items tagged with Our Town

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.

Playwright Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is one of the few preachy plays that I don’t mind for its sermonizing. With his blatant, nearly Buddhist statements and themes about living, really living, each and every moment of life, Wilder is unapologetic about the points he wants to drive home. And perhaps because his ideas are so universally acceptable, it’s easy to accept Wilder’s moralizing. It also helps that the delivery of his messages is so emotionally poignant, as was effectively displayed during Friday night’s Our Town performance at Augustana College.

No childless adult should feel the least bit silly about attending the Countryside Community Theatre's madly enjoyable production of Seussical.

But just in case the thought of a family-friendly evening of candy-colored costumes and rhyming couplets gives you pause, know that by missing this production, you'll miss what might stand as the musical-comedy performance of the year. As the Cat in the Hat, Nathan Meyer is giving the sort of fiercely committed, ceaselessly inspired portrayal that feels like the reason God invented musical comedy.

You can tell that the Playcrafters Barn Theatre's production of Strangers on a Train is doing its job, and doing it quite well, because - at Friday's opening-night performance, at any rate - the show appears to be making a large segment of its audience really uncomfortable.

There seems to be a pretty safe rule of thumb regarding the productions at Quad City Music Guild and the Richmond Hill and Playcrafters Barn theatres: When the actors appear to believe in their material (whether that material is strong or weak), the shows are terrific, and when they don't, they're not.