items tagged with The Green Room Theatre

There was no lack of spectacular work done in area theatre this year, and the following list is hardly exhaustive. But if you were fortunate, you caught at least a few of these 12 performances in 2008; whether taking on a leading role, a supporting role, or (in one case here) the only role, these gifted artists commanded the stage. And, hopefully, your attention.

If you attend The Green Room's current production of Angels in America: Perestroika, I assume you know that you'll be entering playwright Tony Kushner's work halfway through, as part one of this two-part saga, Millennium Approaches, debuted at the Rock Island venue on Halloween. The back page of Perestroika's program provides a very bare-bones summary (or refresher) on what previously occurred in Kushner's epic exploration of the 1980s, but, I'll venture, your enjoyment of this second outing will be significantly enhanced by familiarity with the show - and not just familiarity with the Green Room's first installment.

Tony Kushner's Angels in America has an intimidating reputation: It's a work in two parts - Millennium Approaches and Perestroika - that earned its playwright a Pulitzer Prize; it boldly explores religion, politics, and homosexuality in Reagan's America; and its two leading figures are men recently diagnosed with AIDS. So where, in regard to The Green Room's current presentation of Millennium Approaches, do I begin in describing just how much freaking fun this show is?

Playwright Tony Kushner's Angels in America begins its run at The Green Room Theatre on October 31, and to hear artistic director Tyson Danner describe it, he and executive director Derek Bertelsen couldn't have chosen a more appropriate production to open on Halloween.

"It's a monster," says Danner.

Into the Woods (August 10 - 12, 2007): The Green Room's debut production was Stephen Sondheim's and James Lapine's fairy-tale musical, and many of its cast members had previously worked with director Derek Bertelsen (also the venue's Executive Director) and music director Tyson Danner (the Artistic Director) in the pair's previous, fund-raising performances for the Children's Therapy Center of the Quad Cities: 2005's Ragtime and 2006's The Secret Garden. Both vividly remember opening night.

Derek: It smelled like fresh paint.

Tyson: It did. We painted that morning.

As its storyline was inspired by 1925's notorious Scopes "Monkey Trial," and its original 1955 presentation a response to McCarthyism, Inherit the Wind is one of those theatrical titles that wears its badges of Importance and Social Relevance on its sleeve. And so it isn't until you see the play (or see it again) that you realize (or remember) just how entertaining it is; Jerome Lawrence's and Robert E. Lee's courtroom drama is less a lecture or a harangue than a juicy, if sentimentalized, episode of Law & Order.

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.

If you weren't able to get tickets for the Green Room's weekend presentations of Assassins, I'm guessing you weren't alone, as all three performances wound up selling out. But over the next two weekends, I urge you to try again - there are scenes in director Derek Bertelsen's production that are so good they'll give you the chills. And the scenes that don't? They're pretty amazing, too.

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.