items tagged with Jonathan Gregoire

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 ... .

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.

Into the Woods (August 10 - 12, 2007): The Green Room's debut production was Stephen Sondheim's and James Lapine's fairy-tale musical, and many of its cast members had previously worked with director Derek Bertelsen (also the venue's Executive Director) and music director Tyson Danner (the Artistic Director) in the pair's previous, fund-raising performances for the Children's Therapy Center of the Quad Cities: 2005's Ragtime and 2006's The Secret Garden. Both vividly remember opening night.

Derek: It smelled like fresh paint.

Tyson: It did. We painted that morning.

I didn't think there was much wrong with Sunday night's presentation of Genesius Guild's Romeo & Juliet, aside from the fact that I didn't feel much of anything at it. But in terms of this particular Shakespeare play, isn't that a pretty sizable issue?

A preface for those at Sunday's Genesius Guild presentation of The Comedy of Errors: You know that horribly rude woman who talked, and talked loudly, on her cell phone through the first two minutes of the play, even after repeated shushings and one verbal request to shut the hell up? I sat three rows behind her.