• Tim Tavcar

A successful three-week run of The All Night Strut ended at Montpelier’s Lost Nation Theater last Sunday. On Monday, director Tim Tavcar, a mainstay of Vermont’s music and theater scene for 14 years, left the Green Mountains for greener artistic pastures in his native Cleveland. He starts rehearsal next week, “probably grimy from the move,” he quips, as Colonel Pickering in My Fair Lady. The professional theater is just blocks from his apartment. It rents for a sum that in Vermont might score an unheated woodshed in Buels Gore.

Blame it on Facebook, Tavcar jokes. In April, he posted that he was hometown-bound to visit family. “I got all these hits from people I hadn’t seen in 20 to 30 years,” he recalls. “We had a wonderful reunion. I was immediately plunged into the Cleveland theatrical scene.”

Several old performing colleagues now hold leadership positions in the city’s artistic and academic communities. WordStage, Tavcar’s innovative fusion of chamber music and literature, may soon find a new home at a local college. He’s already been commissioned to reshape a WordStage piece on Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya for Cain Park’s 2011 summer arts festival.

Although the move caught many in Vermont off guard, Tavcar has contemplated relocating for a while. “It was a hard decision, because I’ve had a wonderful time here and worked with wonderful people,” he reflects. However, “I felt like I had sort of reached a plateau. I wanted to make a leap into a bigger pool again.”

Tavcar already plans to return to Vermont for occasional gigs. In December, he may appear in LNT’s It’s a Wonderful Life. “Because, as they say, nobody does evil like I do,” he notes with a laugh. Next summer, he’ll probably direct another show at his LNT stomping grounds.

“I’ve been telling people, ‘It’s not adieu, it’s au revoir,’” Tavcar says.