“Now listen, Eileen, Ohio was stifling. We just couldn’t wait to get out of the place,” Rosalind Russell said to Edie Adams in Leonard Bernstein’s 1953 musical Wonderful Town. In 1990 Ohio may still have that image, of being a great place to be–from. But performance artist and producer Tom Mulready wants people to know that there’s more to it than that.
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Mulready is director of the Cleveland Public Theatre Performance Art Festival, an annual showcase of cutting-edge theater, music, dance, and other related forms that, while attracting performers from all over the world, is particularly committed to presenting Ohio artists. Having established itself there over the past three seasons, the festival is branching out with visits to Baltimore, New York, and Chicago.
The Backyard Mechanics–Luigi-Bob Drake and Kristen Ban Tepper–experiment with handmade instruments and sound poetry in what Mulready calls “a very low-tech, down-home,” deliberately naive fashion.
