There’s plenty of professional theater in Cincinnati to keep you occupied — from contemporary works at the Cincinnati Playhouse and Ensemble Theatre to classics at Cincinnati Shakespeare and zany shows at Know Theatre. But don’t lose track of theater on university campuses, because there’s a lot of it. It’s a chance to see works that are less likely to be produced by theaters where selling lots of tickets is a necessity.
Theater departments at colleges and universities, first and foremost, are training grounds for students interested in stage careers. The University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music provides professional training at the highest level for aspiring dramatic and musical actors. At Northern Kentucky University, with many, many majors, a plethora of paths are available — from traditional acting and directing to opportunities for improv and script writing. At Xavier University, where the curriculum is focused on liberal arts, theater has a dual purpose — to offer performance experience for students but also to broaden horizons with issues that will result in well-rounded graduates.
In fact, Xavier is about to open three shows in rotating rep between Feb. 17 and 28. It’s an ambitious effort: August Strindberg’s Miss Julie (first produced in 1888), Harold Pinter’s Betrayal (from 1978) and the premiere of Begotten, a play by senior theater major Tatum Hunter.
“This is an exciting experiment for us,” says Stephen Skiles, Xavier’s director of theater. “Working on small, intimate shows gives our students a unique and intense opportunity to work on their craft, both on and off the stage. We’ve essentially formed three theater companies under the direction of some of the best professional directors in our region.”
Strindberg’s play is about an illicit affair between a young noblewoman and her father’s valet; it’s directed by stage veteran Regina Pugh. Betrayal explores a more contemporary love affair that involves deceiving spouses — and one another; well-known performer Bruce Cromer is directing. Busy freelance director Bridget Leak is staging Begotten, the story of a tug-of-war as a mother and a wife clash over Aaron, the mother’s son and the wife’s husband.
In April, Skiles will stage the Rock musical Rent to close out Xavier’s 2015-2016 season.
Across the river at NKU, up next (Feb. 18-28) is the earliest comedic collaboration between George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, Once in a Lifetime, a wickedly funny script from 1929 about vaudeville performers past their prime who pose as voice experts and head to Hollywood to cash in on the talkies. Their encounters with vapid starlets, snarling studio execs, gossip columnists and more make for hilarious storytelling.
Faculty member Mike King is directing. “When I first read Once in a Lifetime, I was struck by how up-to-date its critique of Hollywood was,” he says. “As depressing as it may be, the exact same things Kaufman and Hart were poking fun at are the same things we see in movies today. What’s amazing is that Kaufman and Hart had never worked in Hollywood when they wrote this play. They just studied Variety magazine and took their material from there.”
King’s production relies on acting talent available at NKU: 30 actors are playing 70 characters, many of them handling at least three different roles.
The balance of NKU’s season offers April productions of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (the play that became the musical My Fair Lady) followed by Stephen Sondheim’s fairytale mash-up, Into the Woods.
CCM at UC runs its drama and musical theater programs separately, although they share facilities and tech support. They just completed a production of a rare gentle comedy from 1933 by Eugene O’Neill, Ah, Wilderness!, on the Patricia Corbett stage. With a quick changeover, PCT will be the venue for the local premiere of the Punk Rock opera American Idiot (March 3-13), portraying the harsh realities of the lives of young men in the 1990s. It’s based on Green Day’s Grammy-winning 2004 album of the same name.
Subsequent shows on the UC campus include Cohen Family Studio Theater productions in April of the basketball musical Lysistrata Jones (inspired by Aristophanes’ ancient Greek comedy) and a staged reading of a new play by filmmaker and playwright Grace Gardner, The Great Majority. She’s a recent graduate of Ohio’s Kenyon College.
CONTACT RICK PENDER: rpender@citybeat.com
This article appears in Feb 10-17, 2016.
