CAMEO - Cooperative Alliance of Medina Entertainment Organizations

CAMEO, The Cooperative Alliance of Medina Entertainment Organizations, was founded in 2003 as The Medina Collaborative. The then Medina Collaborative consisted of the Medina City Schools, the Medina County Show Biz Company, and the Medina County Performing Arts Foundation. The three organizations pooled their resources with an objective of producing a large-scale community based musical in the newly constructed Medina Performing Arts Center. This new state-of-the-art facility was among the grandest and most spectacular in the state of Ohio, and the newly formed collaborative aimed to create a production worthy of this new venue.

The inaugural production would be the classic production My Fair Lady, selected because this was the first show to be produced in the original Medina High School auditorium. A local creative team produced a show that many considered to be quite a risk due to the amount of resources required. In spite of these challenges, My Fair Lady proved to be an unqualified success and got the ball rolling on the start of a new summer tradition in Medina.
The success continued with The Music Man (2004). This large show had a cast of 50 people and featured a production staff of local artisans. Many of the original company returned in 2005 to produce the hit Broadway show Annie. The blockbuster family musical exceeded everyone’s expectations and enabled the Collaborative to take their shows to a new level with the formation of CAMEO. CAMEO, replacing the Collaborative not just in name but in vision and in professionalism, aimed to take theatre in Medina to levels it had never previously reached. The first step in this process would be to hire a professional director to lead the fourth production, Roger’s and Hammerstein’s The King and I. After an extensive search, Ansley Valentine, theatre professor at the College of Wooster, was selected as the director and together with a professional creative team, created a musical that was heralded as the greatest achievement in Medina musical theatre to date.

Building on the success of the previous production, the CAMEO board of directors would hire veteran New York and Cleveland Playhouse director Bill Hoffman to direct 2007’s production of Oklahoma!, the largest and most successful production to date. Due to popular demand, Bill Hoffman will return for 2008’s production of Thoroughly Modern Millie, the most ambitious production attempted in Medina theatre.

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