As I got comfortable in my seat for the Monday-night dress rehearsal of Quad City Music Guild's A Christmas Story: The Musical, I was fully expecting a 24-hour marathon, as well as my ingesting the show only in sporadic moments throughout the day in between kitchen visits to fill up on ham and chocolate. That's customarily how I enjoy the film version. Alas, there was no marathon, or ham, or chocolate. But there was a fun production filled with holiday cheer - and aside from the addition of songs, the theatrical version is a mirror image of the movie.
On at least three occasions during Thursday's preview performance, Quad City Music Guild's Young Frankenstein achieved a transcendent silliness - the kind you get with stunning regularity in Mel Brooks' film-spoof inspiration. If you include everything said and done by Nate Karstens' hunchback Igor, it was more like 203 occasions, but in the spirit of this tasty musical confection, let's save the sweetest for dessert.
Quad City Music Guild's Les Misérables has the look and feel of the local community theatre producing its own, specific version of the Broadway favorite, with its music by Claude-Michel Schönberg and lyrics by Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel. And that delights me, given that I wanted to see the group's take on this much-loved musical, rather than an attempt to recreate one of its previous stagings.
I had an utterly fantastic time at Quad City Music Guild's preview performance of The Drowsy Chaperone, director Bob Williams' high-spirited and hysterical presentation of the long-running Broadway hit. Yet I'm embarrassed to say that I may have inadvertently missed 10 of its most entertaining minutes, because I made what was, in retrospect, a terrible mistake: I left the auditorium during intermission.
The Shakespeare-inspired Elvis Presley pastiche All Shook Up is too inconsequential and ridiculous - gloriously so - to feature anything resembling a moral. But if pressed, you could probably fashion one from the words of its motorcycle-riding hero, Chad: "It's like my daddy used to say: 'In the right light, with the right liquor, anyone can fall for anyone.'"
