Got suggestions for Jersey Production’s 2008 season? Send up to three suggestions by tomorrow, Monday Oct. 1 to artistic director Larry Smiglewski at Larry@jerseyproductions.org. If one of your titles is chosen, your name goes into a raffle and the winner gets a subscription.

Make sure you pick musicals – past shows includes “Grease,” “Godspell,” “High School Musical,” “The Fantasticks,” “Annie” and upcoming is “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” to give you a sense of the way Jersey leans. “Cabaret” and “Ragtime” were departures from strict family fare.

Winner will be drawn on Dec. 14, opening night of “Joseph…” Given Jersey’s most recent choices, the size of the stage and budget considerations, you might want to think about shows like “The Boyfriend.” Or not.

Jackie Demaline

posted by CinStages Buzz  # PermaLink 9:45 AM 0 Comments

That’s a ton of sand on stage at the Aronoff’s Fifth Third Bank Theater, where Performance Gallery is telling the story of “Gilgamesh in Uruk: G.I. in Iraq” through next week. “We lugged it in 50 pound bags (40 of them) from Lowe's,” reports director Regina Pugh. Opening nighters noted that stagehands spent a lot of time sweeping during intermission.

David Lyman’s Enquirer review promises you’ll find the two and a half hour show “a work in progress” Catch the show Sunday and there may be room at the 4:30 p.m. forum “The Legacy of Story.”

Jackie Demaline

posted by CinStages Buzz  # PermaLink 1:23 PM 0 Comments

Yup, “Ace,” last season’s Playhouse hit by Cincinnati native Richard Oberacker and Rob Taylor, is revving its engines – but it hasn’t left the gate and it’s a long runway.

The musical charmer about a fatherless boy in the Fifties who meets his flying ace dad in his dreams won the heart of a first-time Broadway producer, who has started phone calls to potential investors and is said to be planning visits to St. Louis (where the show is set, and where St. Louis Rep partnered with Playhouse on the world premiere) then Cincinnati by mid-October.

“Really?” said Playhouse’s Ed Stern. “I didn’t know he was coming to town.” Stern was also surprised by the $7 million figure being reported by potential investors who’ve already been approached.

Reports have also come in that the BroadwayAcrossAmerica folks (the company that brings national tours to the Aronoff) are considering becoming producing partners. (As we all know from the Cincinnati run, this is a musical that will play in the Heartland.) But not until it hits the road with some Broadway cred, Stern points out.

The musical’s original director, Stafford Arima, who’s in town reprising his Off-Broadway hit “Altar Boyz” for Playhouse is no longer connected. Eric Schaeffer of Signature Theatre outside Washington, D.C., who first worked with Oberacker on “The Gospel According to Fishman,” is set to direct, if the $$$ lines up.

Jackie Demaline

posted by CinStages Buzz  # PermaLink 2:28 PM 0 Comments

Terry LaBolt, who'll be music director and entertainment coordinator for the 2008 Acclaim Awards on Monday, May 18, reports a growing cabaret crowd for his weekly Sunday night gig at Below Zero (1120 Walnut in Over-the-Rhine.)

You might want to circle Oct. 21 when guest is Broadway veteran Jessica Hendy, back home thanks to her husband's job transfer. (Good news for local musical theater.)

Which is no reason not to stop by for this Sunday's open mic.
LaBolt also weighs in on what just drives him nuts at the theater. "My pet peeve is at the end of a musical or play when the house lights come up too soon and too fast (before the applause has dwindled.) It seems like message from management saying, “Show’s over, now get out.” Very jarring if you have been transported at all by the piece to be thrown back into the gutter of reality too quickly.

"Backstage story: Where to begin? I would have to start with Fred the tuba player in Tulsa in 1983 or so (when we still actually had a tuba in the orchestra).

"It seems that Fred was a little hard of hearing, as we used to say. When he stood to fix his tuba at one point in "Hello, Dolly!" (with Miss Channing of course) he knocked his metal chair down a flight of steps and into a large metal fire door (during the quiet "Efram" monologue just before “Before the Parade Passes By”).

"Only problem: Fred didn’t seem to hear his chair fall, so as he went to sit back down his chair was no longer there. The drummer and I whispered loudly to Fred, “Fred! Don’t sit down!”

"Fred’s last words were, “Huh?” So down the staircase went Fred, his tuba, and 3 metal pipes which secured the runway leading over the pit, all crashing into the metal door. “Before the Parade Passes By” has the entire cast come marching around the runway full force.

"So I get on the phone and get my crew guys down there to repair the ramp, all of this happening during Carol’s monologue; she is inches from me on the center of the runway…(”an oak leaf fell out of my Bible....”)

