If you visit the Web site for local not-for-profit-organizer-turned-author Jane Wagoner (http://www.janewagoner.com), you'll be able to read passages from her recent historical fiction, Bells of May, which follows five generations of women rooted in the Harz Mountains of Germany. Here's what you'll find on the site's first page:
"The kiss, begun in sorrow, ignited into passion, a passion born of desperation and loss, wild and unstoppable ... . They came together desperately, without nuance or soft caress. But Katherine, still virgin, was no stranger to orgasm and responded wildly to Christoph's thrusts ... ."
And trust me, things just get racier from there.
THE DEPARTED
On the list of things that are tough to get youths on board with - right up there with meeting curfew and putting down their cell phones - attending the ballet has to rank near the top. Consequently, Ballet Quad Cities Executive Director Joedy Cook has, for years, been bringing the ballet to them.
As part of his stand-up routine, Florida-based comedian Ron Feingold - appearing at Bettendorf's Penguin's Comedy Club October 5 through 7 - performs what he calls "mockappella," in which he apes the stylings of such singers as Joe Cocker, Axl Rose, and Nat "King" and Natalie Cole. And during a recent phone interview, Feingold did appear to possess an uncanny gift for mimicry.
THE GUARDIAN
It's easy to understand how, in a musical devoted to a famous recording artist, certain aspects of the performer's history will fall through the cracks. How do you comprehensively detail an artist's life - anyone's life - in the span of two hours? But until I saw the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse production of Stand by Your Man: The Tammy Wynette Story, I never experienced a musical biography that delivered too much information. Marriages, divorces, children, addiction, electro-shock, tabloid romances, a kidnapping attempt - the show is so chockablock with facts and minutiae that it's like the stage adaptation of Wynette's Wikipedia listing.
My Verona Productions' The Nonconformists Double Bill is composed of two comedic, one-man performance pieces; Jason Conner and Adam Lewis star, arranged the material, and serve as the show's directors. In the show's first half, Conner enacts a half-dozen vignettes from bohemian performance artist Eric Bogosian's Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll; in the second, It's Just a Ride: A Tribute to Bill Hicks, Lewis has fashioned a 40-minute monologue from the stand-up routines of the late comedian. And while the work is a local debut, I'm probably one of the few people in the area who initially caught the production when it opened out-of-town.
ALL THE KING'S MEN
Songs for Older Women - the second of, thus far, seven albums by Chicago rockers Umphrey's McGee - includes a "secret track" on the CD, a song titled "Baby Honey Sugar Darling." And when he first auditioned for the band in 2003, Umphrey's McGee drummer Kris Myers discovered that the group, as it turned out, was no stranger to secrets.
Offhand, I can think of no type of play more annoying than one that won't stop insisting on how clever it is.
