- [Announcer] Production of "Applause," on Idea Stream Public Media is made possible by the John P. Murphy Foundation, the Kulas Foundation, and by Cuyahoga County residents, through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

(upbeat cheerful music) - [Kabir Bhatia] Coming up, the Tudors take center stage with a royal collection.

Plus, did you know Playhouse Square theaters where saved by a musical from France?

We explain an important anniversary.

And indi folk singer, Kahrin, shares her anthem for overcoming obstacles.

Welcome back to you and me.

This is "Applause," and I'm Idea Stream Public Media's, Kabir Bhatia.

Royal life has long captured people's attention, particularly in magazines and now social media.

When it comes to England's historic kings and queens, we can learn a lot today from art.

A special exhibit looks at the Tudor dynasty.

Head inside the Cleveland Museum of Art with Idea Stream Public Media's Carrie Wise.

(nostalgic upbeat music) - [Carrie Wise] The luxury on view in the galleries is by design as the Tudors intended to send a message with their art.

- Tudors had a legitimacy issue.

You know, it wasn't without question that Henry the 7th should be king.

And so as someone who's trying to project legitimacy, art is an incredibly powerful tool.

- [Carrie Wise] Unlike royal life today, the grandeur of these portraits, armor, and furnishings wouldn't have all been seen by everyday people back in the 1500s.

In fact, much of this collection hasn't been widely seen.

- [Cory Korkow] This is a really rare opportunity to see a lot of works.

We have dozens of lenders to this exhibition, over 90 works of art, and a lot of the loans are coming from collections in England.

So they're coming from the royal collection, they're coming from the Victorian Albert Museum, churches in France, in Belgium, they're coming from Vienna, all over the world.

- [Carrie Wise] The Tudor's reign started in the late 1400s and includes the infamous Henry the 8th, known for his many wives, including two he had killed.

This dynasty also gave way to England's first ruling queens, Mary and Elizabeth.

- Mary and Elizabeth really had to rewrite the playbook for queenship in portraits.

By the time Elizabeth becomes queen, she has a number of options at her disposal and we see the first in the Hampton portrait where she's holding the carnation, she's a marriageable beauty, she's set against this elaborate backdrop of fruit and flowers, suggesting her fecundity, fertility, the potential heir that might be the product of this union, and she's around 34 when that portrait's painted and she has recently become queen.

So then we move forward a few years or decades, and by the time she's in her 50s, she's still unmarried and she really embraces the cult of virginity.

So she's basically saying, "All right, "I've looked at the market, "I don't see anything that's for me out there."

Instead, she decides that she will stay a virgin queen, and in that sense, she's married to her people.

- [Carrie Wise] While these portraits may captivate people today, back in Renaissance England, the tapestries would have claimed the spotlight.

- We have two textiles that come from The Field of the Cloth of Gold which is a historical event in 1520 where Henry the 8th met his rival, King Francis the 1st, and we know that Henry the 8th, who was a very substantial, large, muscular, six foot two, we think, man, and Francis the 1st, who was a bit on the slimmer side, Henry really underscored this point by arriving the first day dressed, or undressed as the case may be, as Hercules.

And so from there on, they basically brought together some of the most sumptuous tapestries.

A lot of the tapestries that were present there were actually woven with gold thread, which is why the event took the name The Field of the Cloth of Gold.

So the cope, which is a liturgical vestment that we have in the exhibition and the tapestry that shows the creation and fall of man, which is one of the series of 10, are both woven with gold thread and were present at this event.

- [Carrie Wise] The importance of the textile art of this period can be understood today be taking a closer look at some of the royal portraits.

- Each of the portraits is really also, you know, kind of an essay in embroidery, in tapestry, in these luxurious textiles.

So you might be looking at a portrait of a queen and she's standing on a Turkish carpet against a cloth of gold hanging, wearing, you know, elaborate gold network, wearing incredibly elaborate embroidery, and so I think when you have the sense of the textile as being really the star of the collection, and then the fact that it's featured in a portrait, is the sitter telling you something about what they value and how many resources they have.

- [Carrie Wise] The artists creating these works also angled for status.

One example of this is with the portrait of Henry the 8th's only son, Edward the 6th, as a baby.

- We know that he was a really frail child, but you would not get that sense from the portrait.

He looks like the image of his father, really.

He's a very robust, healthy baby, holding a rattle as if it were a scepter, and this we know was a gift that was given by the artist, Hans Holbein, to Henry the 8th, and what better way to curry favor with your major patron than to give him a portrait of his long awaited male heir.

We also know that Holbein, in exchange, was given a gold cup and cover because that kind of gesture would not go unrewarded.

- [Carrie Wise] Another portrait in this exhibition carries both significance and mystery.

