CLEVELAND — Most Northeast Ohioans have a basic understanding of the history of Playhouse Square, the theaters that were targeted for demolition a half century ago only to be saved from the wrecking ball and restored into what is the largest theater district in the United States outside of New York City. But there was a pivotal part of that story that played out quietly at first, 50 years ago this week.
Joe Garry was directing the play “Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris” at Cleveland State University. On closing night, Ray Shepardson, the driving force behind the effort to save the Playhouse Square theaters, approached Garry about continuing the play’s run in the lobby of the State Theater.
“It was one of the few spaces in Playhouse Square that was savable and inhabitable at the time. There was debris, desolation everywhere. It looked like bombs had dropped,” Garry recalled.
The theater itself was not an option.
“I’m not overstating it when you say you walked into the space and if you were in the theater of the State Theater you thought it was snowing because all of the plaster was coming down from the ceiling and it was dripping and the stage had collapsed and there were no seats and there had been fires everywhere in the building. It couldn't have been more of a disaster.”
He told Shepardson no.
“Everyone in the theater community loved him and supported what he was trying to do but no one could see beyond the disaster of all of these spaces,” Garry said.
Shepardson, though, with the help of Garry’s mother, eventually won him over and he agreed to a three-week run, but he still had to convince the rest of the team.
"When I brought the cast here they thought I'd lost my mind because this is a cavernous space, it's a very intimate little show,” he said. “Keep in mind, there's no money, there's no staff, so I had to use all of my students, anyone we could find to clean out the space and make it possible for an audience to come into the space.”
With only about three weeks until the wrecking balls were expected to begin demolition, they opened in the lobby of the State Theater on April 18, 1973.
“Every night we counted the money to make sure there was enough money to open the next day,” Garry recalled. Word quickly spread, though, and their three-week run became six, then twelve.
“We opened, and lo and behold, magic happened and the Phoenix started to rise."
What was supposed to be a run of less than a month ended up lasting two and a half years. It is still the longest-running play in Ohio history. It sent a message that theatergoers were willing to come to Cleveland for shows, and the corporate community soon took note. As the theaters were restored so too was the neighborhood around it.
"It wasn't only the rebirth of Playhouse Square, it was the rebirth of Cleveland,” he said. “Raymond proved the greatest thing of all, he looked deep into the face of mystery and he found magic. He believed so strongly in saving this theater that he convinced ultimately thousands of people that it was savable.”
Garry is still a part of the Playhouse Square family as the host of a show called “Broadway Buzz.”
“I do eight lectures a week for people coming to see the Broadway series. And every night when my lecture's over, I walk through these spaces on my way home and I always sort of look in here,” he said of the lobby. “I’m Irish and I like shrines and this is my shrine, this space, and I burst into tears.”
“Keep in mind what started out as Raymond's idea turned into thousands of people dedicating their lives for 50 years and hundreds of millions of dollars going into the restoration of all of these phenomenal spaces," Garry said.
