By Jackie Demaline
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Marat/Sade, a political stage classic from the 1960s, is the first joint production by the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music's drama and musical theater departments. It turns out to be a chance for the musical theater students to show off their acting chops as they take all but two of the principal roles.

The play embarks from historical anecdote. While the infamous Marquis de Sade (Jack Lazzaro) spent a decade imprisoned (for his scandalous writing as much as his sadistic behavior) in the Charenton Asylum, he whiled away some of his time by staging dramas, using the inmates as actors.

The subject of this theatrical is also historical fact, the assassination of the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat (Geoff Packard) by Charlotte Corday (Gina Restani). It's all jumping-off point for political debate couched in theatrics.

Marat/Sade is a perfect choice for university production - as long as there is injustice, hypocrisy, lust (physical and political) and atrocities committed in the name of "right," it will always be topical. Set in an early 19th-century asylum, it can be as edgy and in-your-face as you want it to be.

The design team establishes the mood - asylum as industrial house of horrors - but student director Jason Podplesky is still learning. He does a beautiful job of moving more than two dozen bodies around the small studio space, but this Marat/Sade is more sanitized than star-tling and Lazzaro is too corn-fed Midwestern to be believable as the arrogant and perverse de Sade.

Marat/Sade is filled with compelling turns - not at all limited to Restani's focused Corday, Doug Barton's pull-out-the-stops rapist, and Jon Catoe's attention-holding bureaucrat.

Packard's Marat has such conviction and passion, it's easy to forgive him for being too young to feel Marat's debilitating illnesses.

Marat/Sade, 2:30 and 8 p.m. today, CCM Studio Theater, University of Cincinnati, 556-4183.

E-mail jdemaline@enquirer.com