"The crew gets out large hammers and are about to pound the bolts back into place on the metal pipes (“....so I have decided to re-join the human race.....”) when I realize this will create a terrible racket just as the soft verse leading into “Parade” begins.

"So I get their attention and have the crew follow me as I conduct, pounding the pipes in time to the music. Brings new meaning to “anvil chorus.” The ramp was back in place just an instant before yjr first actress, dressed as Brunhilda with the horns and trident, stepped onto the runway."

Ah. A life in showbiz.
Jackie Demaline

Jackie Demaline
Theater Critic
Cincinnati Enquirer
513-768-8530
jdemaline@enquirer.com
Visit CinStages.com for Everything. Theater. Cincinnati.

posted by CinStages Buzz  # PermaLink 5:27 PM 1 Comments

A singular opportunity to hear August Wilson’s monumental “Century Cycle” begins tomorrow with readings in chronological order of the playwright’s truly epic dramatization of the African American experience in the 20^th century.

Each decade of the century has a play, almost all of them are set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, where Wilson grew up. Nine plays plus an excerpt will be read through Oct. 6.

The readings of Wilson’s cycle comprise the first Cincinnati New Light Festival, the brainchild of actress Taylore Mahogany Scott, a woman with a dream.

Local audiences discovered Scott, who just turned 30, a few years back as a member of Cincinnati Shakespeare’s Young Company and she’s never severed ties although she hasn’t been an onstage regular. Scott is currently set to take the title role in the regional premiere of “Caroline, or Change” for New Stage Collective.

Scott who’s been working out of her native Texas for the last several months, says she’d still be here – “It’s a comfortable city, it has a Southern quality that I adore, I love the people” -- “but I couldn’t find a job here. If I could have found jobs, I probably would have stayed.”

The readings are free at The Greenwich (2442 Gilbert Ave.) starting with “The Gem of the Ocean,” which is set in the first decade of the 20^th century, with characters who lived through slavery.

Scott happily accepts donations; she’s had a hard time with securing funding. Raising $$$ is difficult enough when you live here. It’s been almost impossible trying to raise money long distance, or cast, rehearse or hold unpaid casts together.

Yeah, says Scott, but Cincinnati needs what she’s trying to do – create opportunities for a diverse acting pool with quality work.

Scott has rounded up some of the best talent in the local African-American theater scene to join the readings, including DeOndre Means, Ken Early, Burgess Byrd, Curtis Shepard and more, and the always excellent Scott will come on stage for half of the readings.

Means was at the center of an excerpt of “Fences” at Play Around earlier this month, and he knocked it out of the park, with strong support from Shepard and Byrd.

All three are in “Gem.” While the engrossing “Gem” is the first in chronology, it was one of the last of the cycle written by Wilson before his death. As the plays became less natural and more magical, the mysteries of the neighborhood’s ancient “Aunt Esther” became more and more a mystery to be solved as the plays premiered one by one.

I’m a bit sad that Aunt Esther’s story will be laid out in the very first reading, but that just means we all have to get there. Yes, there’s already too much to do, but August Wilson is a national treasure, and this is a rare opportunity.

The final reading will be an excerpt of “Radio Golf,” which has its regional premiere in spring at Ensemble Theatre. And will be followed by a forum with Cincinnati City Council candidates, moderated by Scott. The topic will be “Strategies for Cincinnati Neighborhood Revitalization” which couldn’t be closer to these Hill District dramas.

Jackie Demaline   

posted by CinStages Buzz  # PermaLink 3:20 PM 0 Comments

The League of Cincinnati Theatres holds its annual Curtain Up “open house” during lunch hour today (through 2 p.m.) on Fountain Square, with more than 20 local theater displaying their wares, handing out season brochures and pressing the flesh and theater chatting-up potential audiences.

It’s more theater on Thursday, when BroadwayAcrossAmerica celebrates 20 years of touring (in various guises) to Cincinnati with lunchtime performances. Cast members of “My Fair Lady” will perform, and a little birdie tells me that Eliza Doolittle will be among them.

The school choirs of School for Creative and Performing Arts and West Clermont Institute of Performing Arts will also be center stage.

Jackie Demaline

posted by CinStages Buzz  # PermaLink 1:08 PM 0 Comments

Automatic standing Os – how could I not have gone off on that one? Here’s my all-time favorite. Another zillion years ago (see Burt Reynolds in Saturday’s blog), the theater now known as Great Lakes Theatre Festival in Cleveland was taking on two-parter “Nicholas Nickleby” – directed by Ed Stern, pre-Playhouse, how’s that for six degrees?

Anyway, after the dinner break on a nippy Cleveland day, the doyenne of all things social at morning daily The Plain Dealer stood to take off her coat. (She was seated in front of me, I was a witness.) The audience thought she was giving the show-to-come a standing O and within seconds there was a rolling standing O in the theater.

