items tagged with Scott Community College

Playwright Tom Dudzick’s Don’t Talk to the Actors seems a good fit for the actors at Scott Community College. This story of a young playwright’s first play to be produced in New York City includes a range of characters to suit many acting styles – from meek and innocent to hammy and bawdy – and director Steve Flanigin’s cast elicited many laughs during Thursday night’s handling of Dudzick’s material.

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.

I find it easy to like Scott Community College's production of The War of the Worlds, an adaptation of H.G. Wells' tale of alien invasion, presented here in the radio-drama style of Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre. The performance may not be the best you'll see in the Quad Cities, but the show features so much heart – such simple pleasure in performing – that it's refreshing to sit and watch the show's young men and women play on stage.

“Most of our students work jobs when they’re not at school,” says Scott Community College (SCC) theatre instructor Steve Flanigin. “So when you say, ‘We’re going to do a play – who’d be interested?’, you have to see who’s available before you decide what play you can do. Because if they have to go to a job when we normally rehearse – Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, from three to five – then they can’t do the show.

“I think that’s one of the challenges of doing theatre at a community college that a lot of people don’t realize,” he continues. “What we do depends on who is here in the fall or the spring, and what their schedules are like. I mean, I’d love to do Hello, Dolly!, but not with four people.”

Happily for Flanigin, he was able to secure roughly a dozen student participants for the school’s latest production. And while that number wasn’t large enough for a Hello, Dolly!, it was perfectly appropriate for the show that he and fellow SCC instructor John Turner did choose: a new adaptation of author H.G. Wells’ alien-invasion classic War of the Worlds, running October 20 through 30.

As we’ve come to annually expect, there was practically no end to the highlights from this past year in area theatre.