items tagged with Scott Community College

Scott Community College's Who Am I This Time? runs just shy of 45 minutes, and on Saturday evening, I would've been more than happy if the production ended not with a curtain call, but an intermission, followed by a second act in which the cast performed the same show all over again.

The Quad Cities' spring theatre season will be bookended by Shakespeare, with the March 6 opening of Much Ado About Nothing, and Sophocles, with the May 28 debut of Oedipus Rex. But just because these plays are, respectively, more than 400 and 2,400 years old, it probably isn't wise to enter them expecting the expected. This Sophocles, after all, is subtitled The Audacity of Oed, and this Shakespeare is being staged by the Prenzie Players, so in both works, you may as well expect anything to happen; considering our lineup also features titles by Stephen Sondheim, Neil Simon, Euripides, and Mel Brooks, I'm thinking you can say the same for the theatre season as a whole.

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.

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.

The short stories of author Shirley Jackson frequently kick you in the gut. The current presentations of Jackson's The Summer People and The Lottery at Scott Community College frequently tickle your ribs.

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.

For romantic comedies that display a proudly eccentric or whimsical bent, it's a fine line between aw-w-w-w and u-u-u-ugh. And playwright John Cariani's Almost, Maine - a series of comically romantic vignettes that involves 19 Northeasterners in a frigid American province - seems almost designed to encourage irritated sighs and eye-rolling amongst its more jaded attendees. It's the sort of literal-minded fantasy in which one character carries the remnants of her broken heart in her purse, and another returns to her boyfriend's apartment with armfuls of "all the love you ever gave me," and angrily dumps them on the floor.

Design for Living, which Scott Community College is currently presenting at the Village Theatre, is a quick-witted Noël Coward comedy concerning an interior decorator (Bri Kenney's Gilda) who finds her romantic affections torn between a struggling artist (Randy Langtimm's Otto), and a struggling playwright (J.W. Hertner's Leo). It is also, by a considerable margin, the most engaging of the three Scott productions I've seen since November, and while I'm not usually the type to bestow awards, I want to begin by praising three facets of Saturday's presentation that might easily stand as theatrical "bests" of 2008.

My Verona Productions' last stage presentation premiered almost a year ago, so you could argue that the company is simply making up for lost time with its production of Christian Krauspe's Inside Out, a play within a play within a play (within another play, if I interpreted the climactic scene correctly). Yet based on its April 10 preview performance, the author's work-in-progress is still less a play than a stoner's conceit - "What if, like, everything we say and do is being written by, like, some unseen higher power who's, like, determining our actions without, like, our knowing it?" - and holds together about as well as most stoned ramblings; a few hours and a few bags of chips later, your "insights" begin to look rather dim.

In November, I had the chance to see Scott Community College's presentation of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare [abridged], and the production, like the play itself, was a hit-and-miss spoof on the Bard's entire output. Not all of the jokes - nor all of the performances - were at peak freshness, but it was still an agreeably goofball entertainment that showcased a number of promising actors, and so I had every reason to expect the same from the school's current offering, Richard Blaine, the Merchant of Morocco, as its subtitle is a pretty fair précis for the show as a whole: Or, If Shakespeare Had Written Casablanca.