The crazy-good thing was it really got the crowd into the show from the very first moment.

Comments so far are great reading – keep ‘em coming!

Jackie Demaline

posted by CinStages Buzz  # PermaLink 8:49 AM 0 Comments

Is there something that drives you crazy when you go to the theater?

Reader Richard Young is annoyed when audience members laugh inappropriately at big dramatic moments. “I’m involved with the plot, suspending disbelief, and someone cackles at something not even remotely funny. Then everyone thinks they have to laugh.”

Young asked for an opinion from Playhouse chief Ed Stern who said the actors love the laughter in dramas because they interpret it as making someone feel uncomfortable with the material, the result being that nervous laugh.

I’m sure the actors are right – they’ve made the audience members uncomfortable, and yes, Young is right, too, that can pull you right out of the moment. At least you know it’s live theater.

I remember a zillion years ago when actor Burt Reynolds had just posed nude in a women’s magazine – Cosmopolitan? -- and was appearing in summer stock. The ladies’ catcalls were pretty outrageous in what I recall was a decent production of “The Rainmaker.”

When the gals didn’t quiet down for one of co-star Lois Nettleton’s big scenes, Reynolds stopped the show, came to the front of the stage and scolded them. It was a great moment.

And sometimes no reaction is just as bad as inappropriate reaction. I few years ago, when Playhouse was producing “Gypsy,” cast members were taken aback at the lack of reaction from the audience. (The subject came up, emphatically, at an after-party.)

When it’s live theater, the performers gotta feel the love.

The first time I saw “The Producers,” in it’s pre-Broadway Chicago run, the buzz in the audience for the 15 minutes leading up to curtain reminded me why Chicago is known as a theater town. The anticipation caught up the entire crowd. In Chicago, theater is an event.

The communion between artists and audience was just magical at that matinee.

Before we go back to pet peeves – do you have any favorite personal experiences at the theater, the good, the bad, the ugly?  If you’ve told it at a dinner party – tell it here!

Okay, here’s my pet peeve: I want to join the cell phone police.

It’s bad enough when a cell phone rings, but I have been in theaters when the audience member takes the call. Beyond belief. I am all for confiscation.

Jackie Demaline

posted by CinStages Buzz  # PermaLink 1:27 PM 4 Comments

Covedale Center for the Arts’ landmark beacon tower came down this morning for restoration. Exec director Tim Perrino figures the job will take a month, and “depending on the condition, we’ll either refurbish or create a duplicate.

“The interior framing is steel but it’s a bit rusted from its 60 years atop the building. The skin is copper and has a nicely developed patina in shades of blue/green/gray.”

Board prez Doug Ridenour leads the project and Perrino gleefully reports that the replacement beacon could have a wattage that would be bright enough for a helipad. “We’ll paint on the roof, “Don’t land on me!” Perrino promises.

Jackie Demaline

posted by CinStages Buzz  # PermaLink 12:59 PM 0 Comments

Satori Group, a birthing ensemble-based theater with 11 co-artistic directors, postpones its planned departure to Seattle with two area premieres to add to the chock-full fall season: Daniel MacIvor’s dangerous contempo social satire “Never Swim Alone” and Charles Mee’s “The Investigation of the Murder in El Salvador,” both at the Carnegie in Covington.

Satori, an honest-to-goodness experimental theater in the making, added some pepper to the theater scene in August with a site specific production of “Hello Again.”

Now the company – two CCM students, three CCM alumni and six Williams College alumni, including Cincy native Andrew Lazarow – will be here at least through November. (Other locals include CCMers Adrienne Clark, Acclaim Award Rising Star Anthony Darnell, Adam Standley, Clare Strasser and Lindsey Valitchka.)

First up: “Never Swim Alone,” Oct. 19-Nov. 4, already the busiest weeks of the theater season. (“Swim” makes it six opening for the week of Oct. 15.)

I read it a few months back courtesy of Lazarow.  Two guys who look very alike come on stage, each with a briefcase. What makes them different: one is the first man. And one of them has a gun. Very smart and theatrical, “Never Swim Alone” debuted at the New York International Fringe Festival and won the Overall Excellence Award.

Lazarow will direct, inspired by the structure of NBC reality hit “The Biggest Loser.”  OK, high concept. (I hope there’s a big scale.)

Satori goes site specific in November, taking “Investigation” into the Carnegie main gallery Nov. 8-17, where the drama will be sharing the space with the Glass Group Show. (Now that’s dangerous.)

According to the NY Times, “Investigation” is “T.S. Eliot crossbred with Wallace Shawn….In language and attitude Mr. Mee has captured the death-in-life decadence of his characters.” Lazarow promises the play “draws dynamically from contemporary art, musica, video pop cvulture and foreign policy.” Whee!

