Giles Davies and Jeremy Dubin burst onto the Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival stage almost five years ago in The Tempest, which was pretty awful in general, but had me sitting at attention and wondering "who are those guys?" They were fresh from the acting program at Ohio State.

A couple of months later, they were dazzling sold-out crowds in Waiting for Godot and it's been entirely too long since they've been scintillating on stage together.

So here's great news for Festival fans - and everyone in Cincinnati who's excited by passionate performance. Dubin and Davies will be together again at CSF, opening the season in Love's Labour's Lost and then returning for holiday annual Jacob Marley's Christmas Carol, with Davies taking over for the departed Nick Rose in the title role. Rose, a company founding member and former artistic director, will be exploring new theatrical frontiers, still to be determined.

For 2004-05 season information call the festival box office at 381-2273.

'Wonder of the World'

Know Theatre Tribe will stage David Lindsay-Abaire's Wonder of the World as its final play of the season in August.

The New York Times liked it plenty in its Manhattan run: "Exceedingly whimsical and playfully wicked. Winning and genial."

Lindsay-Abaire writes gleefully demented contemporary tragi-comedies. "Very know," opines executive director Jay Kalagayan.

Wonder is about a wife who finds a dirty little secret in her husband's sweater drawer - which sends her fleeing to Niagara Falls where she hopes to discover a different life - and maybe herself.

Christine DeFrancesco, who directs Kevin Barry world premiere A Note on the Type, opening Saturday, returns to helm Wonder.

For more information, call Know at 300-5669.

Staged reading

Playwright Pauline Smolin is fresh back from Taos, N.M., where she celebrated a Wurlitzer grant by writing a new play and having a public reading of it. Meanwhile, she has her fingers crossed for Numbers Man, which is a finalist in the National Art Club Playwriting Contest.

Smolin's The Immie Queen will have a staged reading at 7 p.m. Monday, a joint venture by Cincinnati Playwrights Initiative and Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati.

Smolin sees Queen as "following in the footsteps of Sophocles' Oedipus The King" as it considers a "pair of ordinary sisters (who) challenge their fate."

The reading will be directed by College-Conservatory of Music drama department chair Richard Hess at Ensemble (1127 Vine St., downtown) Tickets $6. For reservations and information, call ETC at 421-3555.

E-mail jdemaline@enquirer.com