Pretty Danielle Dorfman, who played the part of Mimi in the Kent State University School of Theater and Dance's excellent production of "Rent," is the daughter of Dr. Philip Dorfman, the cardiologist.
A freshman broadcast major, she had been on campus only two days when she tried out for the role.
Having portrayed Maureen, another character in the musical in a Canton performance this past summer, may have given Miss Dorfman an advantage. Still, she was selected from a group of about 30 young women, nearly all of them theater majors, who also wanted to play the role of Mimi.
The 2009 graduate of Hoban High School was active in theater at her alma mater where she had most recently played the role of Nellie Forbush, the lead female role in "South Pacific."
"I told her that trying to make it in theater is about as difficult as trying to make it in the NFL," her father said Thursday.
Accepting her dad's advice, Michelle entered Kent State as a broadcast major, but after her success in "Rent," she is now auditioning for admission into the School of Theater and Dance.
Her father supports the change.
"She's pursuing what she wants and I think that's great," he said.
What a terrific candidate for the School of Theater and Dance is what I think.
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At 68 years old, I've missed out on many a pastime that life has to offer, but opera is not one. I enjoy it and Puccini's "La Boheme" is my favorite.
Having read somewhere that "Rent" is an updated version of "La Boheme," I readily agreed with Janet when she suggested we attend the "Rent" production at Kent State, one of the first college-level theater programs to stage this challenging musical.
We did so a week ago last Friday and my reaction?
Some update!
"La Boheme," which premiered in 1896, explores the bohemian culture of Paris in the 1830s, artists scraping for a living, one of whom, Rudolfo, an aspiring poet, falls for Mimi, his neighbor who supports herself as a grisette, or part-time prostitute. Afflicted with tuberculosis, Mimi is doomed and the opera centers around the tempestuous relationship she and Rudolfo share.
"Rent," composed by Jonathan Larson, premiered in 1996, shortly after Larson's death from an aortic aneurysm at the age of 29. It tells the story of the artistic community of the East Village of New York City in the 1980s, gripped with the dreaded threat of AIDS.
Roger, one of the lead characters, is HIV-positive and so is Mimi, who shoots heroin, so both characters appear doomed. The character Angel Dumott Schunard, ably played by Jon Gluckner, is a drag queen with AIDS who is in a relationship with Tom Collins, a computer genius and a gay anarchist, portrayed by Zach Hartley.
In the musical, the lives of these characters and others like them are being sympathetically documented over a year's time by Mark Cohen, a struggling filmmaker, energetically and skillfully portrayed by Danny Lindenberger, his character no drug user or victim of AIDS.
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To some people my age or older, the plot of "Rent" may seem bizarre, but I noticed so many younger people so enthusiastic about the performance that I concluded I must be out of it. Editor Roger Di Paolo, my junior by more than a dozen years and much better read, had seen the performance so I asked him to explain the story and he did.
"Rent" took the theater world by storm. It won four Tony Awards including "Best Musical" and "Best Score." It won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, six Drama Desk Awards, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for "Best Musical," three Obie Awards including "Outstanding Book, Music, and Lyrics." It ran for nearly 6,000 performances on Broadway and took in more than $280 million.
Poor Jonathan Larson, who suffered from Marfon's Syndrome, which led to his fatal aneurysm the day his musical was to premiere, did not have AIDS. Like most struggling artists, he was impoverished, although he had grown up in a middle class family on Long Island.
Terri Kent, the head of the Musical Theater Program and artistic director of Porthouse Theater, is like two of her legendary predecessors, William Zucchero and Louis Erdmann, incredibly ambitious in what she undertakes and area theater-goers who attend the productions she stages are seeing Broadway quality for ticket prices a lot less than what we'd be paying in New York or even Cleveland for that matter.
"Rent" ended its KSU run last weekend. It was as well done as anything I've seen at Kent State and, as Dr. Dorfman, a savvy East Coast transplant, assured me when we compared its story line to that of "La Boheme," I am now up to date.
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On another topic, the University of Akron's new $62 million football stadium is going to take some adjusting for visiting teams from the MidAmerican Conference, I think.
The stadiums at Kent State, Ohio University, Bowling Green and the University of Miami in Oxford, have fewer seats and all are situated in laid-back, country-like settings.
Akron's stadium, by contrast, is in the heart of the campus in the bustling city in a bowl carved out of the ground, with spacious and well-appointed stands along both sides of the field, each seating approximately 15,000. The Akron sound system, cranked up to pep up the crowd, reverberates echo-like between the stands, a handsome new fieldhouse on the north side and a glitzy digital scoreboard on the south side.
From the visitors' stands on the east side, where Janet and I were seated on the 40-yard line during the recent Zips-Flashes game, one looks up at a soaring multi-storied VIP section behind the home team's stand whose bright flood lights illuminate the playing field.
Staring up at that VIP section, which looks even taller when one is seated below ground level, I started feeling like a bumpkin. It was intimidating and, with the sound cranked up, confusing.
The Golden Flashes, who had played so well in their previous three games, gave the Zips a contest right up to the end, but I wondered if that high-powered, urban setting, a smaller version of an NFL stadium in actuality, put them off-stride.
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Finally, when I think about the talented people I've had the opportunity to work with so far during my 41 years at the Record-Courier, several stand out. Sheila Unsworth, who died this past week, absolutely fits in that category.
Sheila edited About People pages for Ravenna when we still segregated their content between western and eastern Portage County. She started as an assistant to Fran Harper and succeeded Fran.
A cultured and intelligent person, Sheila was a gifted listener, an immigrant from the United Kingdom who understood and appreciated the people of Ravenna and Portage County.
The pages she edited were as well done as any I've seen over the years. I'm a native, born and bred here, but sometimes an outsider sees us more accurately than we see ourselves. Sheila's writing, dependably accurate, was insightful.
She and Jim moved to the Portland, Ore., area 15 years ago to be near their children, who had all gravitated to the West Coast. In Ravenna, they had resided in a home they purchased from the late Jim Poland, a prominent attorney, and his wife, Dorothy, a Reed Memorial Library trustee. When they left for Oregon, the Unsworths sold their home to Jim and Dorothy's son, Kevin and his wife, Sheila. Kevin, who has since become the mayor of Ravenna, was elected a Portage County Municipal Court judge by the voters November 3rd.