Summer is winding down just as the dance season is heating up! This fall brings a host of delights from longtime companies as well as new directions for the local dance scene. Kicking off Cincinnati Ballet’s season with a bang once again is the eagerly anticipated annual Kaplan New Works Series Sept. 8-18 at the Mickey Jarson Kaplan Performance Studio.  

One man’s story. A parable. Searing social commentary. A fairytale. A slice of history. You could apply any of these descriptions to Samm-Art Williams’ 1979 play Home, a breakthrough script from the Negro Ensemble Company that was nominated for a 1980 Tony Award.  

As Josh Eagle frames an answer, it quickly becomes apparent the response he’s offering has little in common with the question. Eagle pauses, then smiles. “What was the question?” he inquires. “I’m the king of fucking tangents. Hit the ball in left field and I’ll run in the opposite direction.”  

Artist Stevie Grueter digs rocks out of the ground with a railroad spike. She's barely 5 feet tall and lugs them home like she's cradling a baby. That's where her art begins — on the uneven surfaces of rocks. Her life began in the rubble of an earthquake. It struck the Greek island of Crete, killing her parents.  

I have seen the future of art museums and it is fashion/costume design. That’s a paraphrase of a famous review Jon Landau wrote upon seeing an early Bruce Springsteen concert, but I felt as if I’d just discovered the art-museum-world equivalent — at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty exhibit.  

While you might think of a play or a musical as entertainment — which it is — there’s another dimension worth considering. They are also works of literature, words written on a page meant to be spoken or perhaps sung. The success or failure of a performed work often hinges on the quality of the words in a play’s script or a musical’s book.  

If you Google search “John McClellan,” you’ll find the late Democratic senator from Arkansas and the 19th-century chemist. So what is comedian, Akron native and onetime Cincinnatian John McClellan — who brought his "Punk Rock" stand-up tour to Northside's tiny music club/bar The Comet Aug. 13 — doing to distance himself from his fellow McClellans?  

How many people can make jokes in porcelain? Or even, going up to the next level, are witty in porcelain? Artists Katie Parker and Guy Michael Davis regularly carry off that difficult feat in the course of creating works of considerable beauty and technical éclat.  

Who knew that Madeira is a hotbed of British Punk Rock scholarship? Those familiar with the quiet, upscale northeast Cincinnati community might think its musical interests fall more toward Streisand and Manilow than The Damned and The Sex Pistols. But there in the Madeira Branch library, in a wall case in the long entryway corridor, is the display “The A-Z of UK Punk Rock and Post Punk.”  

Daniel Dorff literally has the catbird seat from which he keeps his artist's eye on the transformation now underway in Over-the-Rhine’s Washington Park, where Cincinnati Center City Development Corporation is building an underground parking garage for patrons of Music Hall and others.