It was a dark and stormy night … . No, seriously – it really was a dark and stormy night on August 11, which, fortunately, enhanced the eeriness and prolonged the tension of the opening night for the Timber Lake Playhouse's final production of its summer season.
There's magic in the Timber Lake Playhouse's Peter Pan that reached my inner child and set him dancing. Even knowing that Rosie Upton's title character would fly, I still got chills when scenic designer Benjamin Lipinski's grand windows were flung open and the forever-young boy floated through them. And that thrill only took a break during the production's intermission, otherwise staying with me during its entire two hours.
If the Timber Lake Playhouse's production of Les Misérables is the only experience some theatre-goers will have with Alain Boublil's and Claude-Michel Schönberg's much-loved musical, I think that would be more than okay. Director Matthew Teague Miller and his cast and crew not only do justice to the material, but present it in a memorable way that, for me, actually improves on the long-running Broadway version. This is an exceptional production, boasting fantastic performances and exquisite imagery.
Prior to last Thursday, I had seen 40 productions at Mt. Carroll's Timber Lake Playhouse, and somehow, during all those visits, I had never been there when it rained. Yet rain it did on Thursday, and it rained hard, and I couldn't imagine more fitting weather for the venue's opening-night performance of An Inspector Calls, an eerie, succulent psycho-drama (with laughs) that made the literal storm clouds a spectacular match for the figurative ones on-stage.
