The forecast is sunny at Playhouse in the Park with classic and contemporary comedies and new musicals.

Marx Theatre

• Sept. 7-Oct. 8 - Twelfth Night. Shakespeare's glorious romantic contrivance in which Viola, dresses as a male page, falls in love with melancholy Count Orsino who loves the lady Olivia, who falls in love with Viola-in-disguise.

• Oct. 19-Nov. 19 - The Crucible. Arthur Miller uses the Salem Witch Trials to look at personal integrity, misguided authority and a population gripped by hysteria.

• Jan. 25-Feb. 25 - Bad Dates. Suffering Sex and the City withdrawal? Cincinati native Theresa Rebeck has her first Playhouse production with this one-woman show in which a restaurant manager and show conoisseur re-enters the dating world.

• March 15-April 15 - The Retreat from Moscow. Front-runner for this year's Tony Award for Best Play, William Nicholson's Broadway hit examines the end of a marriage.

• April 26-May 27 - Crowns. This musical look at black women and their church hats is adapted from the best-seller using oral histories and a gospel score and has been box office gold in its first national productions.

Thompson Shelterhouse

• Sept. 25-Oct. 24 - A Picasso. Jeffrey Hatcher (Scotland Road, Turn of the Screw) returns with a new, critically acclaimed drama set in 1941 Paris, where, during the Nazi occupation, the Gestapo demands the artist authenticate three paintings.

• Nov. 6-Dec. 31 - Plaid Tidings. The harmonizing (if ghostly) quartet from Forever Plaid return with the coolest of Yule revues.

• Feb. 12-March 13 - World premiere, to be announced.

• April 2-May 1 - The Underpants. Steve Martin, that wild and crazy guy, adapts a classic German comedy about a housewife who becomes an instant celebrity when her pantaloons fall down in a very public place.

• May 14-June 12 - The Last Five Years. Jason Robert Brown's bittersweet musical looks at both sides of a relationship that falls in love and falls apart.

Jackie Demaline