items tagged with Village Theatre

Roughly 10 minutes before the Prenzie Players' presentation of The Winter's Tale gets underway, there's a brief, improvisational scene between the Bohemian king Polixenes (David Furness) and Prince Mamillius (Stephanie Moeller), the young son of the king and queen of Sicily.

Truth be told, playwright Adam Bock's Swimming in the Shallows - currently being produced by New Ground Theatre - is a bit of a mess. If, however, a show is fortunate enough to feature Pat Flaherty and Susan Perrin-Sallak as a bickering married couple, Eddie Staver III performing an underwater pas de deux in scuba gear, and a tuxedo-clad shark dancing the Macarena, it doesn't much matter if the script falls apart.

David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross is arguably, though not that arguably, the author's best-known, best-loved, and all-around best play. (Thanks to 1992's celebrated film version, I have friends - including friends who don't really like plays - who can quote entire scenes verbatim.) And it's no overstatement to say that the cast recruited for the Curtainbox Theatre Company's presentation of this exhilaratingly profane comedy is ridiculously gifted. At one point here, you'll find Michael Kennedy, Pat Flaherty, Eddie Staver III, Louis Hare, and Daniel D.P. Sheridan all sharing the Village Theatre stage, and that's before David Furness and Tristan Tapscott show up.

At last count, there were a whopping 46 area-theatre productions scheduled between September and December, and included among the titles are A Dog's Life, The Big Funk, Scrooge!, Don't Hug Me, and Mid-Life! The Crisis Musical. It's the season that my editor, Jeff, has been waiting for!

They don't touch, they don't come within five feet of each other, and with one notable exception, they don't share a moment of eye contact. But in the Riverbend Theatre Collective's current production of Hate Mail, Jeff De Leon and Stephanie Burrough exude such combustible comic spark that you wouldn't necessarily want them to interact directly; the Village Theatre might damn well go up in flames.

Neil LaBute's Bash - the debut presentation from the newly formed Phoenix Theatre Company - finds three of the author's short plays performed in succession, and in the middle of its first offering, actor Chris White rises from his chair, walks to its back, removes his suit coat, and then sits down again. In movie parlance, this is what would be known as Bash's "action scene."

Director Lora Adams' Village Theatre production of The Boys Next Door opens and closes on the solitary figure of actor Jason Platt, and his portrayal here begs the question: Is there anything the man can't do?

Jason Robert Brown's The Last Five Years is perhaps the best-known, most widely adored American musical that, in all likelihood, you've never heard of. Unless, that is, you're well-versed in modern musical theatre, in which case Brown's two-character, mostly dialogue-free offering probably isn't familiar so much as borderline-legendary.

The Prenzie Players' presentation of Euripides' The Trojan Women, adapted by Richard Lattimore, runs just over an hour, and I can't imagine who would want it to last longer than that. There's so much anguish and grief on display, and the material appears so deeply felt by director Jill Sullivan-Bennin's cast, that the production leaves you not just haunted, but shaken; it's questionable whether either the actors or the audience could endure two hours of such extreme emotional states.

In the loveliest segment of the one-act monologue Going Back Naked - the first half of New Ground Theatre's Going Back Naked: Two Plays by Local Playwrights - author Melissa McBain, portraying herself, reads from her late mother's 70-year-old love letters, and lands on a passage wherein her Mom refers to the children she hopes to one day have with her young paramour. Marveling that she was being thought of a full decade before she was actually born, McBain takes a beat and smiles, and addresses her absent mother in tones of longing and wonder: "You imagined me."