Oscar Wilde’s 'An Ideal Husband' is the crowning pleasure of Cincinnati Shakespeare Company’s 2009-10 season. Everything works. What, it ponders, makes for an ideal marriage partner? Is he or she some bepedastaled paragon of relentless virtue? Or is the ideal spouse more human, more touchable, more capable of forgivable error?  

As you enter the Columbia Performance Center, you’re handed a program describing 'Reservoir Dogs: The Musical.' What? Actors swarm the stage, warming up, dancing, practicing swordplay, moving set pieces — all of it as boring as watching somebody paint a storm door. Then an actor announces that, instead of performing 'Reservoir Dogs,' the company will rehearse a new translation/adaptation of Rostand’s 1897 classic, 'Cyrano de Bergerac.' Through May 1.  

Putting it as simply as I can, Oscar Wilde's 'An Ideal Husband' is the crowning pleasure of Cincinnati Shakespeare Company's 2009-10 season. Everything works. The direction by Jeremy Dubin is tight, focused and spot on. Design elements are more sumptuous and elegant than any CSC has ever presented. Performances maintain the lilt, audacity and inner laughter of high comedy.   

Over several seasons, outgoing Artistic Director Greg Procaccino has elevated New Edgecliff Theater's reputation with sensitive, provocative productions like 'Glengarry Glen Ross' and 'Equus.' Now, in a curious farewell gesture, he's wasting audience enthusiasm and some estimable players in a misconceived muddle called 'Cyrano (Rehearsed).'  

Since Irwin Shaw's expressionistic, ritualistic play opened on Broadway in 1936, five more major wars have come along to prove its horrific accusation: Old generals march young men off to their slaughter while spouting jingoistic exhortations that civilians accept and industrialists turn into profit. Shaw's work is back, with accusations intact and ritual inflated, in a co-production between The Carnegie Center in Covington and UC's College-Conservatory of Music.  

Under Professor Sandra Forman's zesty direction, the student actors turn the first hour of this 2002 script by Theresa Rebeck and Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros into rattling good spit-and-spirit theater. It's just post-9/11, and seven glitterati (some lampooning real world celebs) gather over gourmet grub prepared by domestic diva Suzie, played by Katie Kershaw.  

Under Professor Sandra Forman's zesty direction, the student actors turn the first hour of this 2002 script by Theresa Rebeck and Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros into rattling good spit-and-spirit theater. It's just post-9/11, and seven glitterati (some lampooning real world celebs) gather over gourmet grub prepared by domestic diva Suzie, played by Katie Kershaw.   

Nearly a century has elapsed since Jean Webster's 1912 novel 'Daddy Long Legs' was published. Now her story of a talented, forthright foundling named Jerusha and her mysterious, reclusive mentor returns, this time onstage in an expressive, impressive world premiere musical at the Cincinnati Playhouse from playwright-director John Caird (who won a Tony for his Broadway work on 'Les Miserables') and composer-lyricist Paul Gordon (whose 'Emma' won audience approval at the Playhouse last season).  

Considering the talent and sensitivity of the people involved onstage and in the director's chair, Cincinnati Shakespeare Company's 'Othello' is a disappointment. Little is egregiously wrong. Nobody falls down. Nobody goes up in his or her lines. But it's all so pedestrian.  

When George Wolfe's 'The Colored Museum' was new, back in 1986, it drove some New York critics to spasms of praise for its liberating satire. Now onstage at Northern Kentucky University, there's considerably more sizzle than satire — or substance — to the show, which has been frazzle-dazzled into vaudeville that insists on upstaging itself.