If you’re a musical theater fan, make note of a concert by the Kentucky Symphony Orchestra on Saturday evening at Northern Kentucky University’s Greaves Concert Hall at 7:30 p.m. The Battle of Broadway will feature songs by two of musical theater’s greatest contemporary composers — Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Two Broadway veterans with Cincinnati roots, Pam Myers and Jessica Hendy, will perform songs by these legendary composers. No real battle, to be sure. The winners will be everyone in attendance. Tickets: kyso.org or 859-431-6216.
You still have a few chances to catch the touring production at the Aronoff Center of Beautiful and see Julia Knitel’s great performance as Carole King. As a teenager in the late ’50s and early ’60s, she created hit after hit. In 1971 she kicked it up even further with her legendary album, Tapestry, of which every song has become a standard. I gave the show a Critic’s Pick in my CityBeat review. Final performance is Sunday evening. Tickets: 513-621-2787.
Two more weeks remain for Cincinnati Shakespeare’s final production at its Race Street theater, The Tempest. As I mentioned a week ago, this happens to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote, making it the perfect show to go out with. And this is simply an excellent production, firing on all cylinders — design, talent, staging — as staged by Brian Phillips, Jeremy Dubin and Sara Clark. You can read more about this production in my recent Curtain Call column. It’s a great omen for what we’ll be seeing in Cincy Shakes' new theater in September. Through May 20. Tickets: 513-381-2273.
We don’t often get to see plays by South African writer Athol Fugard these days, so be grateful to Falcon Theater for staging one of his greatest works, Master Harold and the Boys. The play, portraying apartheid’s poisonous impact on race relations in South Africa in the 1950s, is about a young white Afrikaner and two black men who worked in his family’s tearoom for many years. It’s onstage at Falcon’s intimate venue, the Monmouth Theater in Newport, through May 20. Tickets: 513-479-6783.
It’s the final weekend for Know Theatre’s world premiere of Kara Lee Corthron’s Listen for the Light. It’s a drama set in 1844 about a former slave, a strong-minded girl and Mormon prophet Joseph Smith. All three actors — Darnell Pierre Benjamin, Tess Talbot and Josh Katawick — are veterans of Cincinnati Shakespeare Company; their work with director Tamara Winters has resulted in a thought-provoking production. Tickets: 513-300-5669.
Once Listen for the Light wraps up at Know, Ensemble Theatre’s Professional Acting Apprentice Company moves in for three performances next week — because ETC is undergoing a major renovation project. They’ll perform Antigone (born against), a modern retelling of Sophocles’ ancient Greek tale of a defiant woman. Born into a world that doesn’t love her, the central character floats between the ancient and the modern as she struggles between political necessity and morality. The script has been translated and adapted by one of the acting apprentices, Griff Bludworth. ETC usually does an apprentice production on its own stage during the annual Cincinnati Fringe Festival, but that wasn’t possible this year, so its great that Know, the Fringe producer, could make room on its stage (at 1120 Jackson St.) for performances on May 17, 18 and 19 at 8 p.m. Tickets from ETC’s box office: 513-421-3555.
Rick Pender’s STAGE DOOR blog appears here every Friday. Find more theater reviews and feature stories here.
