Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival goes back into a seven nights a week schedule with an unlikely holiday entry, Harold Pinter's Betrayal.

        The festival's timing couldn't be better. Mr. Pinter's masterpiece, which moves backward through time to explore the end-to-the-beginning of a romantic triangle involving a wife, a husband and a best friend, is getting a star-studded New York revival.

        Festival director Jasson Minadakis delights in the play's “sorrows and regrets . . . rage and pain . . . love and longing.” He loves its silences and melancholy, its delicacy, how the characters “make lots of little decisions, commit lots of little betrayals to find momentary happiness rather than risking everything for true happiness.”

        He loves this play.

        “I think Pinter really feels that people go to great lengths to deceive themselves, and that those deceptions play into memory and eventually play into the way we define ourselves. Who we are is really more who we wished we were, or who we thought we were.”

        The festival production features company members Jeremy Dubin, Brian Isaac Phillips and Anne E. Schilling.

        Betrayal plays at 7 p.m. Sunday-Wednesday through Dec. 13. It shares the festival stage with The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (abridged) playing Thursdays through Sunday matinees through Dec. 17.

        Another unlikely holiday entertainment opens Thursday. New Edgecliff joins forces with Xavier University Players for Harry Kondoleon's Christmas on Mars.

        The offbeat comedy/drama is about a young couple, an impending birth, an estranged mother eager to reconcile and a godfather-in-waiting, all in a very small apartment.

        Jane Goetzman directs the production, which features Xavier students and guest artist Miriam Rosenberg.

        Christmas on Mars comes with a “parental discretion advised” caution. It plays at 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and 2 p.m. Dec. 3 at the Aronoff's Fifth Third Bank Theater. Tickets $12. Call 241-7469 for reservations.

        Homecoming: I bear no ill will toward Robert Patteri, the actor playing the title role in the touring Scarlet Pimpernel, coming to the Aronoff Center Jan. 16-28 as part of the Fifth Third Bank Broadway Series.

        But I wouldn't mind if he caught a 24-hour flu while he's here because Mr. Patteri's new understudy is Aaron Lazar, who dazzled audiences at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music last season as Don Quixote in The Man of La Mancha.

        Mr. Lazar graduated in the spring and headed straight for New York. Among his adventures were an independent film and participating in a pair of readings of long-ago hit musical Hallelujah, Baby! where he met legendary songwriting team Betty Comden and Adolph Green.

        They liked Mr. Lazar so much they snuck him into the final auditions for the Broadway revival of their Bells Are Ringing. He knew he was too young for the role, but “I got to read with Faith Prince!!” (Another CCM grad, by the way.)

        He will join the Pimpernel tour in San Diego, spend a white Christmas in Denver, and, after a chilly January tour of Ohio, head for Florida dates for the rest of winter.

        Mr. Lazar isn't the only recent CCM grad playing the Aronoff this winter. Look beyond the Fairy Godmother (Eartha Kitt) and Cinderella (Debbie-now-Deborah Gibson) when the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical fairy tale tours to Cincinnati Feb. 20-March 4, and CCM fans will recognize re cent grads in the chorus.

        Lyn Philistine and Jason Robinson were both standouts in Oklahoma! She was heroine Laury, he was the droll traveling salesman Ali Hakim.

        Showboat season: Showboat Majestic will be showcasing directors along with some unusual titles for its 2001 season. It begins April 18 with Showboat producer Tim Perrino starting things with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

        Of course you know Forum (playing until May 6), but what about the next show Good News, a jolly little collegiate musical. (Surely you remember the MGM version, with June Allyson and Peter Lawford leading the chorus in The Varsity Drag.)

        Good News will be directed by Ty Yadzinski, best known locally as a musical leading man. He starred for Showboat last summer in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and is currently a member of Actor's Rep in Middletown. It plays May 16-June 3.

        Next up is the lovely and bittersweet musical fable The Baker's Wife (June 13-July 1), about a middle-aged baker in a small French town who loses his young wife to a cad. The town sets about putting things to rights to get their wondrous bread back. Showboat vet Greg Dastillung directs.

        Isaac Turner, longtime staffer and performer for the Children's Theatre, will helm the rarely produced Shenandoah (July 18-Aug. 5), about a widowed father trying to protect his family from the Civil War.

        Carrie Ellen Zappa, another familiar performer for Showboat and Cincinnati Public Theatre, directs Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park (Aug. 8-26). Then, back by popular demand, is Forever Plaid (Sept. 12-30). The revue, which sends up the four-part harmony 1950s, debuted at Falcon Players and played last year in Showboat's winter dinner theater season. Dave Radtke directs again.

        The season closes with a different take on The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, told from the viewpoint of the investigating Scotland Yard inspector.

        Subscriptions ($66) are on sale now. 241-6550.

        Dog days: Snoopy has a special holiday gift for a Lebanon police dog. A percentage of ticket sales from Landen-Deerfield Theatre's You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown will go toward a canine bullet-proof vest. Show sponsor Iams will be matching the box office funds.

        The Peanuts musical plays 8 p.m. Friday, Saturday and Dec. 9, and 2 and 7 p.m. Dec. 3 at the Olde Shoe Factory in Lebanon. A food barrel will be stationed in the lobby for donations to Lebanon and Kings food pantries. (513) 933-0142.

        Day Without Art: The Performance and Time Arts series will commemorate A Day Without Art at next weekend's performances (Dec. 1 and 2). Two dollars of every $10 admission will be donated to AIDS Volunteers of Cincinnati (AVOC).

        Performers include Dan Britt and Chris Kramer presenting an original short play; James Crooks and Teddy Darling performing excerpts from their original rock opera; poet Richard Hague performing selections from his Bestiary series; and Columbus performance poet Nancy Kangas performing a revised version of her “Tour of Homes” which she premiered at Cincinnati Art Museum in April.

        PTA performs at College Hill Town Hall (1805 Larch Ave.) Information and reservations, call Contemporary Dance Theater at 591-1222.

        Jackie Demaline is The Enquirer's theater critic and roving arts reporter. Write her at Cincinnati Enquirer, 312 Elm St., Cincinnati OH 45202; fax, 768-8330.
       

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