items tagged with You Cant Take It with You

More than a third of the area productions I attended this year - a whopping 35 of them - I saw in the 91-day span from May 17 to August 15. And more than half of those shows - 19 in all - were produced by a combined five theatre organizations: Rock Island's Genesius Guild, Eldridge's Countryside Community Theatre, the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre (CAST), Mt. Carroll's Timber Lake Playhouse, and Davenport's newly established Riverbend Theatre Collective. My experiences with this quintet formed a fascinating theatrical journey, one boasting plenty of highs, occasional lows, randomly bitchy Web-site comments ... .

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.

In the Playcrafters Barn Theatre's current production of Crimes of the Heart, Ashley Hoskins portrays Babe, the youngest and most eccentric of playwright Beth Henley's Magrath sisters, and the actress is like a nervous breakdown on legs.

This is meant as the highest of praise.

No one in his or her right mind could possibly think that the Elvis Presley pastiche All Shook Up, the new presentation at the Timber Lake Playhouse, is a stronger piece of theatre than West Side Story or You Can't Take It with You, the first two presentations in the venue's 2008 season.

But whatever you do, do not, for the love of Pete, tell this to the performers in Timber Lake's latest, who are attacking this goofy lark with such impassioned zeal that you'd think they were enacting Shakespeare. (And, it turns out, they oftentimes are.)

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.