“Do you remember a summer when you thought everything was possible?”
That was the question D. Lynn Meyers, producing artistic director at Ensemble Theatre’s May 2026 production of “The House on Watch Hill,” posed when announcing the production.
Ensemble Theatre will premiere this show by Cincinnati native and Tony nominated composer Richard Oberacker and his writing partner Robert Taylor. It’s about a group of teen misfits in the summer of 1984 who set out to build the ultimate haunted house in the Anderson Township suburb of Cincinnati.
Oberacker, a graduate of Anderson High School (as well as the University of Cincinnati’s College Conservatory of Music), was the kid who led his geeky friends for a project that stirred up fears far more real than any ghost story. Their show captures the bittersweet moment between childhood and growing up, a time when you’re old enough to know the world is scary but brave enough to face it anyway.
“The best way Rob and I have found to describe the show is that it’s like “The Breakfast Club” (1985) meets “Stand by Me” (1986) with about a cup-and-a-half of the Netflix series “Stranger Things” (2016-2025),” Oberacker said in a conversation with CityBeat. “All those pieces continue to resonate in pop culture.”
Asked what might set their show apart, Oberacker said there isn’t any other music like it.
“When we first started working on it and sharing it with a few trusted people, everyone said, ‘I’ve never read anything like this before,'” he said. But in truth, “the scariest thing isn’t the haunted house—it’s growing up.”
“The House on Watch Hill” is based on real events, Oberacker said, that happened here in Cincinnati with a group of young teenage friends.
“Social misfits, theater kids, gadget kid, the total nerd, the artist, the rich girl, the one Asian kid in Anderson High School, the one Black girl in Anderson High School,” he said. They persuaded a neighbor to take over the entire basement of her suburban home.
“We spent the summer building a neighborhood haunted house,” Oberacker said. “But what we really spent the summer doing was coming into ourselves, growing up. It’s a coming-of-age story … What they go through during this summer—falling in love, getting out of love, losing a parent—all the things that we dealt with as kids trying to get to the other side of puberty.”
Steeped in Cold War anxiety and latchkey freedom, “The House on Watch Hill” promises to be funny, moving and maybe just a little spooky.
Oberacker and Taylor’s script is firmly rooted in 1984 Cincinnati.
“Anderson High School is name-checked,” Oberacker said. “McNicholas High School is name-checked. The Friendly’s on Beechmont Avenue, no longer there, is where we used to hang out. The Skywalk Cinema downtown where we first saw ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show’ is name-checked.”
There are many other local references.
“The show is 100% a love letter to my childhood in the city,” Oberacker said. “The musical is full of these granular details of real life in Cincinnati in 1984. It’s not a mythic, faraway place.”
Oberacker, today a composer and conductor with Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas, has crafted an ’80s-inspired soundtrack.
“I really wanted it to sound like the ’80s,” he said. “Kate Bush, Annie Lenox and the Eurythmics. The architecture of the melodies, the chord changes are in the style of those artists. Depeche Mode figures very heavily.”
He also developed music resembling numbers by the synth-pop band A-ha , as well as early Madonna and Cyndi Lauper. Those iconic reverbs and chords will be shaped by veteran sound designer Brian Hsieh for ETC.
“It’s really going to transport you back to the time with my songs,” Oberacker said. “The melodies in pop music at that time were very bold and very catchy. The score feels like it’s of the time.”
Meyers, who will co-direct the show with Dee Anne Bryll, said the show is about stripping away the layers of who we become and going back to a time when we were still dreaming and hoping for the future.
She calls the music “intoxicating. Once you jump in, the rhythm just keeps going throughout the whole piece. These songs could have been hits of the 80s had they been written during that time.”
Several music demos were recorded in New York with a professional cast of Broadway kids. They are available on Oberacker’s YouTube channel.
In addition to seven teen actors, the cast includes two mature players as “The Adults in the Room.”
Oberacker said they enable the generations to look at one another and discover common ground.
“It’s really electric and special,” he said of a 2023 workshop production in Las Vegas. “It transcends the story we are telling and what it means to go on this journey from childhood into adulthood.”
He hopes high school kids find the show at Ensemble as they did in the Vegas workshop, which was extended several times.
“I want them to know that there’s a show happening here in Cincinnati that’s about what they’re going through right now,” Oberacker said. “I was one of those kids!”
If you go:
Tickets: Call 513-421-3555 or click here.
Dates: May 9-31
Run time: 2 hours with intermission
Other theater productions in May
Falcon Theater in Newport presents Kate Douglas’s “The Apiary” (May 1-16), directed by Chad Brinkman. Set 22 years in the future, honeybees are nearly extinct except for a few kept alive inside labs, where several dedicated women try to rehabilitate the bee population. When an unexpected incident boosts the bee population, hard decisions have to be made. This unsettling and sharp-witted cautionary tale warns that the key to protecting each other and the planet is right in front of us, if only we would listen. Tickets: 513-479-6783
Broadway in Cincinnati will present a five-day run of the touring production of “Suffs” (May 12-17) at the Aronoff Center. Make plans to catch see this tuneful portrait of the activists who fought for the 19th Amendment to the Constitution to give American women the right to vote in 1920. In 2026, when women are likely to be a decisive factor in our midterm elections, this Tony Award-winning show is an essential reminder of what our democracy is about. Click here to purchase tickets.
Cincinnati Shakespeare Company will take audiences into the world and time of romance novelist Jane Austen via a witty stage adaptation of “Emma” by playwright Kate Hamill (May 22-June 14). It’s the story of a headstrong matchmaker who believes she can’t possibly fall in love, but who orchestrates romance for those around her with hilarious results. This clever and charming take will be directed by Candice Handy featuring a completely Black cast of professional actors, including Torie Wiggins, Burgess Byrd, Samuel Stricklen and Ernaisja Curry as Emma. Tickets: 513-381-2273
On Saturday evening, May 30, 6-11 p.m., the Young Professionals Choral Collective (YPCC) will present its annual gala fundraiser at the Netherland Plaza’s beautiful Art Deco Hall of Mirrors, one of Cincinnati’s most iconic venues. The evening’s program, Sing the Queen City, will feature renditions of Broadway show tunes and anthems by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Stephen Schwarts, Stephen Sondheim and many more, sung by a well-rehearsed chorus of 142 voices in collaboration with Sarah Folsom and Matthew Umphreys, a duo who perform vintage jazz and pop songs as Queen City Cabaret. The evening begins with a pre-concert dinner. Click here to purchase tickets.
