“We didn’t dream where we were from,” says Kevin Smith of his childhood in Highlands, N.J. “Nobody had an example to point to and say ‘Hey, someone came from Highland and did something big.’ And no one from my family had done anything like that.”

 The opening 15 minutes of Titanic: The Musical, recreating the tragic 1912 sinking of the doomed ocean liner, is one of the most stirring, evocative sequences in all of musical theater. It grabs you as you meet dozens of characters boarding the ship, overflowing with great expectations — of success, of escaping poverty, of new life in America, of achieving dreams. But we know what awaits many of them in the freezing North Atlantic after the collision with an iceberg.

 Let’s give props to Cincinnati Shakespeare Company for bringing to the stage The Merchant of Venice, one of Shakespeare’s most difficult plays. It’s officially categorized as a comedy, and it contains humorous and romantic elements, including a subplot about contesting for the hand of a wealthy heiress. But the central story of a more dire contest between a moneylender and a businessman is anything but amusing.

The Rake’s Progress promises to be the first of what CCM staff hope will be regular interactive performances. Visual media is here to stay, says College-Conservatory of Music director Robin Guarino, and a tech-savvy public expects it in their theater experiences.

Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and human-rights advocate whose landmark 1956 memoir of surviving the Holocaust, Night, has been translated into more than 30 languages, will speak Sunday evening at Xavier University’s Cintas Center. For his sponsoring agency, his speech will be more than just a history lesson. 

 Before Jesus Christ Superstar and The Phantom of the Opera, Andrew Lloyd Webber composed together a brief “pop cantata” based on the biblical story of Joseph and his “coat of many colors.” It was a piece to be sung by children and subsequently recorded as a concept album. Webber later expanded Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, molding it into a bouncy, bubbly show stuffed with musical parodies.

I became CityBeat’s arts and entertainment editor in 1998, following a few years of being a contributing writer, covering the local theater scene. In 1999 I wrote my first big cover story — it was about Keith Glover and his Blues musical, Thunder Knocking on the Door. 

The Carnegie’s production of Pump Boys & Dinettes works hard to appear effortless, and its effervescent cast chases away any worries you might have brought to the Otto M. Budig Theatre.

Reasons to be Pretty, getting its local premiere at New Edgecliff Theatre, was Neil LaBute's first play to make it to Broadway, where it landed in 2009 and earned a few Tony nominations.

Not many musicals begin with the cast flipping the bird at the audience, but then not many musicals are like Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, the brash show that spins a tale of America’s seventh president to in-your-face Indie Rock tunes.

I read Kim Rosenstock’s Tigers Be Still before I saw the production currently onstage at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. I confess that I found it amusing but not hilarious, perhaps even a tad predictable. I didn’t anticipate that with solid direction by Rob Ruggiero and spot-on casting, Rosenstock’s script manages to be charming, funny, optimistic and perhaps even heart-warming.

At a swanky 1976 cocktail party, we witness the last gasp of two former friends. Composer Franklin Shepard, at the pinnacle of success in the entertainment world, is miserable. Author Mary Flynn is outspoken, loud and drunk. They argue about their old pal Charley Kringas, whose name can’t even be mentioned without ire.

In Irish playwright Conor McPherson's St. Nicholas, Michael Shooner plays a thoroughly nasty theater critic; a writer without  much to say but who enjoys lording his influence over actors and theaters. Most  critics actually love the theater, but not this guy — it’s largely an experience for him to bully people and freeload food and drink on opening nights. He enjoys preying on those who fear him. So perhaps it’s only natural that he ends up in the employ of a coven of vampires.