Tag Archives: UC College-Conservatory of Music

CCM proudly presents MACK AND MABEL on Thursday, March 2 through Sunday, March 5 in Corbett Auditorium. Aubrey Berg directs with choreography by Patti James and musical direction by CCM graduate student Evan Roider.

The performance is rare treat for Cincinnati audiences; MACK AND MABEL has not been produced in the Queen City for over a decade, and it has never been presented as a CCM Mainstage production. With a memorable score by Broadway master Jerry Herman (Hello, Dolly!; Mame; La Cage aux Folles), MACK AND MABEL received eight Tony Award nominations after its original premiere in 1975.

“At CCM, we have the great advantage of performing these classic musicals with full orchestra,” says Evan Roider, music director of the show and a CCM graduate student in orchestral conducting. “This is a great opportunity to see and hear a rarely-performed Jerry Herman musical with all the stops pulled out!”

MACK AND MABEL is a star-crossed, bittersweet love story that explores both the lighter and the darker side of the Golden Age of Comedy. It focuses on the tumultuous relationship between legendary director Mack Sennett and his greatest star, Mabel Normand.

Mack, an aging director whose silent films become obsolete in the age of “talkies,” tells the story in a series of flashbacks. He recalls his first encounter with Mabel, a feisty barista who Mack turns into a silent film star. However, following a torrid affair with Mack, Mabel leaves to act in dramas for a rival director.

Mack and Mabel struggle to find their places in the changing film industry, and both experience their own triumphs and failures along the way.

Praised by the New York Times as “a musical in the old and true tradition,” Mack and Mabel’s musical style is reminiscent of the silent film era in which it is set.

“The score highlights Herman’s tremendous talent for melody — brassy two-steps, voluptuous ballads and a tap number that rivals those of the early 20th century,” Roider says. “Audiences can expect an old fashioned score that will have them humming as they leave the theater.”
____

MACK AND MABEL
Based on an idea by Leonard Spigelglass
Book by Michael Stewart
Music and Lyrics by Jerry Herman

Performance Times
8 p.m. Thursday, March 2
8 p.m. Friday, March 3
8 p.m. Saturday, March 4
2 p.m. Sunday, March 5

Location
Corbett Auditorium, College-Conservatory of Music
University of Cincinnati

Purchasing Tickets
Tickets to Mack and Mabel are $31-35 for adults, $22-25 for non-UC students and $18-21 for UC students with a valid ID. Tickets can be purchased in person at the CCM Box Office, over the telephone at 513-556-4183 or online at ccm.uc.edu/boxoffice.

Parking and Directions
Parking is available in the CCM Garage (located at the base of Corry Boulevard off Jefferson Avenue) and additional garages throughout the UC campus. Additional parking is available off-campus at the U Square complex on Calhoun Street and other neighboring lots. Please visit uc.edu/parking for more information on parking rates.

For detailed maps and directions, please visit uc.edu/visitors.

For directions to CCM Village, visit ccm.uc.edu/about/directions.
____

CCM Season Presenting Sponsor and Musical Theatre Program Sponsor: The Otto M. Budig Family Foundation

Mainstage Season Production Sponsor: Macy’s

Mack and Mabel is presented by a special arrangement with SAMUEL FRENCH, INC.

HER NAKED SKIN presented by UC College-Conservatory of Music.

Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s 2008 play tells the story of British suffragettes and their struggle for equal rights in the early 20^th Century.

The University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music’s (CCM) Mainstage Acting Series resumes in February with the regional premiere of Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s enthralling drama, Her Naked Skin. Directed by CCM Acting Chair Richard E. Hess, Her Naked Skin plays Feb. 9-12 with a special preview performance on Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2017. Set in London in 1913, this production focuses on the thousands of suffragettes who served time in Holloway Prison after demanding their right to vote. 

Her Naked Skin explores a crucial moment in the Suffragette Movement when, with emancipation almost in sight, women refuse to let the establishment stand in their way. Political battles collide with personal struggles when Celia Cain, trapped by the policies of the day and a frustrating marriage, begins an affair with seamstress Eve Douglass while they are imprisoned.

