Cincinnati doesn't just have a Shakespeare festival - next season Cincinnati is a Shakespeare festival.

With last week's announcement that Playhouse in the Park will be among 22 theaters nationally participating in the National Endowment for the Arts' Shakespeare in American Communities initiative in 2004-05, it seemed like a good time to add up exactly how much Shakespeare we can see locally next season.

Shakespeare is the Man on Cincinnati stages next year with nine productions of eight plays in the Tristate.

The first curtain to go up will be Playhouse on Sept. 7 with Twelfth Night; Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival follows Sept. 9 with Love's Labour's Lost and continues its season with Henry V, Troilus and Cressida and Much Ado About Nothing.

Northern Kentucky University and Clear Stage Cincinnati are both scheduling Romeo and Juliet, Ovation Theatre Company will produce Macbeth and Falcon Players will offer As You Like It at Monmouth Theatre in Newport.

The number is "almost scary," says Steve Finn, education director for Cincinnati Arts Association. The Clear Stage and Ovation productions will be housed in the Aronoff Center and be part of CAA's offerings to schools.

Many of the productions will be targeting school audiences - the Bard earns the parental and educational seal of "safe" and "good for you" which translates to "good for box office."

"That's the reality," sighs Finn. "Everything is so curriculum driven" - and content and standards driven, too. In the front of CAA's educational brochure for next year, Finn says, is a massive chart that outlines all standards that apply for every program.

Count on a wide range of quality. Depending on the theater, the stage will be populated with everything from high school students to hobbyists to professionals.

Finn is thrilled that Playhouse will tour a fully realized Twelfth Night to area high schools. Playhouse is known for getting theater into schools that don't have the ability to pay. "They can put it where it needs to go," says Finn.

CAA and Playhouse are educational outreach powerhouses, each reaching more than 80,000 students a year. There's the very real possibility that strapped-for-cash/time/energy teachers will choose a single "Shakesperience."

At Northern Kentucky University, Romeo & Juliet is primarily an acting experience for drama students, but there will be a study guide and NKU will be getting the word out to Kentucky high schools by summer.

NKU's Ken Jones says that Shakespeare at his best is popular for a lot of reasons. "There are so few stage directions, directors love to do it because you can put it anywhere and do anything with it. And he wrote to so many levels of society that he still hits all the demographics."

Ted Weil, artistic director of tiny Falcon, which occupies a no man's land between community and semi-professional theater, loves Shakespeare and says "any serious company needs to tackle it once in a while."

While Ovation artistic director Joe Stollenwerk is excited to be doing his first Shakespeare, he's definitely aware of school-age audiences. "We wanted to do a show with educational appeal, and this definitely fits that bill."

Finn is intrigued in particular by Clear Stage's plan to put high school students in the lead roles of Romeo and Juliet. ("I think kids will connect to that.")

Cincinnati Shakespeare artistic director Brian Isaac Phillips isn't concerned. "This is a great thing for us," he says. "If all these people are doing Shakespeare, it means Shakespeare is a playwright that wants to be seen - and the best place to see it is by people who do it all the time."

Shakespeare party: You can start celebrating all things Shakespearean tonight with Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival, will be partying hearty from 6 to 9 p.m. tonight at Sycamore Place at St. Xavier Park (634 Sycamore St., downtown) to mark CSF's 10th anniversary. Admission $20.

Jackie Demaline