Outstanding Cast Assembled for Oct. 7 Workshop at Carnegie

There's a new piece of musical theater in the oven, and you'll be able to get a peak and a listen on Sunday, Oct. 7 at 7:30 p.m., when it has a one-night-only public performance at Covington's Carnegie Center. The evening will feature several local theater veterans including two with national reputations, so it's a very promising event. The Sandman is a new musical by Richard Oberacker and his writing partner Robert Taylor. They teamed to create Ace (which premiered at the Cincinnati Playhouse back in 2006), and Oberacker was the creative force behind Don't Make Me Pull This Show Over, a hit at the Cincinnati Fringe in 2008 and returned for a full production at Ensemble Theatre the following season.The Sandman is strange and darkly comic musical, drawn from a nightmarish fantasy by E.T.A. Hoffman, the author of the story of The Nutcracker and the personal inspiration for the opera The Tales of Hoffman. Oberacker, whose day job is as a music director with Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas, will spend a week here to workshop the show about a month from now, and he will play piano for the performance on that Sunday evening. A star-studded cast has been recruited, topped by Broadway veteran, Tony nominee and nationally respected musical performer Pamela Myers. She'll play Frau Kaeseschweiss, an unusual nanny recruited to serve as a nanny the children of the Strauss family. Charlie Clark and Sara Mackie (both Cincinnati veteran theater professionals and familiar to ETC and Carnegie theater audiences) will play the parents, with Clark as an ingenious German clockmaker who sets in motion a series of bizarre and unnatural events when he meets the strange Dr. Copelius, played by Bruce Cromer. (Cromer is spending this month at Cincinnati Shakespeare as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird). The devilish deal between them to save the Strauss's daughter's life takes a strange and chaotic turn and sinister forces at play are revealed — forces from which only the children may be able to save their parents. Another piece of good news: Busy local director Ed Cohen will be involved in staging the piece, which will utilize a number of projected illustrations to evoke the mood and setting.Oberacker is excited by the quality of the cast assembled for the performance, especially with Myers' involvement. (Like him, both are Cincinnati natives and grads of UC's College-Conservatory of Music. She was the first musical theater grad in 1969; although he was a musical prodigy, conducting shows for community theaters while still in high school, he excelled in CCM's drama program, graduating in 1993.) In a recent email, he told me that Myers is playing "a titanic role that narrates the whole show" and added that it's "huge to have Pam in a role tailor made for her." The Carnegie's website has the performance listed but no further information. If you want to be there, I suggest you call the box office and make your interest known: 859-957-1940.