Theater in the City

New Stage Collective (NSC) takes seriously its position as a theater that operates in and focuses on our city, or so it appears by virtue of the shows it has selected for its 2008-2009 season: Four of the seven regular season shows have the word "city" in their titles. NSC impressed audiences with newer and edgier plays and musicals in its first full season in its Over-the-Rhine theater; for its second year at 1120 Main St., it will present two older musicals, four regional premieres of plays that were presented in New York City in the past two seasons and a drama from 1979. In December, the group will repeat its holiday Rock musical, Striking 12. Here's the line-up:

• Shining City by Conor McPherson (Sept. 4-21, 2008), whose play The Seafarer is currently running on Broadway. This work, a 2006 Tony nominee, is about a Dublin therapist treating a man haunted by the ghost of his late wife.

• The History Boys by Alan Bennett (Oct. 16-Nov. 9, 2008) was the 2006 Tony Award winner for best play (it won six Tonys in all), and a 2006 film using many of the same actors and behind-the-scenes staff. It's a comedy about eight British high school students aspiring to get into Oxford and Cambridge, their overeager headmaster and several ambitious teachers.

• Striking 12 by GrooveLily (Dec. 11-13, 2008).

• Dying City by Christopher Shinn (Jan. 8-25, 2009) is the story of an Iraq War widow unexpectedly visited by her dead husband's twin brother. The work has been staged in London (2006) and New York City (2007); this is the first time a work by this much-praised thirtysomething American playwright has been presented in Cincinnati.

• Dead City by Sheila Callaghan (Feb. 5-22, 2009) is a 2006 script inspired by James Joyce's Ulysses. Just as Leopold Bloom in that classic novel travels around Dublin, Samantha Blossom takes an odyssey through New York City in this 90-minute comic drama.

• Bent by Martin Sherman (March 12-April 5, 2009) is a powerful 1979 play about Nazi persecution of homosexuals. It was made into a 1997 film starring Clive Owen and Ian McKellen.

• A Little Night Music by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler (April 23-May 17, 2009) is a romantic, waltz-time musical from 1973, perhaps the most romantic — and ironic — show that Sondheim has written music and lyrics for. Based on Ingmar Bergmann's 1955 film Smiles of a Summer Night, the show was on Broadway 35 years ago, when it won six 1973 Tony Awards, including best musical. Joe Deer from Wright State University will be the show's guest director; Bruce Cromer (who portrays Scrooge at the Playhouse in A Christmas Carol and King Lear recently for Cincinnati Shakespeare) will play Fredrik Egermann; Amy Warner (who earned a CEA opposite Cromer in Cincinnati Shakespeare's production of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and another for her work in NSC's staging of another play by Albee, The Goat, a year ago) as Desiree Armfeldt, a middle-aged actress.

• City of Angels by Cy Coleman, David Zippel and Larry Gelbart (July 16-August 16, 2009) also won six Tonys, including best musical, in 1990. Set in the late 1940s, it uses a jazzy score to tell two stories: One is about a writer struggling to adapt his noir novel into a screenplay; the other is the story he's re-telling. Often the real-life scenes are staged in color and the movie scenes in black-and-white.

According to NSC's news release, Artistic Director Alan Patrick Kenny is directing at least four of the productions — History Boys, Dead City, Bent, and City of Angels. It was also recently announced that Kenny will stage Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel at the Carnegie in Covington next spring (May 29-June 14, 2009). He'll be one busy director.

– Rick Pender