Know Theatre Presents ALL-ONE! Next Month
All-One! opens March 10 and runs through March 26.
By: Stephi Wild Feb. 16, 2023
Small minds decay! Average minds delay! Great minds teach All-One today! A riotous celebration of life's darkness and light, inspired by the only soap that's ever made you want to read the label, top-to-bottom. Cincy Fringe favorites Erika Kate MacDonald and Paul Strickland team up to lead this one-of-a-kind (extremely unauthorized by the Dr. Bronner's corporation) theatrical experience.
All-One!, the fifth production of our 25th Anniversary season, is a circus-slash-bathtime extravaganza inspired by the stranger-than-fiction life of "Doctor" Emmanuel Bronner, who escaped Nazi persecution in Germany and built a soap empire to lift his family out of poverty - and to spread his self-created "All-One" religion, teach his "Moral ABCs," and to save "Spaceship Earth."
Every production of All-One! features all-new original material devised by the cast as they explore the various uses of Dr. Bronner's famous 18-in-1 soap, which means that this production will be unique from its previous or any future productions - this is your singular chance to see this script performed.
Local theatre artist (and frequent Cincinnati Fringe Festival performer) Erika Kate MacDonald joins the Know to direct All-One!. Her 2016 Cincy Fringe solo show Ice Candle won the Critics' Pick of the Fringe; she's appeared in multiple Cincy Fringes since either alone or alongside fellow Fringe favorite Paul Strickland. Paul joins Erika once again for All-One! as composer and music director of the show.
To tackle a story this big, we'll need to break out every trick in our bag. In All-One!, get ready for original songs, showtunes, dance, storytelling, a water ballet performed in a kiddie pool, and a musical combination featuring guitar, mellophone, accordion, and castanets.
"This show feels essential to the present moment. It's about celebrating and delighting in difference, about choosing to come together not split apart, about radical impossible love in the face of appalling human actions.
It's a show that focuses on absurdity and wonder and passion, and also mundanity... and insists on making room for everyone.
My hope is that initially any audience member will see themselves easily in some cast members and not at all in others. But this show will be so undeniably fun and wacky and intimate that by the end audiences will fall in love with the whole cast and thereby with the whole world! That's got to help, right?"
- Erika Kate MacDonald, Director of All-One!
All-One! is for anyone who's weathered life's storms and understands that after the darkness, we are still alive and ready to create joy. It's for anyone who feels like they've walked the fine line - sometimes the perforated line - between genius and madness.
It's for anyone who's ever dreamed of a meteoric rise to fame, and wondered what they'd have to give up along the way.
It's for anyone who's hungry for a wacky celebration of our shared humanity, and who's ready to tap into the creative spirit to remind ourselves why we're alive.
The theatre will be welcoming back some familiar faces to the Know MainStage for All-One! Elizabeth Chinn Molloy rejoins the Know after previous appearances in SuperTrue (2018), Mercury (2019), In The Night Time (before the sun rises) (2020) and Theatre: A Love Story (2021).
Hot off their successes as stars of last autumn's superhero musical Lizard Boy, Ian Timothy Forsgren and Erin McCamley (who also music directed Lizard Boy and 2016's Girlfriend) return to the Know for All-One!
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