Seen here is Abdul Wahid visiting Queen Elizabeth to perhaps discuss trade or more discretely, an alliance against Spain.

- The idea of an ambassador from Morocco, traveling that kind of distance in 1600 and speaking face to face with Queen Elizabeth is really incredible.

It's also the first portrait of a Muslim person painted in England that we know of.

So incredibly fascinating and amazing picture to have on loan.

- [Carrie Wise] The impressive works in The Tudors: Arts and Majesty in Renaissance England may seem like truly from another world, but arguably there are still ways to relate to these works, now hundreds of years old.

- One of the fascinations with royalty now comes from the idea of celebrity and royals are so much in the news and, you know, part of, you know, social media and conversations that we have in the kind of entertainment venue that, I think it's easy for us to enter into that kind of spirit when we're looking at these figures, but also you can think about the more, kind of, human aspect of the story.

For instance, the idea of you're losing a mother in a young age or the idea of trying to reinvent yourself.

The stress, you know, that I think that Elizabeth had of being the queen and trying to convince people that she wasn't an imposter, she had the knowledge, she had the intellect, she had the power to be in that role, I think those are the kinds of things that a lot of us can identify with.

No matter what your status is, that struggle for legitimacy and that desire to be understood and remembered is something that transcends time.

- [Kabir Bhatia] The Tudors: Arts and Majesty in Renaissance England is on view through May 14th at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

In the late 1960s, the curtain came down, almost forever, on the dilapidated theaters of Cleveland's Playhouse Square, but an inspired group of volunteers worked tirelessly to restore the theaters to what they are today.

50 years ago, in April of 1973, a musical opened in the lobby of the state theater serving as the catalyst to save Playhouse Square.

In honor of that anniversary, here's a selection from Idea Stream's 2012 Emmy Award winning documentary, "Staging Success."

This is the story of "Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris."

(gentle piano music) - What in the hell do you do with three huge theaters and one 11, 1200 theater?

I mean, it was like nuts.

So I tried to figure out how you use these theaters and what else can you do besides theater?

- And then along in time is this show that's running in town called "Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris."

- Seal Hartman who was working with Ray and all of us on this project, said, "There is supposed to be a wonderful show "at Cleveland Stage, just up the street."

- And on the last performance of the last night of the show, Ray Shepardson and his wife, Seal, came to the show.

- And so I saw it in this ridiculous classroom where the armrests come up and you can do tests and I had this religious experience.

It was like this phenomenal, and I'm a theater, I love theater, this phenomenal theater experience in a classroom.

- He said, after the show, "I would like to present this show at Playhouse Square," and I said, "Raymond, it's impossible.

"You have no space to present it in."

- I said, "This'll be perfect "for the Playhouse Square Cabaret," and Joe said, "You don't have a cabaret."

(laughs) I said, "But we will."

- We left the theater at Cleveland State, walked down here to the theaters in Playhouse Square, Ray unlocked the State Theater and started frantically walking around, as anybody who knows Ray and when he's in his major thinking process.

- He recognized the potential of that unusual lobby of the State Theater.

- When we all met in the lobby of the theater, I realized that it was no longer a matter of should we do it, it was a matter of we will do it.

It was very clear.

(gentle piano music) - You get things done in the amount of time that you're allowed to do 'em and it was pretty clear that no one had a lot of time to think about this.

You had to make it happen.

- [Joseph Garry] Everyone just had this commitment to make this work.

- I started mopping floors and fixing the roof and taking out trash and scrubbing the restrooms.

- We built a stage.

- I had to build a kitchen.

- We got a caterer.

- Raymond gathered chandeliers, I borrowed cabling from Cleveland's stage.

- Playing a hallway was a bitch.

- Acoustically it was terrible.

- The sound really sucked.

- The side seats, quite frankly, were dreadful seats.

- We laid down $2.00 a yard, orange, Mohawk carpet (laughs) for acoustics.

- We were selling tickets for $7.75, which included the Brel performance, a buffet dinner, and a bottle of wine at the table.

- It was a nice bottle of wine and that lasted a week 'cause it totally killed the bar business.

(laughs) I know, like, what a idiot.

(laughs) - [Joseph Garry] There was a handyman who worked here at Playhouse Square, it never could have happened without him.

His name was Smitty.

- He was from the farm outside, someplace out in Missouri.

- And Smitty had a very sort of sheik bachelor pad upstairs where he had like 16 urinals in his bedroom.

- [Speaker] He was an electrician, I think.

I think he was a real electrician, he was pretending to be an electrician.

