This is why I love live theatre.
In the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre's production of Ken Ludwig's Lend Me a Tenor, Will Morgan plays Tito Merelli, an egocentric and wildly passionate Italian opera star. Late in Act I, the character discovers that his equally tempestuous wife is leaving him. Merelli subsequently launches into a fit of hysterically inconsolable grief, and on Thursday night, Morgan wailed and moaned with peerless comic abandon.
Yet at the very moment the actor began his tirade, there was an enormous thunderclap, and the evening's rainstorm - which had been percolating for an hour - significantly grew in intensity. For three minutes, the squall outside seemed to echo the personal tsunami that Morgan was enacting on-stage, until finally, with Joshua Estrada's hapless nebbish Max calming him, Morgan's Merelli collapsed on the bed, devastated and exhausted.
And outside, as if on cue, the storm began to subside.
In his director's notes for the Countryside Community Theatre's presentation of The Fantasticks, William Myatt writes that he was honored to helm the production, but also concerned, as Tom Jones' and Harvey Schmidt's minimalist musical wasn't originally intended for a 900-seat venue such as North Scott High School's Fine Arts Auditorium. "Would a show of such intimacy be swallowed by the size of the North Scott theatre?" asks Myatt in his program notes.
Rating its Degree of Difficulty on a scale of one through ten, I'd give Genesius Guild's opening-night performance of Shakespeare's As You Like It... hmm... about a 27.
EVAN ALMIGHTY
The scariest thing about the Timber Lake Playhouse's world-premiere production of Dracula is the set, and I mean that as a compliment. Designed by Joseph C. Heitman, the industrial playing space includes a series of metallic walkways with perilous inclines, some 20 feet above the floor, and the walkways themselves are slightly askew. The best way I can describe Dracula's architecture is by saying that, if the set were an amusement-park attraction, you'd be both ecstatic and petrified about riding it.
HOSTEL: PART II
I've seen plenty of stage sitcoms over the years, but based on Over the Tavern and its sequel, King o' the Moon - currently playing at the Richmond Hill Barn Theatre - Tom Dudzick appears to be that rare stage-sitcom creator with soul.
At Thursday's preview performance of Quad City Music Guild's Thoroughly Modern Millie, I seated myself in the third-to-last row of the Prospect Park theatre, yet even at that distance, I found myself distracted by an intense, nearly blinding illumination shining from center stage. It turns out, though, that this wasn't any kind of technical glitch; it was just Melissa Anderson Clark grinning at us.
Genesius Guild opened its 51st season on Saturday with Gilbert & Sullivan's comic operetta Patience - co-produced by Opera @ Augustana - and the signs were good right from the beginning.
Let me preface by saying that the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre's Friday performance of Always ... Patsy Cline received a hearty standing ovation, which, based on the happy audience murmurs that circulated whenever the band began one of the country singer's signature numbers, appeared largely composed of Cline admirers.
