items tagged with Jay Berkow

For what it is, the Circa ’21 Dinner Playhouse’s Nana’s Naughty Knickers is rather amusing and somewhat unexpected. The title, for me, conjures up images of scantily clad grannies telling off-color, elderly-themed jokes in a wild farce. Instead, playwright Katherine DiSavino’s piece is a mild farce, with a unique plot and interesting, likable characters (and only a handful of age-based jokes). I didn’t laugh quite as much as I expected to during Friday’s opening-night performance, but I was more engaged than I anticipated I would be, and interested in where DiSavino would take her characters.

I'm tempted to say that the high point of the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse's Oklahoma! comes in the show's first minute, when Adam Clough's Curly enters singing "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'" in a thrillingly rich, powerful baritone. Such a statement, however, might indicate that the rest of the actor's performance is somehow less of a thrill. Put simply - and with no disrespect meant to director Jay Berkow or the show's other participants - this Oklahoma! works because of Clough.

As the director of music theatre performance at Western Michigan University, Jay Berkow is well aware of the historical significance of Oklahoma!, which he is currently directing for the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse.

"It is kind of the grandfather, or the progenitor, of the contemporary musical-theatre piece," Berkow says, referencing the work's fame as one of the first "book musicals" in American theatre, wherein songs are fully integrated into the drama, and the lyrics and score are as essential to character understanding as dialogue.

In the 11-week period between June 1 and August 12, I saw 28 area productions. And how did you spend your summer vacation?

Considering the overall great time I had last summer, though, I was hardly dreading this relentless schedule. I'd spent 10 whole months eagerly anticipating my return to the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre (CAST), Mt. Carroll's Timber Lake Playhouse, and - for Genesius Guild productions - Rock Island's Lincoln Park; the summer-theatre triad would be responsible for 17 of those 28 offerings. (Summer 2006 would also provide my introduction to Eldridge's Countryside Community Players, whose Cinderella I missed last year.)

There are a number of fascinating and entertaining elements in the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre's production of Cabaret. But at the show's opening-night performance last Thursday, what fascinated and entertained me most was watching how Cabaret's thematic storyline was being unwittingly enacted by Cabaret's audience.