items tagged with Timber Lake Playhouse

There are wonderfully fresh, unexpected grace notes all throughout the Timber Lake Playhouse's presentation of You Can't Take It with You, but you have to be quick to catch them. Then again, for much of the show's length, you have to be quick to catch just about anything.

Certain theatrical works are so inherently satisfying that they're pretty great even when their productions are only pretty good, and some are so firmly entrenched as classics that nothing less than spectacular will do. West Side Story is the rare piece that's actually both - a thrilling entertainment that many of us have seen way too many times - and the Timber Lake Playhouse's West Side Story is both, as well; it starts out as pretty good passing for pretty great, and ends up spectacular. By its finale, director James Beaudry's offering had morphed into one of the smartest, most impassioned versions of this legendary Bernstein/Sondheim/Laurents collaboration I've yet seen. It just took a while to get there.

I love making lists. Love it. And I get an annual charge out of composing "10 best"s for the Reader based on my movie-going experiences: 10 Best Films, 10 Best Guilty Pleasures, 10 Best Action Blockbusters Based on a Pre-Existing
Toy ... .

So when I started thinking about my forthcoming Year in Theatre recap a few weeks ago, I thought it might make for a fun change of pace to compose "best" lists for area stage productions.

For 2006's Year in Theatre recap, I included a list of 12 talents whose gifts couldn't help but be noticed, as they had performed exemplary work on a number of theatrical offerings during the year, oftentimes at a number of area venues.

It's the list so nice I'm doin' it twice!

Among those I spoke with during the show's subsequent opening-night party, the prevailing opinion seemed to be that the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse's new production of Irving Berlin's White Christmas was superior to the 2006 production, and I guess that maybe, in several respects, it was.