items tagged with Peggy Freeman

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.

In its opening minutes, Quad City Music Guild's Evita is so thrilling that even though the production begins with a funeral, I found it nearly impossible to stifle my giggles.

In a theatre weekend that found me attending a Rodgers & Hammerstein musical, a Kaufman & Hart play, a Shakespeare, and a pseudo-Shakespeare, I have to admit that, with the Riverbend Theatre Collective's presentation of Kimberly Akimbo, I was so psyched to see actors in modern dress screaming obscenities at one another that I could barely contain myself.

There are actors in the Quad City Music Guild's current production of Anything Goes that are behaving like total idiots.

Thank God.