By Jackie Demaline
Enquirer staff writer

The year-round theater season here traditionally begins the week after Labor Day with several companies, including Playhouse in the Park, Ensemble Theatre and Cincinnati Shakespeare raising the curtain on the 2004-05 season.

Young students learn to write reviews

High school students from throughout the region who have a strong interest in writing, theater and critical thinking are invited to apply to participate in Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park's theater criticism workshop led by Enquirer theater critic Jackie Demaline. The free class meets at 4 p.m. one Monday per month starting in September and continuing through May at Playhouse. Students will see the entire main stage Playhouse season as well as productions at theaters throughout the city including Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival, College-Conservatory of Music, Know Theatre Tribe and more. Students are nominated by their English teachers. For more information and an application form, interested students, parents and teachers can call Playhouse director of education Bert Goldstein at 345-2242.

It's an ideal time to offer some applause to the best of the season just past and shine a spotlight on what some of these talented artists will be working on in 2004-2005:

Best news

And the 2004 Regional Theatre Tony Award goes to...Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park.

It doesn't get better than national recognition of excellence, with producing artistic director Ed Stern accepting the trophy on stage at Radio City Music Hall.

Playhouse's 45th season begins Tuesday with Shakespeare's romantic comedy, Twelfth Night.

Best season

Breathtaking, spellbinding, even astonishing - College-Conservatory of Music at University of Cincinnati had an extraordinary season of musicals, dramas and operas.

To mention just a few: Thomas de Mallet Burgess delivered a profound re-imagining of children's opera Hansel and Gretel; choreographer Diane Lala worked overtime on New York valentine On the Town; The Mystery of Edwin Drood, directed by Aubrey Berg, was Broadway-worthy; Holocaust drama Ghetto, directed by Richard Hess, continues to haunt me after many months.

The Musical Theatre class of 2004 wins my award for Most Valuable Players-Onstage. And the work that comes out of the Alternative Forms class led by directing program head Nick Mangano can be eye-opening.

Last season ended with an informal reading of work-in-progress, 14 Actors in Search of Thornton Wilder, which is a startling, every-citizen-should-see-this docu-drama about Cincinnati's racial issues. Cross your fingers that it goes public at next year's Fringe Festival.

The upcoming season is also chock-full of must-sees. Just a few of a dozen productions: Lerner & Loewe's musical fantasy in the Scottish highlands Brigadoon should be a dance dream; terrific director Mangano will helm Stephen Sondheim's too-rarely revived Merrily We Roll Along; opera department chair Sandra Bernhard will collaborate with Burgess on The Voyage of Edgar Allen Poe; and there's a full lineup of intriguing free studio shows starting in October with Elegies: A Song Cycle by William (Falsettoland) Finn.

Best debut

Cincinnati Fringe Festival. Huge congratulations to producer Jason Bruffy and everyone who lent a helping hand (or two) in creating a couple of vivid, lively and crazy weeks downtown last May.

The 12-day festival was made worthwhile by Time Outside My Body, a terrific multimedia piece by Tara Guilfoil and Natalie Bolan, which powerfully set the before, during and aftermath of a date rape to a pounding techno beat.

It's thrilling that Cincinnati can give birth to works like Body and the messy but riveting puppet drama You Don't Exist to Me.

The fringe promises to return in June. If you can't wait, check out what Bruffy is up to as newly named artistic director of Know Theatre Tribe and keep an eye on his new arts group, Cincinnati Experimental Arts (CineX Arts.)

Best restaging

Metamorphoses, "The One With the Pool," wasn't created for Playhouse in the Park. It won deserved Tony Awards for its Broadway production in 2002.

But any play that awakens audiences to the possibilities of live theater deserves a standing ovation. In this contemporary re-telling of Ovid's stories of gods and men, Metamorphoses celebrated the transformative power of art not just with dips in a pool but also with the most multicultural cast that's ever graced a Cincinnati stage.

Best local script

One by Joseph McDonough opened the Thompson Shelterhouse season at Playhouse last year. A trio of interwoven monologues about a Civil War soldier and the guy who plays him on TV, One is funny, sad and smart.

In my review a year ago I predicted that the show would have legs: It has been inked in for a production this season at a Florida theater.

Outstanding design

If there's one thing Cincinnati has, it's great-looking shows that add layers of understanding to script and performances. I loved the nouveau riche McMansion for Blue and the dive of a bar (you could almost smell the stale whisky) that was the setting for Hiding Behind Comets, both at Playhouse; the 1950s suburban fantasy of Cosi fan Tutte at CCM was a marvel; Brian Mehring continues to do inventive work for Ensemble; and the small theater companies have happily discovered multimedia.

But for quality and quantity, there was no beating set designer Paul Shortt in 2004-2005, who anchored three great design teams last season. Hansel and Gretel was a delirious fairy tale/nightmare, and the Victorian music hall setting of The Mystery of Edwin Drood was spot on, both at CCM; for Playhouse, Shortt grappled with a challenging stage configuration to put the audience on the deck of a WWII supply ship in Mister Roberts.

Shortt's to-do list for this coming season includes CCM's two main-stage operas, Ariodante and The Voyage of Edgar Allen Poe.

E-mail jdemaline@enquirer.com