Around Cincinnati

With better weather on the way, racing fans in this area are beginning to plan for the upcoming Kentucky Speedway season. Lee Hay, an avid NASCAR fan, happily welcomes in Mark Simendinger, the general manager of the Kentucky Speedway, to preview the 2013 race weekends and especially this year’s third running of the Quaker State 400 on Saturday, June 29.

During last year’s Fringe Festival, one of the most popular presentations was a new musical with the 80’s movie blockbuster Ghostbusters as its basis. Don’t Cross the Streams: The Cease and Desist Musical is getting its first full theatrical production from Falcon Theatre and Hugo West Theatricals, starting on March 15 at Newport’s Monmouth Theater. Jim Stump finds out more about the genesis of this show and this stage production from co-writer Mike Hall and cast member Tom Highley.

Local musician Kim Taylor is on quite a roll. Her new, self-produced CD, Love’s a Dog, has just been released and the movie she co-starred in, I Used to be Darker, just appeared at the Sundance Film Festival. Somehow, she found the time to join Brian O’Donnell in the studio to talk about this whirlwind and where 2013 might take her next.

Ensemble Theatre Cincinnati opens the regional premiere of Black Pearl Sings by Frank Higgins on March 13, and it’s a powerful musical about being a woman in a man’s world, being black in a white world, and about holding on to your soul when the world treats people as a commodity. Lee Hay finds out more about this production from the two stars, Annie Fitzpatrick and Torie Wiggins.

Local author Shelley Shepard Gray is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author whose newest novel, Daybreak, has now been published. The author joins our Barbara Gray to talk about her writing, the success she’s achieved, and this new novel.