In its ambitious and atmospheric world premiere, Mrs. Dalloway: A New Musical brings Virginia Woolf’s modernist classic to life through richly layered visuals, gorgeous vocal arrangements, and a cast that delivers committed, emotionally resonant performances.
Christiana Cole leads the company with elegance and clarity as Clarissa Dalloway, grounding the character’s introspective journey with a strong vocal presence and nuanced restraint. The ensemble is uniformly strong, and under Matthew Umphreys’s musical direction, the show’s harmonies shimmer—sometimes wistful, sometimes soaring, always artfully arranged.
Lindsey Augusta Mercer’s score, which she also orchestrated, is striking in its beauty. While some shifts in musical style—especially in the second act—feel a bit abrupt, the ambition behind them is evident. Mercer and the creative team aim to translate Woolf’s famously nonlinear narrative into theatrical form, a challenge that results in moments of abstraction and occasional disorientation. For those unfamiliar with the novel, some of the emotional and narrative threads (such as the connection between Clarissa and the war-haunted Septimus, or the passage of time across decades) may be difficult to follow.
Still, what the production may lack in narrative clarity it more than makes up for in visual and musical texture. Samantha Reno’s scenic design and Rainy Edwards’s costumes are elegant and expressive, and the floral elements—lavish, vibrant, and thematically resonant—help tie the show’s visual motifs together. Robert Carlton Stimmel’s projection design gives the piece a filmic quality, with sweeping images that ripple along the outer edges of the stage like memory itself.
Sara Clark’s staging makes use of the platform space exclusively, a departure from the usual thrust configuration of the Otto M. Budig Theater. While this removes some of the intimacy the space is known for, it gives the show a sense of distance and dreaminess that complements its source material.
If you're willing to lean into the ambiguity, Mrs. Dalloway offers a moving theatrical experience—one that values emotion over exposition, impression over instruction. It's a thoughtful, beautifully designed production that rewards patience and openness, and marks a meaningful and artistically brave premiere for Cincinnati Shakespeare Company.
The production succeeds in capturing something essential about Woolf's vision: the way memory, consciousness, and fleeting moments of connection shape our inner lives. In translating one of literature's most introspective works to the stage, this Mrs. Dalloway creates its own compelling theatrical language—one built on music, image, and the spaces between words where meaning often lives.
Mrs. Dalloway: A New Musical runs through June 15th at Cincinnati Shakespeare Company. Tickets and more can be found here.