Late last month, the CCM student cast of oldie-but-goodie "The Pajama Game," all about union and management at love and war in a pajama factory, was rehearsing, divided into couples and dancing through the tango-esque finale.
"Sex, please!" sings out director Aubrey Berg.
"You're in the coolest place in Iowa. I'd prefer it if you don't smile at each other. Signal to each other with your eyes that you want to do IT.
"
With "The Pajama Game," Berg celebrates his 20th year as chair of the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music's musical theater program, which also gives him the longest tenure of any major director in Cincinnati.
Such is the reputation of the mainstage musicals at CCM that the five-performance runs sell out as much as a month before opening night. The only tickets left now are limited-view seats, on sale this week.
CCM has always had a respected program. It's Berg's extraordinary team, including choreographer Diane Lala, that has taken it to the top ranks of training programs in the nation - and in musical theater, that means the world.
CCM is a small program - averaging 60 students across four years at any given time.
So when you count up the grads populating Broadway, the percentages would get a hitter in baseball's hall of fame:
Five CCM alumni in "Les Mis," three in "The Apple Tree," three in "Legally Blonde" due this spring, one each in "High Fidelity" and "The Times They Are A-Changin' " and two in "Mary Poppins," which shares an opening night with "The Pajama Game." That will keep Berg from cheering on 2004 grad Ashley Brown, who plays Poppins.
Director Stafford Arima, whose credits include Playhouse in the Park's current "Ace," notes, "I see hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of actors.
You always know when it's CCM - there's polish, clarity, wonderful professionalism, even if someone graduated seven minutes earlier. Everybody knows it."
Berg, 56, is a native of South Africa and heavily influenced by the social, political and theatrical ferment in London and Off-Broadway in the late '60s and '70s and by "every Broadway recording I could get my hands on.
"
Half a world away, Berg and his pals were avid students inventing avant-garde productions, like one "set on a Vietnam battlefield where a performance of 'Swan Lake' was going on," he chortles.
"Reserved" is the word you hear most when people describe Berg, and even "chilly," but it depends on whom you ask.
Lala says that, "deep down Aubrey is a cuddly guy - and a shy guy.
"
Berg has a deep intellect combined with a wicked sense of humor, a disinclination to make small talk and the highest imaginable standards. His Clifton bungalow is filled with art. He is expert at horrid and very rude show tune parodies, and his rhymes are both surgical in their precision and usually unprintable.
IT ALL STARTED WHEN...
Berg came to "audition" at CCM at the urging of old pal Terrell Finney (now a division chair at CCM, with oversight of opera, musical theater, drama and arts administration). They met 25 years ago, working together at a small liberal arts college in Birmingham, Ala.
Finney recalls Berg being reserved "and even shy" when he interviewed for the Birmingham faculty post, and feared he wouldn't fit the personality of the department.
That is until the end of a long day when a dejected looking Berg "walked into the lobby, threw himself to the floor, waved his arms and legs in the air like some demented beetle and shouted, 'This is my submissive pose! No more interviews! I submit.
' I decided on the spot he was the right person for the job."
Berg is certainly the right person for CCM musical theater, although he'd been a generalist before taking over the program here.
The secret of his success is that Berg sees all theater the same way.
"The through line is believability - not realism, I don't like the word - with theatricality," he says. "These are not conflicting, they are complementing.
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