It makes you hope they stick around for a while. Ticket info is at Carnegie box office: 859-957-1940.

Lazarow, meantime, is, with the help of Standley, directing “Drag,” an entry in playwright Suzan-Lori Parks’ “365 Days/365 Plays” experiment, by E-MAIL.

Directors from all over the U.S. were contacted and invited to direct the short play, says Lazarow, “to see if a short play could be directed with the directors never appearing in the rehearsal room.” The purpose is to offer the audience a sample of viewpoints from around the U.S.

“Drag” plays Saturday at the Brick Theater in Brooklyn.

Jackie Demaline

posted by CinStages Buzz  # PermaLink 3:50 PM 0 Comments

Sherry McCamley, who is as good at cabaret as she is at acting and teaching theater is making her first solo appearance for the first time in a long time. So if you’re not doing anything Sunday night at nine…consider stopping in at Below Zero (1120 Walnut St.)

McCamley is stepping in for Spring Starr Pillow, who’s in her third trimester, is feeling a little under the weather, and, like host Terry LaBolt says, “she wants to play it safe and who can blame her?”

Jackie Demaline

posted by CinStages Buzz  # PermaLink 5:25 PM 0 Comments

Local actresses Jen Spillane and Embrya DeShango have been commuting to Columbus these past weeks for rehearsals of Available Light (theatre)'s production of the Obie Award-winning play The Thugs by Adam Bock.

“We are at rehearsal last week, taking a break when we discovered several of our cars had been broken into,” DeShango reports. “It was really depressing and sad until...the news showed up! Then it got silly in the way only crazy theater people can make it.”

DeShango sent along the YouTube link to the Columbus TV news coverage, which features an actor who gave chase to the miscreant:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aD27ePo-WRk

“We open this Thursday (Sept. 20), so hopefully it'll sell some tickets. Make lemonade out of lemons, I say.”

Jackie Demaline
 

posted by CinStages Buzz  # PermaLink 9:46 AM 0 Comments

Queen City Off-Broadway’s killer cast for August Wilson’s “Jitney”  – Tony Davis, Reggie Willis, Daryl Hinton and more, set to open in New Stage Collective’s space in mid-October, is now on ice.

New Stage artistic director Alan Patrick Kenny “felt the turn-around time from the end of “Jitney” into (New Stage’s) “Caroline, or Change” would be too short and created too many logistical problems,” reports Queen City AD Lyle Benjamin.

Benjamin plans to move the production, about a gypsy cab company in 1970s Pittsburgh, to early 2008 at the Deaf Club of Greater Cincinnati (3938 Spring Grove. Ave., Northside) and “hope the cast holds together.” 

“Jitney,” is the first of two Wilson shows being produced as a Queen City collaboration with Cincinnati Black Theatre Company. Benjamin will also move “Gem of the Ocean” out of New Stage, fearing the same problems with “Take Me Out.”

Queen City opens its season in October with the regional premiere of “The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow” at Deaf Club.

Jackie Demaline

posted by CinStages Buzz  # PermaLink 1:08 PM 0 Comments

Michael Shooner, so compelling in the regional preem of “Frozen” (tonight and next weekend at Xavier U., details on the show’s production page at CinStages) has plenty of psychological pain as a pedophile/serial killer – and that is just the half of it.

Shooner has a torn rotator cuff – “shredded, actually” he chortled. (He really did chortle.) Shooner then demonstrated how far he could use his arm, and noted that director Cathy Springfield had to re-block the show so he could gesture with the arm that still works.

Of course Shooner sustained the injury while he was working at staying in shape.

Surgery comes when the curtain comes down, giving the actor plenty of time to get in shape for “Glengarry Glen Ross” at his home base, New Edgecliff.

Jackie Demaline

posted by CinStages Buzz  # PermaLink 11:39 AM 0 Comments

Performance & Time Arts seeks artists for the 2007-2008 season. Especially Oct. 12-13.

If you’re a local or regional dance, performance, music or poetry artist or perambulations thereof, and you have an original idea for a performance between 10and 20 minutes, Performance & Time Arts wants to hear from you. Sooner than later.

Just go to Contemporary Dance Theatre at CinStages and find the PTA page.

Performance evenings are presented at Contemporary Dance Theater headquarters at College Hill Town Hall. Dates are Oct. 12-13, Jan. 11-12, March 7-8 and May 2-3 and artists receive a portion of the evening’s proceeds.

Jackie Demaline

posted by CinStages Buzz  # PermaLink 4:44 PM 0 Comments

What did you see and what did you think? Anybody catch the Stratford Festival revival of soon-to-be-Playhouse area preem “The Blonde, the Brunette and