Sunday, September 05, 1999
Critic's choices, week by week
Audience can enjoy variety of theater
BY JACKIE DEMALINE
The Cincinnati Enquirer
I set out to pick a theater production to recommend for each of the 17 weeks of the fall season (now through the end of the year). I discovered I couldn't do it — keep it down to 17, that is. And that's amazing.
We're looking ahead to what is shaping up to be the strongest season yet by an ever-strengthening theater scene. You'll find heart-wrenching drama, plenty of spectacle, bold choices, fresh viewpoints.
Along with a script and the actors to perform it, live theater needs a live audience. It's easy to recommend this season in particular as a good time to check it out.
Here are 20 choices for the next 17 weeks. I hope to see you there.
WEEK 1: Side Man (Sept. 8-26). This year's Tony Award-winning Best Play gets its first regional production at Ensemble Theatre. ETC vets Gary Sandy, Dale Hodges, Sherman Fracher, Greg Procaccino and Mark Mocahbee are among the ensemble in Warren Leight's biographical drama about a jazz man who's a better musician than he is a husband or father.
WEEK 2: Ragtime (Sept. 8-26). The musical adaptation of E.L. Doctorow's epic tale of turn-of-the-century America follows a comfortable, upper-middle-class white family, Jewish immigrants and an ambitious African-American whose stories weave through each other's and American history. It stars the best Broadway score in a decade.
*For something completely different, Cincinnati's two play-reading series open this week: Cincinnati Playwrights Initiative starts Sept. 14 with Scott Levy's comedy Cerebral Vaudeville at the Aronoff's Fifth Third Bank Theater; Theatre of the Mind debuts its Women's Writes series at the Mercantile Library on Sept. 13 with the local premiere of Wendy Wasserstein's An American Daughter.
WEEK 3: Much Ado About Nothing (Sept.9-Oct.8). Playhouse in the Park opens its season with Shakespearian romance wherein several sets of lovers, including squabbling Beatrice and Benedick, have a lot of growing up to do on the way to happily ever after.
WEEK 4: The Geometry of Miracles, Wexner Center, Columbus. (Oct.1). As part of its extraordinary 10th anniversary season, the Wex ner will feature the Ohio premiere of astounding Canadian theatre artist Robert LePage. Expect a multimedia spectacle that uses the life of architect Frank Lloyd Wright as a departure point for Big Thoughts including the quest for the divine and striving for perfection.
*If you can't bring yourself to commit to a drive to Columbus (but you won't be sorry if you do) consider a side trip to the Xavier University campus for Girders & Catwalks (Sept.30-Oct.2).
It's a festival of original local work featuring some of our most original local artists including director Gyllian Raby, choreographer Linda Reif, actress/director Naomi Bailis, Cincinnati Public Theatre artistic director Don Wong and more.
WEEK 5: The Tempest (Sept. 16-Oct. 10). Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival opens its season with the magical tale of banished Prospero, who brings his enemies to his enchanted island not to wreak revenge but to bring closure.
WEEK 6: Barrymore (Sept.25-Oct.24). The always superb Philip Pleasants (Someone to Watch Over Me, The Woman in Black) returns to Playhouse in the Park in a one-man show about stage and screen legend John Barrymore.
WEEK 7: The Glass Menagerie (Oct.19-Nov.19). Tennessee Williams' masterwork about memory — the only thing you can't outrun — directed by Playhouse associate artistic director Charles Towers (Nixon's Nixon, Valley Song, How I Learned to Drive). That's good enough for me.
WEEK 8: The Grapes of Wrath (Oct.28-31). How do you follow Angels in America, the most talked-about production of the 1998-99 season?
University of Cincinnati's College-Conservatory of Music's drama department is aiming high again, at Steppenwolf's legendary production of The Grapes of Wrath.
The 30-plus member cast is CCM's largest ever. It will feature every drama student, sophomores through seniors.
WEEK 9: Waiting for Godot (Nov.4-21). The name may be Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival, but this year the troupe is exploring material back to the ancient Greeks and forward to the 20th century and Samuel Beckett, a gutsy bit of time travel.
WEEK 10: Titanic (Nov.9-21). Why would anybody tempt fate advertising a passenger liner as “unsinkable?” Why not “fabulous service” or “12-course meals?” Ah, hindsight.
The musical about a ship and an iceberg officially opens the 1999-2000 Fifth Third Bank Broadway Series season.
The fancy hydraulics that tilt the ship's decks is reportedly staying at home in New York, but the superb 20-minute opening sequence that takes the doomed passengers and crew aboard the liner is intact.
*Keep in mind: Dayton has a Broadway touring series, too, and Blackbirds of Broadway (Nov.9-21) sounds good on paper: funky swing, brown sugar blues, gospel and Le Jazz hot from the 1920s to 1940s. All set to Langston Hughes poems.
WEEK 11: The Secret Garden (Nov.18-21). The children's classic, about a Victorian era orphaned girl who brings a family's emotions back to life as she tends an abandoned garden, is a must for mothers and daughters.
*Don't overlook The Chairs (Nov. 11-20). If there's one thing we don't see around here, it's the absurdist work of Eugene Ionesco. It features an Old Man, an Old Woman, his message for humanity and a stage full of empty chairs. Degree of difficulty: 10. Stage First Cincinnati gets points for gumption.
WEEK 12: Sanders Family Christmas (Nov.6-Dec.23). The subtitle says it all: More Smoke on the Mountain. Hear the jolly jing-a-ling of the Playhouse box office. This is the hottest-selling ticket in the season because audiences remember the love affair they had with the original Smoke on the Mountain a few years back. This time, it's Christmas, just after Pearl Harbor and we're again the congregation, back in the Mount Pleasant Baptist Church.
WEEK 13: A Christmas Carol (Dec.2-30). Some things are traditions for a reason. It wouldn't be the holidays without the Playhouse's wonderful rendition of Charles Dickens' classic ghost story of hope and redemption.
The computerized set keeps things moving like a thrill ride, Joneal Joplin makes a grand Ebenezer Scrooge, and there's nothing more heart-warming than seeing the Marx Theatre stage packed with local performers.
God bless them, every one.
WEEK 14: Six Women with Brain Death (or Expiring Minds Want to Know), Cincinnati Public Theatre. If kiddie fare and holiday cheer are making you mutter “bah, humbug,” Cincinnati Public offers this smarty-pants musical revue as really alternative programming.
WEEK 15: The Comedy of Errors (Nov.26-Dec.19). Long-lost twin brothers (who share a name) and their twin servants (who also have the same name) wreak comic havoc in ancient Greece.
It's the kind of rambunctious comedy at which Cincinnati Shakespeare can excel.
WEEK 16: Around the World in 80 Days (Dec.8-Jan.2). The most charming holiday entry of 1997 was Ensemble Theatre's The Frog Princess, a Russian fable endearingly adapted into a musical fractured fairy tale by locals David Kisor and Joe McDonough.
They're at it again this year, with their take on the Jules Verne globe-trotting adventure. Hope that theatrical magic strikes twice.
WEEK 17: Peter Pan (Dec. 28-Jan. 9). Olympic gymnast Cathy Rigby has been playing the lost boy with the fairy sidekick for years, and she's darned good, especially at flying.
It's the Broadway Series' terrific holiday treat.
Cincinnati's stage struck
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