items tagged with Playcrafters Barn Theatre

Chris Walljasper isn't exactly a new face in area theatre, as the actor (and recent co-founder of Davenport's Harrison Hilltop Theatre) appeared in Genesius Guild's and Opera@Augustana's Patience last year summer, the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse's Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story this past winter, and, most memorably, Carousel and A Year with Frog & Toad for Rock Island's The Green Room.

Yet it's entirely conceivable that audiences for the Playcrafters Barn Theatre's Promises, Promises will watch his performance and, on the drive home, ask one another, "Who was that guy?", because Walljasper is delivering the sort of terrifically engaging and endearing musical-comedy turn that makes you wonder why you haven't seen even more of him.

During a recent post-show conversation, an actor friend and I agreed that perhaps the most exciting moments at any theatrical production are those few seconds before the production even starts, when the lights dim, cell phones (please God) are turned to silent or vibrate, and the venue becomes alive with possibility - with the awareness that, in this live art form, absolutely anything can happen.

In the Playcrafters Barn Theatre's current production of Crimes of the Heart, Ashley Hoskins portrays Babe, the youngest and most eccentric of playwright Beth Henley's Magrath sisters, and the actress is like a nervous breakdown on legs.

This is meant as the highest of praise.

Near as I can tell, there are two types of people: those who like Reginald Rose's jury-room drama 12 Angry Men, and those who haven't seen it yet. So speedy and smart, so filled with personality and (mostly) unforced emotion, the work seems practically indestructible, and I actually fall into a special subset of people: those who love 12 Angry Men with a passion bordering on mania. (Between Sidney Lumet's 1957 film version and the 1997 television remake, I've watched it - and this is a conservative estimate - more than three dozen times.) So it was with nearly delirious excitement, and just a touch of dread, that I attended the Playcrafters Barn Theatre's Saturday-night presentation of the show, the first stage production of Rose's piece that I'd seen.

In the Playcrafters Barn Theatre's current production of Anybody for Murder?, Christopher Tracy plays Max Harrington, a seemingly mild-mannered gentleman who, through the course of the play, will attempt to murder his wife, convince his girlfriend to assume her identity, attempt to murder his girlfriend, drug potential witnesses, and lie to everyone he comes in contact with. Yet while Max may be a monster, it's pretty apparent that Tracy himself is just about the best friend a moderately funny comedic thriller could ask for.