items tagged with Alison Luff

More than a third of the area productions I attended this year - a whopping 35 of them - I saw in the 91-day span from May 17 to August 15. And more than half of those shows - 19 in all - were produced by a combined five theatre organizations: Rock Island's Genesius Guild, Eldridge's Countryside Community Theatre, the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre (CAST), Mt. Carroll's Timber Lake Playhouse, and Davenport's newly established Riverbend Theatre Collective. My experiences with this quintet formed a fascinating theatrical journey, one boasting plenty of highs, occasional lows, randomly bitchy Web-site comments ... .

All things considered, Friday night's presentation of Chicago at the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre was pretty darned impressive.

There were a fair number of shocks at Saturday's presentation of the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre's Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. But one of the biggest came before the show even started: When the house lights dimmed, I looked down from my chair in the Showboat's balcony, and gazed upon ... nearly a half-dozen rows of completely unfilled seats.

When he took the stage before Thursday night's presentation of Thoroughly Modern Millie, the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre's producing artistic director - and Millie director - Craig A. Miller mentioned that audiences might notice a couple of changes at the 'Boat this year.

For 2006's Year in Theatre recap, I included a list of 12 talents whose gifts couldn't help but be noticed, as they had performed exemplary work on a number of theatrical offerings during the year, oftentimes at a number of area venues.

It's the list so nice I'm doin' it twice!