virtually every major theater artist of the first half of the 20th century in America and much of Europe played in the Hanna Theatre,” Fee says. “So, it’s just a huge gift as an artist to work in that space, refurbish that space, and work in a community that supports classic theater.”