items tagged with Village Theatre

Five Women Wearing the Same Dress, the Alan Ball comedy that opens the Riverbend Theatre Collective's 2009 season, takes place during a wedding reception, and the production is kind of like a wedding reception - or at least, the reception for a bride and groom you don't know all that well. It might begin awkwardly, but after a few drinks, dances, and interesting encounters with people you otherwise wouldn't have met, you discover that you're having an unexpectedly fantastic time, and when it's over, you may realize that you're not quite ready to leave.

In New Ground Theatre's current production of playwright Julie Marie Myatt's Cowbird, Patti Flaherty is a glorious wreck.

With the current Much Ado About Nothing, I've now attended 10 presentations by the classical-theatre troupe the Prenzie Players, and perhaps fittingly, it's maybe the most sheerly Prenzie Prenzie production I've yet seen.

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.

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.