- Smitty was so exhausted getting the show ready that when I finally stood at the light booth with Bob Rodey for the show to begin, I realized that Smitty was sitting next to the stage and had fallen sound asleep and his head was sort of resting on the edge of the stage and he stayed there through the whole opening of the show, asleep.

(gentle piano music) - I think there were about 100 people there and the tables were all sort of spread out so it would look like we had more people than we did, and we were very surprised.

I mean, we had done the show before, but this time people went crazy and they hollered and threw napkins in the air and we all just thought, "Wow."

- [Narrator] "The Plain Dealer," April 23rd, 1973, "Cabaret Theater Off to a Good Start Here," by Peter Bellamy.

(typewriter clatters) The show is "Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris."

It is a musical with more intelligent, civilized comment on life, love, tragedy, and the sins and woes of this planet.

Located in the lobby of the old State Theater, the new Playhouse Square Cabaret has opened in a blaze of glory.

(gentle piano music) - In '73, people didn't come through the front doors of the theater, they came through a side door that's a fire exit today, and it was a fire exit then, off of East 17th Street.

They came into the back of the auditorium, paid for their tickets, walked upstairs under the mezzanine level of the lobby of the State Theater where they had cocktails, meanwhile, down here on the main floor, this was filled with tables and chairs, and at a certain point, they would come down, they would be seated, eat the meal, have a drink, waiters and waitresses would clear the tables, and then we'd be ready for the show.

- And we came down those stairs every night and did the show and people took us into their hearts.

(opera music with foreign lyrics) - I loved Jacque Brel.

I thought it was a great show, I must have seen it 15 times.

- I don't know, at least 20 times.

- I think 31 or two times.

- How many?

(laughs) Not did I ever go, how many?

Many times.

- And you went because you wanted to support it even though you'd seen the show so many times.

- I still talk to people who talk about Jacque Brel as though it was a religious experience.

- [Speaker] You felt a closeness to the performers and each of the four, Cliff Beamus and David Fraser and Terry Piteo and Prov Hollander understood that relationship with the audience so well.

- Just grabbed you and just carried you straight through and by the time it was over, you said, "Wait a minute, I don't want this to end."

- After the show, we'd always go down and have a drink and the waitress came over and said, "This man is sitting over there "and he wants to talk to you."

And I went over and I said, "Hi."

He said, "You know, I work in a steel mill, "I've never been in the theater.

"I didn't know anything about the theater "and I came tonight and I looked around "at all these people and I thought, "I'm feeling the same thing they are, I'm enjoying this."

- The idea that that live performance is gone forever, it's just a memory, that's powerful.

♪ Ava Marie, you'll live alone ♪ ♪ You'll love alone, the day is gone ♪ ♪ The day is gone ♪ ♪ The day is gone ♪ Well you feel pretty good.

How is it that the first show you actually produce becomes the longest running show in Cleveland history, what are the chances of that?

And if it didn't work, it wouldn't have worked.

- Had Jacque Brel not been successful, it would have been very, very difficult for us to create the longevity that would allow us, ultimately, to get to the renovation of the theaters themselves.

- That gave the opportunity for people to come together at Playhouse Square and not only dream about what Playhouse Square might be, but what the city of Cleveland could be again.

It was a powerful, powerful time in the city's history.

- I think all of us knew that something was gonna happen, something was comin', but I don't think any of us could dream that big.

Maybe Ray, maybe Ray Shepardson could dream that big.

But I think the rest of us were just along for the ride of our lives.

(gentle piano music) - [Kabir Bhatia] You can see more from the 2012 documentary, "Staging Success: The Playhouse Square Story," via the PBS app.

♪ Mara mara marathon ♪ ♪ Join us now on a marathon ♪ ♪ We're always (voices fade) ♪ Wish you were here.

On the next "Applause," National Postcard Week is coming and the Western Reserve Postcard Society is prepping for its annual show.

A few of its members share their love of history and postcards.

Plus, the golden age of shopping malls may be over, but for some, the nostalgia lives on.

And we celebrate the dawning of spring with a 20th century classic by a female, French composer.

(lighthearted orchestral music) All this and more on the next round of "Applause."

Flip the script, turn the tables, change tack, all good descriptors of visual artist, Ron Anderson, and his passion for always changing perspectives as a painter in Columbus.

(twinkling lighthearted music) - Whatever pops in my head, instead of me saying, "Oh, that can't be done," or, "No, someone's gonna have a problem with that," I tend to just do it because you're not gonna know until you get it out of your head.

That's the starting place is just making some marks.

You just move the paint around or you move the pen around or you move the pencil around until you find something in there.

It's kind of like looking at clouds, as they move across the sky, you start to see images in there.

My job as a storyteller is to take existing things and then somehow do a different twist on it, and twisting the story gives it a different perspective.

