The premise is strange enough to stop you: a barmaid out of time, once the muse of Edgar Allan Poe, retells her encounters with the writer while famous poems blur into her own stories, and the audience is invited in to help piece together the mystery of how Poe actually died. That is the setup for Poe Is Dead: A New Musical, which lands at Summit Artspace, 140 E Market St in downtown Akron, for three workshop performances October 23 through 25, 2026 — Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. (doors at 7), Sunday at 2:30 p.m. (doors at 2).
The show is the work of two Cleveland theater artists: music and lyrics by Jacob Bremkamp, book by Adam Hoffman. It is being staged by Starcatcher Theater, a young Akron company, and it rounds out Starcatcher's 2026 inaugural season. Tickets run $16.50 and are sold through the company's Showpass page; they are non-refundable, though they can be transferred to another performance if seats are available.
What makes this run worth attention is that it is not a finished product being trotted out, but a step in a long, incremental development process — one that has already passed through several very different incarnations.
The origin story begins in 2008, when Hoffman wrote a play called Quoth the Raven as a touring production for a local professional theater. It was later expanded into a full stage production and mounted more than once. Then, in 2023, Bremkamp approached Hoffman with the idea of turning that play into a musical, and Poe Is Dead was born.
Since then the piece has been reshaped repeatedly. According to the creative team's own project history, it started as a short play with a modest tour, grew into a presentation staged on a railroad, and then blossomed into a full-scale musical revue at Cleveland State University. It has also been workshopped at Western Reserve, and the script and score have gone through many changes since. The team describes the work as nearing its final draft and hopes this production takes it to the next level.
That history explains why the word "workshop" matters here. A workshop production is theater's equivalent of a working draft made flesh — a chance to hear the material in front of a live audience, in a room that is not a full commercial house, and to learn what lands and what does not. The creative team lists direction by Deb Lemire.
The subject matter is a natural fit for that kind of tinkering. Poe, who lived from 1809 to 1849, is one of American literature's most haunting figures, and his death is one of its most durable mysteries — he died under circumstances that have never been satisfactorily explained. His fiction and poetry, steeped in madness, obsession and the fragility of reality, mirrored a life marked by tragedy, poverty and loss. The musical leans into that: rather than a straightforward biography, it filters Poe through Ginny, the barmaid who says she was his muse, letting his poems and her memories bleed into one another until the audience is left sorting fact from invention alongside her.
The setting adds its own layer. Summit Artspace occupies a building that has been an Akron landmark since 1927, when it was commissioned by John S. and James L. Knight as the new headquarters of the Akron Beacon Journal. Three stories and roughly 55,000 square feet, it was, by the organization's own account, an epicenter of the city's creative and civic life for nearly a century — on November 10, 1927, President Calvin Coolidge started the paper's presses using a telegraph key from the White House. Today the nonprofit runs the building as an artist incubator, with affordable studios, rotating exhibitions in five galleries and public programs. Staging a musical about a 19th-century writer's death inside a former newspaper headquarters, in galleries hung with local art, is the kind of pairing that only a scrappy local company would attempt.
Starcatcher Theater itself is a young operation with an explicit mission. Founded by Ryan Leflar, a Kent State graduate with a BFA in directing, the company describes itself as an up-and-coming black box theater in Akron offering acting and theatrical design classes alongside performances. Leflar's stated motivation is access: he has written about growing up in a small Tennessee town where the nearest community theater was an hour away and the prices were out of reach, and about wanting to build something where theater is not reserved for those who can afford it or who started training at age three. The company's New Works initiative, which partners with local playwrights to showcase and workshop new scripts, is the pipeline that brought Poe Is Dead to Akron.
For audiences, that means a rare look at a musical in motion. Workshop stagings tend to be intimate and unpolished in the best sense — closer to the actors, with a script still being tested and a score still being adjusted. For anyone who has wondered how a musical actually gets made, or who simply wants to see what two Cleveland writers and a new Akron company do with one of American literature's strangest deaths, three performances in a downtown arts building is a small window. Details and tickets are at starcatchertheater.com.