I seldom laugh out loud when I’m watching a comedy, but I found myself doing just that more than once at last night’s opening of Peter and the Starcatcher at the Cincinnati Playhouse. You can read about this show and the appeal of Peter Pan here, but let me simply say this is a deliriously silly but wholly heartfelt prequel about the origins of the boy who “won’t grow up.” This award-winning play uses simple theatrics, not special effects, to work its magic, and the Playhouse cast of a dozen quick-change performers dive into the wacky storytelling with zest and zeal. Everyone is having a good time, perhaps Tom Story most of all, playing “Black Stache” (the pirate who will become Captain Hook) who spews malapropisms and extravagant posturing: “There’s a poet in these pirate veins,” he announces. The laugh-inducing moment that sets up his subsequent need for a hook is both ghastly and breathlessly funny, not to mention milked for all it’s worth. Everyone in the cast has moments of fun. This is imaginative storytelling and extravagant theatricality at its best. You’ll have fun if you bring a kid or two; but even if you don’t, go by yourself and feel like a kid again. Through April 4. Tickets: 513-421-3888.

A show that’s stuck with me since last June’s Fringe Festival, Katie Hartman’s ghostly and mournful song cycle, The Legend of White Woman Creek, is back for a pair of performances at Know Theatre tonight and Saturday at 8 p.m. It’s the tale of Anna Morgan Faber, a white woman captured then slowly absorbed into the Cheyenne tribe in 1860s Kansas. Hartman sings about a desperate, lonely woman who finally finds happiness only to have it it brutally snatched away. “It’s not a stand-up-and-cheer kind of show,” I wrote in my review. Instead, “it’s artfully crafted and professionally delivered in an understated way. But it is powerfully effective.” Tickets: 513-300-5669.
Elsewhere you can catch Covedale Center’s production of The Marvelous Wonderettes, the story of four high school girls in the ’50s and ’60s who get their big break singing Doo-Wop tunes. This show kicked off a string of hits for Ensemble Theatre a few years back, and I imagine the Covedale’s audience will love it, too. Tickets: 513-241-6550.

If Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is a book you’ve treasured over the years, you can see a stage adaptation at Cincinnati Shakespeare through March 21 (CityBeat review here; tickets: 513-381-2273) or a musical theater version by Footlighters, the community theater that performs at Newport’s Stained Glass Theater (tickets: 859-652-3849).

This is the final weekend for August: Osage County at Clifton Performance Theatre. It’s a big sprawling play wedged into a tiny space, but with a great script and a fine cast, it’s definitely worth seeing. You’ll be close enough to feel like a member of the dysfunctional Weston family. I gave it a Critic’s Pick here. Tickets: 513-861-7469.

I missed the first two installments of Serials 2: Thunderdome! at Know Theatre, but I was there on March 2, and I’ll be back on Monday evening to see which of five 15-minute segments gets to live on. I’m looking forward to Josh Bromels’ So In Tents (there’s a pun in there) and Trey Tatum and Paul Strickland’s Andy’s House of [blank], a wild, time-shifting musical. But there will be more surprises, I’m sure. It’s a breath of fresh creative air. Tickets: 513-300-5669

Rick Pender’s STAGE DOOR blog appears here every Friday.

This article appears in Mar 11-17, 2015.

RICK PENDER has written about theater for CityBeat since its first issues in 1994. Before that he wrote for EveryBody’s News. From 1998 to 2006 he was CityBeat’s arts & entertainment editor. Retired...

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