If you've read this week's issue of CityBeat, you can probably predict my recommendation for theater-going this weekend: It's Walter Mosley's The Fall of Heaven, getting its world premiere at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park.

Charles Woodman, a Cincinnati artist and assistant professor of electronic art at DAAP, reportedly has a knockout five-screen video installation at the new group show The Romance of the Road: Photographs in Search of the Promised Land at Charlotte's Light Factory Contemporary Museum of Photography and Film.

The best ticket this weekend could be the touring production of Spring Awakening, onstage at the Aronoff Center through Sunday. Because its subject matter is a tad gloomy — and a bit edgy for the typical Broadway show-goer — you shouldn't have any problem getting a seat for the 2007 Tony Award winner. And if you're a CityBeat reader, I suspect you'll like this one, even if you're not a theater regular.

Best-selling author and playwright Walter Mosley discusses his inventive new play The Fall of Heaven tonight at Playhouse in the Park in the Marx Theatre. The play is based on his novel The Tempest Tales and runs as a world premiere at the Playhouse Jan. 23-Feb. 20.

The Fine Arts Fund has released the results of a year-long study intended to start the process of building more collective responsibility in Greater Cincinnati for the arts. Despite the general public’s longstanding support for arts and culture in their communities, charitable giving to and public funding of the arts struggle to keep up with demand nationally and locally — and this study was undertaken to try to “change the conversation” here about the arts as a shared public good and to motivate Cincinnatians to increase support.

Not much to recommend onstage this weekend. In fact, there's really nothing going on as local theater companies are rehearsing for productions that will open later in the month. But there there is drama in Salt Lake City involving a former Cincinnati theater artist. Less than four months on the job, Jason Bruffy, artistic director for six years Know Theater of Cincinnati, is leaving his position as executive artistic director with the Salt Lake Acting Company (SLAC). Bruffy, who founded the Cincinnati Fringe Festival and worked to bring Know to a more professional level in a new physical facility on Jackson Street in Over-the-Rhine, expressed his reasons for departure from the 31-year-old theater in two words: "Artistic differences."

Audience response can be a good indicator of which holiday shows are hitting the mark. While I found the humor in Know Theatre's Sideways Stories from Wayside School to be a tad forced (you can read my full review here), the theater’s box office phone (513-300-5669) has been ringing steadily, so they've added a performance this weekend on Saturday at 3 p.m., and also on Dec. 27, the final day end of the run.

I think there are few more satisfying segments of musical theater than the opening 10 minutes of the musical Chicago, which is in town for a brief run at the Aronoff Center. The first number, “All That Jazz,” gives you an encyclopedia

Aisle Gallery, 424 Findlay St., 3rd Floor in the West End, is presenting a gallery talk with artist, curator and Citybeat contributor Matt Morris this Saturday from 1-3 p.m.

If you can get a ticket this weekend for Hair at UC's College-Conservatory of Music, that's the show to see this weekend. It's an intentional trip down memory lane — if your memory goes back 40 years. (The show that turned the world of Broadway upside down in the late 1960s is being presented as part of the celebration of the 40th anniversary of CCM's musical theater program.) If not, and you want a taste of what all the shouting was about in 1969, Corbett Auditorium is the place to be.