Lenkiewicz’s plays “give theatre a fighting chance in an easily distracted age,” wrote The Guardian. One of her first works, The Night Season, won the Critics’ Circle Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright in 2004. Four years later Her Naked Skin became the first play written by a living female playwright to be performed in London’s Olivier Theatre, the National Theatre’s largest venue. The play “plants a defiant feminist flag” on stage, praised The Guardian after its premiere.

“It is imperative that the CCM Acting Department presents stories written by women that place women center stage,” says Hess. “There is a gender bias to so many aspects of life, intentional or not, and Her Naked Skin stands proudly on the side of inclusion and equality.”

Current events, such as the Women’s March on Washington, and a tumultuous political climate make this play resonate with “unexpected timeliness,” Hess adds. “The students in this play, many of whom participated in the recent marches, do not view this as a story of the past.”

Hess elaborates, “CCM Acting students must be engaged with the world, and our world is currently not unlike the world of 1913. Audiences will be exhilarated by the universal struggle presented in Her Naked Skin.”

Her Naked Skin isn’t the first play from the National Theatre that Hess brings to CCM. The National Theatre is known for presenting sweeping historical dramas like Helen Edmundson’s Coram Boy, which premiered in Cincinnati during CCM’s 2011-12 Mainstage Series. “These scripts, first presented in London, will be new to Cincinnati audiences,” Hess says, “and the drama on stage is guaranteed to be epic and exciting.”

“The right to vote is not guaranteed, although it seems to be promised. What would you do to fight for the right to vote if you were denied? Her Naked Skin answers that question.”

This production contains adult themes and situations, including brief nudity, and is intended for mature audiences.

Creative team

• Richard E. Hess, director
• William Sawyer, scenic designer*
• Tanner Elker, sound designer*
• Patrick Jansen, sound designer*
• k. Jenny Jones, fight choreographer
• Whitney Glover, projections & media designer*
• Ashley Berg, costume designer*
• Marilyn Caskey, dialect coach
• Foster Johns, dialect coach
• Erik McCandless, lighting designer*
• Danae Jimenez, wig & make-up designer*
• Chelsea Taylor, stage manager*
  *CCM Student
  

Cast

• Kenzie Clark as Emily Davison/Mary Nicholson
• Sarah Durham as Miss Brint
• Mickey Tropeano as Celia Cain
• Julia Netzer as Eve Douglas
• Sydney Ashe as Flower Seller/Mrs. Major/Mrs. Collins
• Carissa Cardy as Clara Franks/Miss Beacham/Waitress
• Mafer Del Real as Florence Boorman
• Ella Eggold as Mrs. Schliefke
• Clare Combest as Mrs. Briggs
• Meg Olson as Woman in Street/Prison Wardress
• Katie Langham as Prison Wardress
• Annie Grove as Nurse
• Carter Lacava as John Seely/Guard/Freddie
• Nicholas Heffelfinger as Augustine Burrell/Guard/Dr. Klein
• Graham Rogers as Edward Grey/Guard
• Owen Alderson as Herbert Asquith/Cecil/Guard
• Spencer Lackey as Newspaper Vendor/Keir Hardie/Guard
• Landon Hawkins as Potter/Speaker/Brown/George Curzon
• Ryan Garrett as Dr. Vale/Hunt
• Rupert Spraul as Dr. Parker/Charlie Power
• Isaac Hickox-Young as William Cain
• Andrew Ramsey as Guard

Performance Times

• 8 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 8 (preview)
• 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 9
• 8 p.m. Friday, Feb. 10
• 2 & 8 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 11
• 2 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 12

Location
Patricia Corbett Theater, CCM Village
University of Cincinnati

Purchasing Tickets
Tickets to Her Naked Skin are $27-31 adults, $17-20 non-UC students and $15-18 UC students with a valid ID. Tickets to the Feb. 8 preview performance are just $15.

Student rush tickets will be sold one hour before each performance to non-UC students for $12-15, based on availability. UC students can receive one free student rush ticket with a valid ID, also based on availability.

Tickets can be purchased in person at the CCM Box Office, over the telephone at 513-556-4183 or online at ccm.uc.edu/boxoffice/mainstage/her-naked-skin.

Parking and Directions
Parking is available in the CCM Garage (located at the base of Corry Boulevard off Jefferson Avenue) and additional garages throughout the UC campus. Please visit uc.edu/parking for information on parking rates.

