At The Carnegie, director Greg Procaccino, producer Joshua Steele and music director Alan Patrick Kenny have devised a 'Secret Garden' that's good looking and difficult listening. Leading performances are fetching, especially Ty Yadzinski as a dour, bedeviled widower and Charity Farrell as the cheeky then cheerful orphan who discovers the locked garden and transforms it into a colorful, healing retreat.  

DIY Productions, which last year provided a surprising self-conducted Over-the-Rhine tour with 'Inner: City,' has cooked up a new way to rattle your expectations. The Fringe and the OTR neighborhood itself are part of the package, which you can experience alone or with a friend or two.  

If you've ever been drawn to perform, 'A Chorus Line' will hit you right in the gut. The show distills the essence of what drives people who dance, make music and act.  

This CCM-based dance theater collective presents stories and physical imagery that reflect what it means to be young and alive in the United States in 2009.  

In 'Travel,' Jeremy Millsaps' feet never touch the ground. "I just focus on what's in my hand," whether it's a hoop, trapeze or length of silk (fabric burns, not falls, are his chief occupational hazard).  

A mother (Amy Warner) and daughter (Karen Wissel) meet on a Mediterranean cliff and struggle to connect. "The daughter won't speak to the mother. She dances," Warner explains, which means that CCM choreographer Judith Mikita had to create half the play's poetic "dialogue" from scratch.  

What's one day you'll never forget? A person who changed everything? A color you'll carry forever? Cincinnati-based White Beard Productions blends those thoughts via interviews and fiction, text and movement, theater and visual art.  

In this Native American fable retold by Gunstwork Puppet Mask Theatre of Boulder, Colo., four Abenaki tribesmen journey to the island of the great Gluskabe, who grants one wish to each. "It has to do with human desire," says Michael Gunst, the show's creator and solo performer. "We can all relate to that."  

It's a bummer growing up. "We get to an age where we think we have to become adults and put the toys away," says Karim Muasher of Giant Bird, an internationally touring three-man troupe whose members ignored that impulse.  

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.