items tagged with J.C. Luxton

Roughly 10 minutes before the Prenzie Players' presentation of The Winter's Tale gets underway, there's a brief, improvisational scene between the Bohemian king Polixenes (David Furness) and Prince Mamillius (Stephanie Moeller), the young son of the king and queen of Sicily.

Five Extraordinary Ensembles

An actor friend of mine says he always wants to be the worst performer in everything he's in, because if the rest of the cast is doing stronger work than he is, that means the show is in really, really good shape. With that in mind, any actor worth his or her salt would be thrilled to be the worst performer among these five ensembles.

After six seasons of reverse-gender casting, anachronistic details, audience interaction, and unapologetic tweaking and trimming of classical works, the happily untraditional Prenzie Players have, with their production of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, moved in a truly subversive direction: They've gone traditional. Sort of.

Say what you will about the Prenzie Players' latest presentation, but you can't say that the classical-theatre troupe, with its production of Pedro Calderón de la Barca's Life's a Dream, is merely resting on its laurels.

The latest undertaking by the Quad Cities' classical-drama troupe the Prenzie Players is an adaptation of Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca's Life's a Dream, and at one point during a recent interview, group co-founder and Dream director J.C. Luxton tells me, "This show is just running, running, running. There aren't a lot of breaks for anybody."

Including, as it turns out, the audience.