There's a new piece of musical theater in the oven, and you'll be able to get a peak and a listen on Sunday, Oct. 7 at 7:30 p.m., when it has a one-night-only public performance at Covington's Carnegie Center. The evening will feature several local theater veterans including two with national reputations, so it's a very promising event. The Sandman is a new musical by Richard Oberacker and his writing partner Robert Taylor. They teamed to create Ace (which premiered at the Cincinnati Playhouse back in 2006), and Oberacker was the creative force behind Don't Make Me Pull This Show Over, a hit at the Cincinnati Fringe in 2008 and returned for a full production at Ensemble Theatre the following season.The Sandman is strange and darkly comic musical, drawn from a nightmarish fantasy by E.T.A. Hoffman, the author of the story of The Nutcracker and the personal inspiration for the opera The Tales of Hoffman. Oberacker, whose day job is as a music director with Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas, will spend a week here to workshop the show about a month from now, and he will play piano for the performance on that Sunday evening. A star-studded cast has been recruited, topped by Broadway veteran, Tony nominee and nationally respected musical performer Pamela Myers. She'll play Frau Kaeseschweiss, an unusual nanny recruited to serve as a nanny the children of the Strauss family. Charlie Clark and Sara Mackie (both Cincinnati veteran theater professionals and familiar to ETC and Carnegie theater audiences) will play the parents, with Clark as an ingenious German clockmaker who sets in motion a series of bizarre and unnatural events when he meets the strange Dr. Copelius, played by Bruce Cromer. (Cromer is spending this month at Cincinnati Shakespeare as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird). The devilish deal between them to save the Strauss's daughter's life takes a strange and chaotic turn and sinister forces at play are revealed — forces from which only the children may be able to save their parents. Another piece of good news: Busy local director Ed Cohen will be involved in staging the piece, which will utilize a number of projected illustrations to evoke the mood and setting.Oberacker is excited by the quality of the cast assembled for the performance, especially with Myers' involvement. (Like him, both are Cincinnati natives and grads of UC's College-Conservatory of Music. She was the first musical theater grad in 1969; although he was a musical prodigy, conducting shows for community theaters while still in high school, he excelled in CCM's drama program, graduating in 1993.) In a recent email, he told me that Myers is playing "a titanic role that narrates the whole show" and added that it's "huge to have Pam in a role tailor made for her." The Carnegie's website has the performance listed but no further information. If you want to be there, I suggest you call the box office and make your interest known: 859-957-1940.

OK, it's the last day of August and the last true weekend of summer. That typically means there's almost no theater, since most of the stages in town are readying their season openers. But you do have a few choices: At the Clifton Performance Theatre you can see the last few performances of Nothing, a production brought back from this year's Cincinnati Fringe Festival. It's a one-man show about bullying and autism, told with lots of illustrative video. It was a popular item during the Fringe in June, so it's certainly worth checking out. Tickets: 513-861-7469. Another Fringe-like option this weekend is a mash-up of OTR Improv and True Theatre, happening at Know Theater, which is kind of like the crazy uncle of these two groups that make the Over-the-Rhine venue their home. On Saturday evening at 8 p.m., they'll present another installment of The Chronicle, a long-form improvisation based on the real-life stories of special guests. Dave Levy and Jeff Groh, the guys who make True Theatre go, are the starting point for the evening's fun and games. They'll tell stories, and then the improv folks will turn them into something more. You can get tickets (for $5) at the door — located at 1127 Jackson Street in OTR. The Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park opens its new season (with a new artistic director) next Thursday with The Three Musketeers. But here's a tip: You can see previews starting Saturday, and tickets are more affordable than during the actual run of the show. You might know the story of D'Artagnan and his three swashbuckling buddies, Athos, Porthos and Aramis — but I bet you've never seen such a rollicking, have-a-great-time production as this one. I just finished reading the very conversational and funny script, and I suspect that audiences will love this show, especially if it's pulled off with visual panache. It's our first chance to see a work directed by Blake Robison, the new guy in charge. He says this is the kind of work he wants to bring to the stage regularly. Be among the first to see what he's up to. Box office: 513-421-3555. Other theaters opening shows next week include Ensemble Theatre Cincinnati on Wednesday (Good People is about unemployed folks dealing with the "new normal") and Cincinnati Shakespeare Company starts its production of To Kill a Mockingbird on Friday. Both productions have fine casts: Annie Fitzpatrick is playing the hard-pressed central character in Good People; Bruce Cromer is the virtuous attorney Atticus Finch in Mockingbird. Both are among our most watchable actors. My Curtain Call column in CityBeat this week offers more about these shows and others that are opening this month.

New Edgecliff Theatre will cancel its first production of the season, largely the result of its need for a new venue. The group has performed in the Columbia Performance Center, the "pink church" on Eastern Avenue in the Columbia-Tusculum neighborhood on Cincinnati's East Side, for several years. Without much notice over the summer, NET was informed by the property's owner that the facility would no longer be available. Artistic Director Jim Stump tells me that they've been notifying the actors and designers who had been recruited for a staging of Eric Bogosian's Talk Radio that the production, scheduled to open on Sept. 27, is not going to happen. He wrote to me in an email, "This is due to a number of factors, not the least of which was the suddenness of our losing the Columbia with little warning.  This meant we spent a significant portion of the time we would normally dedicate to the first production to the search for a new venue. In the end, we didn't feel we could present a production of the quality our audiences would expect." NET is still seeking a permanent solution to its venue needs, but Stump says the company will present The Santaland Diaries and The 12 Dates of Christmas at the Aronoff's Fifth Third Bank Theater in December.

Most of the theaters in town are gathering their strength for the fall season, so there's not much to recommend this weekend — unless you haven't made it to the Carnegie in Covington yet to see the delightfully silly production of Xanadu. (Review here.) The recipe for this delicious concoction is a really lame movie from 1980, some clever new writing by playwright Douglas Carter Bean, really inventive direction by Alan Patrick Kenny (the guy who staged Jerry Springer: The Musical a few summers back) and a cast who can sing (Pop tunes from the ’80s), dance (to a disco beat, no less), act (like Greek muses, well, kind of) and do it all on roller skates! This weekend is your final chance to see the production. After Xanadu closes on Sunday, our local theaters will pretty much be dark for a week or so. Then right after Labor Day, you'll have tons of choices. Look for my Curtain Call column in the upcoming issue of CityBeat for a glimpse of what's in store for September.