During Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera - the German dramatist's revolutionary musical-comedy collaboration with composer Kurt Weill - we're meant to feel uneasy. With its cast of beggars and rogues, obliteration of the fourth wall, and refusal to cater to conventional audience expectation (the songs here, devoid of proper finales, don't so much finish as stop), The Threepenny Opera is a fascinating, deliberately alienating piece. Our enjoyment stems from how unconventional the show is, but in no traditional sense are we meant to simply like it.
So in regard to director Corinne Johnson's Depression-era Threepenny Opera that recently opened St. Ambrose University's 2006-7 theatre season at the Galvin Fine Arts Center (and closed on October 15), was it a failing or a blessing that so many of its performers were so damned likable?
MAN OF THE YEAR
Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened at the Richmond Hill Barn Theatre last Thursday, and I may as well preface by admitting that, before the show started, I couldn't have been more excited, as this classic has long been one of my absolute favorite plays.
"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 ... ."
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.
