They'll be singing wonderful stories onstage at Hot Summer Nights: about blues legend Billie Holiday and about a young woman trying to replace her sorrows with hopes and dreams. But the most significant musical in the series is a world premiere revue by Broadway songwriting team Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty.

        The revue, We Tell the Story, has favorite songs (from shows including Ragtime, Once on This Island and Seussical) and songs still to be heard. New York audiences have to wait until September to hear their latest, A Man of No Importance. Hot Summer Nights fans will hear selections from it first, plus a song from The Glorious Ones, a show that's still in development.

IF YOU GO

• What: Hot Summer Nights: Violet (opening Friday), Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill (opening Saturday) and We Tell the Story (opening next Sunday).   • When:8 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, 2:30 p.m. Sunday, continuing in repertory through Aug. 18.   • Where: Patricia Corbett Theater, College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati   • Tickets: $23. 556-4183.

        The revue, says Mr. Flaherty, became a passion almost as soon as Hot Summer Nights artistic director Richard Hess asked permission to create one.

        “I'd think about songs out of their original contexts, in new relationships with one another,” Mr. Flaherty confesses happily.

        When his ideas took on a dramatic shape, he called Mr. Hess back and asked if he could take the first pass at creating the revue. We Tell the Story draws from the first 19 years of the Ahrens-Flaherty songwriting partnership.

        What's resulted “is creating a new show when we hadn't intended to. The thing I like is it's not a retrospective,” Mr. Flaherty says firmly. Adds the 1982 CCM grad: “I'm too young for that.”

Blending musical styles

        We Tell the Story is attentive to themes Mr. Flaherty has seen emerging in their work: journeys, the idea of storytelling, parents and children. “Which is ironic, since neither of us have children.”

        The greatest challenge, Mr. Flaherty says, was musical because the team has used so many musical styles to tell stories — the Caribbean and world music rhythms of Once on This Island, the turn-of-the-last-century score of Ragtime, the pop sounds of Seussical.

        A Man of No Importance is set in Dublin in 1964. “Everyone is in love with the wrong person. It's about the nature of love and artistic spirit.” Musically it combines the lyricism of traditional Irish music and emerging British rock sounds (guitars and fiddling).

        The difficulty increating Story was in “finding a graceful way to blend the different ingredients.”

        Story is grabbing the attention of producers even before its debut. “It would be nice if it had a life,” says Mr. Flaherty.

Riots influence other picks

        About the other two musicals on the series, Mr. Hess says, “the single, greatest impact on my life and my work and my artistic output this year were the (2001) April riots in Cincinnati.

        “Choosing to present a Billie Holiday one-woman show, a show about 1964 and the beginning of meaningful integration in this country, and the healing it can provide as well as a revue bursting with stirring music from Ragtime, about the dawn of modern America and the challenges of being a melting pot are all a response, artistically, to the racial divide polarizing our city.”

        The largely unknown titles are a risk, Mr. Hess says, but “I want to challenge and entertain with the best material available that suits the talents of the students at CCM, as filtered through the world around us.”

        Lady Day may not be a well-known title, but it's about a legend who lived and sang the blues like no other.

        Set at the end of Holiday's career, it features many of her hits (including “God Bless the Child” and “Strange Fruit”) and won an Outer Critics Circle Award for its original off-Broadway run and has been produced around the world.

        Jasmin Walker, who graduated in the spring, returns to Hot Summer Nights for the third time to play Holiday.

        Violet won the Lucille Lortel Award in 1997 for best off-Broadway musical. Based on Doris Betts' short story “The Ugliest Pilgrim,” it is about a disfigured young woman's journey of self-discovery on a bus ride to a faith healer. Set in 1964, it's equally about the civil rights movement.

        Ashley Brown, who showed star power as Cunegonde last season in CCM's sublime revival of Candide, will take the title role.

        Neither Lady Day or Violet is new to the region, but Mr. Hess believes they are shows that “always have more to say.”

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