Choreographer-director Diana Ford blends song, dance, poetry, videotape, projected images and music in a 90-minute collage of sound and movement that examines problems in contemporary society. Five dancers and a poet participate live.  

Writer-performer Jim Loucks adapted recollections of his Southern Christian childhood into a multi-character, 75-minute drama requiring one actor and one bench. Jim, the 10-year-old storyteller, is as much fiction as biography.  

Writer-director Brad Cupples says he and Ornamental Messiah Productions use comedy to "wake people up" about Creationism, which he calls "an abomination to common sense."  

Kurosawa's classic film 'Seven Samurai' is three hours of banditry, heroics and slaughter. David Gaines, who clowns with Big Apple Circus, gets the tale told and the slaughtering done in an hour — using two masks and one costume while playing 40-plus samurai, peasants and bandits and infusing generous amounts of Merrie Melodies comedy.  

The 60-minute show was group-written by several Miami University students, then nailed down into a performance script that "explores our humanity through secrets," says director-coordinator Lindsey Barlag. Five women and two men will do the revealing and exploring.   

It's back ... that musical with the mouthful name that kicked up so much excitement last summer at the 2008 Cincinnati Fringe Festival. Ensemble Theater of Cincinnati bills Richard Oberacker's and Robert Taylor's no-plot, no-dialogue, five-person fantasia on parenting production as a premiere, and considering the changes that's close to true.  

So it's "hail and farewell" to Alan Patrick Kenny and New Stage Collective. With eight performances of Stephen Sondheim's and Hugh Wheeler's 'A Little Night Music' (presented at Know Theater), NSC completes its seventh and final season of always ambitious, often audacious playmaking.  

At a guess, neither playwright Damon DiMarco nor director Michael King meant for 'Shock & Awe: Soldiers' Voices from Iraq' to take stage as a laugh riot when, on Thursday night, it opened Northern Kentucky University's biennial Year End Series (Y.E.S.) new play festival. But it did.  

Despite a few structural fumbles in the second act of Mark Rigney's 'Nightjars' and the occasional tendency to get knotted up in its own vehemence, the play is an engrossing, in-your-face theater piece. It's the third of three world premiere scripts on view at Northern Kentucky University's biennial Year End Series (Y.E.S.) new play festival.  

The Z-movie nonsense that director Matt Johnson packaged in and around The Comedy of Errors at Cincinnati Shakespeare Company (CSC) is little if any more nonsensical than Mr. William Shakespeare’s own loopy script. That’s good news. Johnson’s spaceships, aliens, tinfoil hats among other bizarre costumes, zany sound and light effects combine with first-rate farcing from all hands to serve Willie’s original silliness quite well. Thursday-Sunday through April 26.