Our local universities have had enough time following their holiday breaks to rehearse and build productions for this academic term, so you have some topnotch choices this weekend. Northern Kentucky University is staging Working, a 1978 musical based on interviews by Chicago icon Studs Terkel about people’s jobs. It features music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz (Wicked) and others, including James Taylor.
At Miami University, there’s a production of Charles Mee’s unusual play Hotel Cassiopeia, inspired by the life of visual artist Joseph Cornell, who made nostalgic 3-D collages in shadowboxes. (I saw the premiere of this script at the Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville in 2006, and I’m still haunted by its poetic imagery.)
But what really has me intrigued this weekend is at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music (CCM), where drama students have assembled a mini-fringe festival of six 30-minute works. Under the general title of Transmigration, these works have been created by CCM acting students, inspired and shaped by department chair Richard Hess, whose contributions have been the some of the most stimulating shows at the Cincinnati Fringe for several years. (Although it’s too late for these performances to enter the 2009 Cincinnati Fringe, don’t be surprised if one or more elements of Transmigration lands in the 2010 festival.) The works will be performed simultaneously in three different locations around the CCM complex, enabling audiences to see four of the six in a two-hour stretch.
Get details about the shows and reserve tickets here.
This article appears in Feb 11-17, 2009.