For detailed maps and directions, please visit uc.edu/visitors. Additional parking is available off-campus at the U Square complex on Calhoun Street and other neighboring lots.

For directions to CCM Village, visit ccm.uc.edu/about/directions.

Season Presenting Sponsor: The Otto M. Budig Family Foundation

Mainstage Season Production Sponsor: Macy’s

A preeminent institution for the performing and media arts, CCM is the largest single source of performing arts presentations in the state of Ohio.

All event dates and programs are subject to change. For a complete calendar of events, please visit us online at ccm.uc.edu.

###

In the next installment of UC College-Conservatory of Music’s 2016-17 Studio Series, the Acting Department introduces audiences to the residents of a small town as they search for life’s meaning. Directed by CCM Acting Professor and Department ChairRichard Hess, Will Eno’s MIDDLETOWN runs Thursday, Oct. 20- Saturday, Oct. 22 in the Cohen Family Studio Theater.

MIDDLETOWN runs in CCM’s Cohen Family Studio Theater Oct. 20-22.
MIDDLETOWN, which won the 2010 Horton Foote Prize for Promising New American Play, was praised by the New York Times for its “tart, funny, gorgeous little comments on the big things: the need for love and forgiveness, the search for meaning in life, the long lonely ache of disappointment.”

Will Eno veers toward the avant-garde with his approach to stark realism in MIDDLETOWN. His influences include playwrights Samuel Beckett and Don DeLillo, and the recently deceased Edward Albee was a mentor to him. The play was inspired by Thorton Wilder’sOur Town, which was last seen on CCM’s Mainstage in April 2011.

One of the central characters in Our Town is the local milkman, while MIDDLETOWN gives the spotlight to the town’s celebrity, an astronaut in orbit around Earth. Both plays concern the passing seasons of life and are unapologetically frank and sentimental, according to Hess.

“MIDDLETOWN is about nothing except life and death and everything in between,” Hess says. “With a wry and unexpectedly profound touch, Will Eno has written one of the wisest plays I have ever worked on. Its simplicity is monumental.”

The show will be presented in thrust theater configuration, with set design by CCM student Theron Wineinger. Audience members will be seated close to the action of the play in this intimate setting.

“MIDDLETOWN might make the audience both laugh and cry,” Hess says. “It will hit home for everyone in a deeply personal way. Its wisdom is universal, and, in our crazy world, human to human contact that is sane, rational and open might be a welcome tonic.”

Admission is free for MIDDLETOWN, but tickets are required. Tickets become available through the CCM Box Office on Monday, Oct. 17. They often sell out quickly, so visit ourguide to Studio Series tickets for tips and tricks to secure your seats.

Cast List

• Sydney Ashe as Mary Swanson
• Lauren Carter as Tour Guide/Aunt/Female Doctor
• Kenzie Clark as Tourist/Woman on Date/Attendant 2
• Mafer Del Real as Librarian
• Nick Heffelfinger as Tourist/Astronaut Greg/Freelancer/Male Doctor
• Isaac Hickox Young as Cop
• Meg Olson as Public Speaker/Cop’s Radio Voice/Ground Control/Hospital Intercom Voice/Science Radio Host/Music Radio Host
• Maddie Page-Schmit as Sweetheart
• Andrew Ramsey as Mechanic
• Graham Rogers as Landscaper/Man on Date/Hospital Attendant
• Rupert Spraul as John Dodge

Performance Times

• 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 20
• 8 p.m. Friday, Oct. 21
• 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 22

Location
Cohen Family Studio Theater, CCM Village
University of Cincinnati

Admission
Admission is free. Reservations are required. Tickets become available at noon on Monday, Oct. 17. Please visit the CCM Box Office or call 513-556-4183 to reserve. Limit two tickets per order.

Parking and Directions
Parking is available in the CCM Garage (located at the base of Corry Boulevard off Jefferson Avenue) and additional garages throughout the UC campus. Please visituc.edu/parking for information on parking rates.

For detailed maps and directions, please visit uc.edu/visitors. Additional parking is available off-campus at the U Square complex on Calhoun Street and other neighboring lots.

For directions to CCM Village, visit ccm.uc.edu/about/directions.

CCM Season Presenting Sponsor & Musical Theatre Program Sponsor: The Otto M. Budig Family Foundation