What starts as a theatre audition quickly becomes something entirely different in the QC Theatre Workshop’s second production, Private Eyes. And this change from what’s real to what’s … well … something else is something I don’t want to fully describe, because such a shift happened several times – and at very unexpected moments – during Friday's performance, making the evening a bit of an intriguing thrill that repeatedly piqued my curiosity.

After seeing Friday’s performance of Hank Williams: Lost Highway at the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse, I am reassessing my typical disdain for jukebox musicals, particularly those that are biographies of particular artists wrapped inside collections of their greatest hits. Playwrights Randal Myler and Mark Harelik, here, managed to create a work that – in addition to being cohesive and easy to follow – nicely weaves Williams’ hits into the story and is incredibly interesting to boot. And thanks to a pleasingly lengthy, Hee-Haw-esque scene in the middle of the second act, Myler and Harelik also avoid the seemingly too-frequent theatrical trend of shows with second acts that are much too serious and downbeat.