After a long hot summer (well, it's still feeling like a long hot summer), we have a full array of shows onstage in Cincinnati for you to choose among. I've seen two of them so far: Good People at Ensemble Theatre Cincinnati and The Three Musketeers at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. ETC's production of Pulitzer Prize winner David Lindsay-Abaire's 2011 piece (this is the regional premiere of Good People, which was nominated for a Tony a year ago) about a woman who falls off the bottom of the employment ladder has enough humor to be entertaining (especially with Annie Fitzpatrick in the central role of Margie and Kate Wilford and Deb Girdler as her gossipy friends and bingo-night comrades) and enough contemporary relevance to be thought-provoking. ETC's D. Lynn Meyers is at her best staging naturalistic shows with social meaning, and that's exactly what this one offers. It has a great cast and flexible, attractive scenic design by the ever-creative Brian c. Mehring. I gave it a Critic's Pick. Through Sept. 23. Review here. Box office: 513-421-3555. I wanted to love The Three Musketeers at the Playhouse (through Sept. 29), but its balance of humor and heart is out of whack to my tastes. There's lots of adventure, hilarity and laughter — especially some no-holds-barred swordplay — but the show tries to hard to entertain that it misses out on the true emotion that should lie beneath. I suspect many people will love this thrill-a-minute tale of political intrigue and valor, loyalty and royalty in 17th-century France, and perhaps it will evolve to deeper feelings as it runs. I love new Artistic Director Blake Robison's desire to put appealing, family-friendly work onstage, and he's using this production to show what he means. I hope his approach gets a tad more texture and depth as his tenure continues. Review here. Box office: 513-421-3888. I haven't yet seen To Kill a Mockingbird at Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, and their publicity says it's already sold out its first-two weekends. So you might want to put that one on your calendar for sometime before it wraps up (Sept. 30). In the meantime, you might want to head to Washington Park on Sunday evening at 7 p.m. for a special free presentation of CSC's touring production of The Tempest. It's a perfect piece for outdoor performance, set on an island with a sorcerer and his lovely daughter and some shipwrecked nobles who are responsible for his exile. Audience participation will be a key component of this event, with the audience asked to create large-scale effects by blowing bubbles, making waves with silk and generating sound effects. Sounds like great fun. Music (by The Young Heirlooms) begins at 6 p.m. This is a good one to bring kids to see. Also off and running this weekend is Cincinnati Landmark's production of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. It's a classic drama of sexual tension and family strife, a bit heavier fare than is usually found at the Covedale Center. It's a sign of the company's ambition to be a full-fledged theater offering a wide range of material. (Through Sept. 30.) Box office: 513-241-6550.

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.