items tagged with Clinton Area Showboat Theatre

There is so much energy in the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre’s High Fidelity that I practically had to hold myself down in my seat throughout Thursday night’s performance to avoid jumping up and dancing along with the actors. Not only are the book by David Lindsay-Abaire, lyrics by Amanda Green, and music by Tom Kitt great fun, but director Patrick Stinson and his cast seem to have a rocking good time staging it.

The Clinton Area Showboat Theatre kicks off its summer season with two similarly themed shows running in repertory, and I caught a double-feature of Nunsense and Altar Boyz on Saturday – a marathon day of Catholic humor. The pairing is a good choice, with each offering a self-aware musical featuring jokes related to Catholicism. And while the scripts push the boundaries of Christian decency, neither crosses over into completely irreverent territory, each maintaining a respect for religious roots and having fun with the shows’ core faith, rather than at its expense.

As we’ve come to annually expect, there was practically no end to the highlights from this past year in area theatre.

The Clinton Area Showboat Theatre’s production of It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play has several things going for it. One, it’s nostalgically familiar – who hasn’t seen the It’s a Wonderful Life movie at least once? Two, it’s a holiday show for an audience that’s more than likely in a Christmas spirit, and already jolly when sitting down to watch the play. And three, it’s short, running one hour without an intermission. However, there’s one major element missing from the Showboat’s show that would make it really good: melodrama.

If not for Patrick Stinson’s direction and the cast’s performances (Cole Rauch’s and Tanya Smith’s in particular) adding an effectively creepy air, the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre’s Dracula would be a rather dull affair. Playwright Crane Johnson, it seems, would much rather describe vampiric events in his script than write so that anyone directing the play might show them. It’s not nearly as frightening, after all, to hear someone tell of bodies found or women bitten in the neck as it is to see these events happen before your very eyes.