items tagged with Joshua Estrada

For the third year in a row, I've composed a list of 12 area-theatre participants who devoted their time, energy, and skills to numerous theatrical organizations and venues during the past year. And once again - happily and inspiringly - it hasn't been necessary to repeat names from one year to the next; local theatre, to the great good fortune of local audiences, never seems to run out of talent.

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.

Ryan Schabach is one of the cast members from the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre's three-man comedy The Compleat Wrks of Wllm Shakspr {abridged}, and I haven't yet determined if he's (a) an exceptionally good actor, (b) completely out of his mind, or (c) both. I'm going with (c), but if other commitments weren't keeping me away from Clinton for the rest of the show's run, I'd be happy to see it again just to be sure.