items tagged with North Scott High School

The Reader's chief theatre reviewer, Thom White, saw and wrote about 52 area stage productions in 2011. I saw 39 and reviewed 12. Obviously, during our second-annual breakfast chat on the Year in Theatre, there was a bit to talk about.

In the beloved Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland films of the 1930s, staging a full-length musical production seemed ridiculously easy: A bunch of talented youths would simply unite with the rallying cry “Let’s put on a show!”

“It was really just kind of casual,” says Potts of the Quad City Singers’ 1994 beginnings. “Just friends getting together and deciding, ‘You know, we like to sing, so let’s form a group and see what happens.’”

On Saturday night, I had the distinct pleasure of taking two very special young ladies - eleven-year-old Hannah and six-year-old Madison - to the theatre, since Countryside Community Theatre's Annie seemed the perfect choice to foster their love for live performance. And love it they did, calling the production "awesome" and "really good." As for me, I... didn't exactly love it, but liked it well enough.
Read More About Love & Warbucks: “Annie,” At North Scott High School Through August 1...

Countryside Community Theatre's current, charming presentation of Annie Get Your Gun is directed by married couple Christina and William Myatt, and stars married couple Sheri and Wayne Hess as Annie Oakley and Frank Butler. (You'll also find the wedded Cheryl and John Wagner among the show's 38 cast members, plus several parent/child and sibling/sibling combinations.) Yet the production's most endearing, unexpectedly inspired couple turns out to be two performers who don't share 40 years between them, and whose characters you're probably unfamiliar with if your only exposure to this Irving Berlin classic comes via Ethel Merman's glorious blare.

South Pacific comes to us with an intimidating load of pedigreed baggage: Pulitzer Prizes, Tony Awards, Rodgers & Hammerstein. And if you add its dramatic World War II setting, its themes of interracial romance and prejudice, its enormous scenic drops and set pieces, and its cast of two dozen plus, it'd be enough for Countryside Community Theatre's current production of the piece to be impressive, and it most certainly is that.