I’ve been busy over the past week seeing several shows on Greater Cincinnati stages. You can read my reviews of several of them using the links below.
Tenderly: The Rosemary Clooney Story opened on the Cincinnati Playhouse’s Rosenthal Shelterhouse stage back on March 21 . Perhaps you know that she grew up nearby (Maysville, KY) and became a teen singing sensation (with her sister Betty) on WLW-AM in the 1940s. Despite her happy, girl-next-door demeanor, she didn’t have an easy life, and she spent some serious time with a therapist after a nervous breakdown in 1968. This sturdy portrait uses numerous pop tunes she’s remembered for as she wrestles with memories good and bad. Actor Mollie Vogt-Welsh does a fine job with the music and the acting; Sam Simahk plays all the men (and a few women) from Rosie’s life, stepping in and out of his central role as her counselor. This show is as much drama as it is entertainment, and it’s worth seeing. It was well received in its 2014 debut at the Playhouse, and this revival is every bit as good. Onstage through May 17. My review: https://www.talkinbroadway.com/page/regional/cincy/cincy599.html
Cincinnati Shakespeare Company plans to produce the Bard’s entire canon for a second time by its 40th season. That includes all of his familiar, iconic titles as well as some seldom produced shows: Pericles falls into that category. It has its moments, but given that he probably wrote it with a lesser playwright (which is evident in the early scenes), it’s an odd duck up against Shakespeare’s great tragedies and comedies. It’s the story — more like a fairy tale — about an earnest prince seeking to do good deeds, find and lose a wife and child, then miraculously finding them again. Based on a long medieval poem by John Gower (who Shakespeare shaped into the play’s narrator), the 1619 play had Pericles sailing and shipwrecked around the Mediterranean Sea. For Cincy Shakes, settings have been reconceived across outer space with numerous strange planets, aliens in fantastic costumes, trials and tribulations, accompanied by some original (and quite modern) electric guitar accompaniment. Look to it for entertainment, but don’t go expecting a masterpiece. Longtime favorite actor Giles Davies is back in town for the title role. Onstage through May 3. My review: https://www.talkinbroadway.com/page/regional/cincy/cincy596.html
One of the best of plays from August Wilson’s “Century Cycle” is The Piano Lesson, a Pulitzer Prize winner getting a fine production by the Cincinnati on its Rouse Theatre main stage. As with each of Wilson’s plays about African American life across the decades of the 20th century, this one wrestles with racism, family, ancestors and traditions. The heirloom piano with carved images of their 19th-century enslaved ancestors is caught in 1936 between a sister who wants to keep it in the family and a brother who wants to sell it so he can buy the land in Mississippi where their great-grandparents were owned. The tug-of-war is the show’s central conflict, but other characters have motives, agendas and opinions, all expressed in naturalistic but poetic language. This show was a 1990 Pulitzer Prize winner, and the Playhouse has co-produced this fine rendition with Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, using a veteran African American cast. It’s three hours of powerful acting and memorable drama. Onstage through May 3. My review: https://www.talkinbroadway.com/page/regional/cincy/cincy598.html
While I did not review the touring production of Water for Elephants presented by Broadway in Cincinnati at the Aronoff Center, I can highly recommend it here. Set in a Depression Era circus, it has a cast of superb acrobats who are also fine singers and dancers. The animals, recreated with puppetry, are imaginatively represented onstage, especially Rosie, a talented Elephant with a real personality. (Don’t confuse her with Rosemary Clooney, who also went by “Rosie” …) You can find a few comments that I made about this production on my Facebook page, Rick Pender’s Theater Stages and Scenes.