I have to see it in my mind's eye before I can actually physically put it on canvas or on paper, you know, what is this gonna be about?

I know the history, the story, how do I bring my own interpretation to that?

I've been working on this mostly drawings in my sketchbook, King Kong, you know, and playing with that image and what does King Kong look like to me.

I'll get an image in my head and I'll go ahead and do it, see what it looks like, if it feels like it can be fleshed out a little bit more, I'll do another one and another one, and maybe three or four so you get a sense of where this is going.

There's some paintings that paint themselves, there are other paintings that, you know, you think, okay, I had a great idea, but it doesn't look good visually.

It isn't so much about the subject matter, it's more about the composition, how things come together.

One day you'll start a painting and then the next day everything that you thought was just perfect is no longer perfect anymore.

It's key to step back from time to time.

I see a lot of artists will just take a seat, you know, and they're too close to the work.

That's why you see mirrors here, if you're looking at something for a long period of time, you miss all the mistakes.

But if you have a way to change the way you see, from time to time, by looking in the mirror, you see all the distortions that you aren't gonna see if I'm looking directly at it.

And sometimes it's better to just kind of step away from it, and don't even look at it for a while and paint more than one painting at a time.

Did an 18 foot painting, it's called "A Harlequin's Dream."

The painting appears as though it's a dream because the perspective is sort of wonky in places.

The whole idea was I wanted people to actually be part of the painting, to actually walk into that space, be a part of the event taking place as opposed to being a voyeur.

These aren't models, these are people I'm making up or things I'm making up on canvas.

I think it's very difficult to use a model and make them do the things that I want 'em to do.

So I love to play with things that don't make sense or seem a little dangerous.

I don't know if I really concretely start with a story.

But if you saw the drawing that that painting began with, it's completely changed.

The figure that's holding the magnifying glass, has always been there.

That's probably one of the few pieces in that painting that is from the original idea 'cause you think of the magnifying glass as one of those things where I really wanna see this close so I can understand what I'm looking at.

That's where the original concept came from, using the magnifying glass as a metaphor for, you know, not really believing until I could actually see.

By keeping an open mind, to developing the piece, by saying I don't want to make this about any particular thing, I want it to be open enough that the viewer will have always a possibility of seeing it differently every single time.

That's not your job to explain it.

Your job is basically make something interesting enough that people will ask the question what is this and what does it mean to them.

I have so many ideas in my head that I can't put 'em down fast enough.

And I tend to be one who feels like my work is important for me to just keep doing it until I can't do it anymore.

If I get an idea, I don't edit, I just see what it looks like and I may not like it, but at least I put it down.

So I get the joy out of just being able to come in here in my own space and create images that didn't exist before.

(dramatic upbeat music) - [Kabir Bhatia] In 2019, Kahrin Spear was the captain and starting point guard for John Carroll University's championship basketball team.

Following graduation, however, Spear was off her game, struggling with her sexuality, her faith and her future.

But thanks to the love of her parents and her acoustic guitar, she found healing through music.

The Chardon native joined us in 2021 for "Applause" performances.

(cheerful strumming music) ("Onward Then") ♪ Hello my soul, where have you been ♪ ♪ I'm stumbling down this road, soul searching ♪ ♪ Oh break my bones, man I miss my friends ♪ ♪ So lonely, I go onward then ♪ ♪ Onward then ♪ ♪ Onward then ♪ ♪ Onward then ♪ ♪ Onward then ♪ ♪ Onward then ♪ ♪ Onward then ♪ ♪ Oh no, here we go again ♪ ♪ Honey, take your sweet time traveling ♪ ♪ 'Cause you might find what it is that you're missing ♪ ♪ You won't know if you don't go onward then ♪ ♪ So onward then ♪ ♪ Onward then ♪ ♪ Onward then ♪ ♪ Onward then ♪ ♪ Onward then ♪ ♪ Onward then, hey ♪ (upbeat strumming music) To hear music from Kahrin's new album, which was a collaboration with her grandfather, check out Idea Stream's "Shuffle" podcast, your backstage pass to Northeast Ohio's independent music scene.

Visit online at arts.ideastream.org.

♪ I know you're scared, I know you're- ♪ With that said, it's time to shuffle on outta here.

Thanks for joining us.

I'm Idea Stream Public Media's Kabir Bhatia, reminding you to tune in for the next round of "Applause."

♪ You're scared, I know it hurts ♪ ♪ But my love just won't step forward ♪ ♪ It's not about being fearless ♪ ♪ 'Cause we're all- ♪ (upbeat cheerful music) - [Announcer] Production of "Applause" on Idea Stream Public Media is made possible by the John P. Murphy Foundation, the Kulas Foundation, and by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.