Turns out Dave Allen, music teacher at Elder High School and music director at St. William Church, helped found Cincinnati Metropolitan Orchestra a few years back. It performs several times a year at the Seton High School Performance Hall.

        Anyway, one of its first big shows was a coral rendition of Les Miz, a little number that sold out heaven only knows how many weeks in advance. Apparently, word filtered back to Webber and he's been ever so welcoming since.

        So when Allen decided to do a “Best of Broadway” concert with orchestra, chorus and a ton of Webber, he enlisted D. Michael Heath, the Elder grad who went on to do Jean Valjean in Les Miz and Rusty in Starlight Express, as the centerpiece.

        An that's not all. There's also mini-cast — unsure how many yet — of Broadway-types hand-picked by Webber, including Kelly James, one of Les Miz's first Eponines.

        Webber didn't stop there. About a week ago, the usually unflappable Allen was “flapped” when he walked in to Seton to find a 4-foot square crate from Webber's London office. It was crammed with music for every instrument and every song in Webber's Music of the Night, a gesture pretty much unheard of among composers.

        Allen is as we speak up to his elbows sorting it all out.

        The show also has such Cincinnati favorites as Maribeth Samoya, Sean Kelley and Larry Rehring. It's Feb. 16 and 17 at Seton.

        Cincinnati's role: Everyone knows 9-11 books are all over the place right now, selling like crazy. What everyone doesn't know, says Richard Hunt, is that one of the biggest of them is coming out of Cincinnati. Sort of.

        New York September Eleven Two Thousand One (dm.MO, $35) is a coffee-table sized job full of photos — biiiig, color jobs — and essays from some big names memorializing and honoring victims and heroes.

        Cincinnati's F&W Publications is distributing it, Hunt says, on behalf of dm.MO, a tiny New York publishing house with only one book on its resume so far.

        Strange how it all happened, Hunt says. dm.Mo founders Giorgio Baravalle and Ambreen Qureshi were working on books due in 2003 when 9-11 happened. Determined to memorilize the event, they sped into action, getting rights to photos and lining up “names” to write about it: Richard Dreyfuss, Matthew Modine, Liam Neeson, Joan Rivers, Salman Rushdie, Noam Chomsky, Bill Moyers, more than two dozen in all.

        The book hit the shelves — and the New York Times best-seller list — in late December and continues today as a hot commodity.

        Oh yeah, Baravalle and Qureshi were determined from day one that it be a non-profit project, so all proceeds go to the Robin Hood Fund, the charity that sends profits to victims' families needing to pay bills.

       
       Contact Jim Knippenberg by phone: 768-8513; fax: 768-8330; e-mail: jknippenberg@enquirer.com.

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