11
Apr
2011
On Thursday night, the cast of the Richmond Hill Barn Theatre's Escanaba in da Moonlight brought me to a place I'd yet to arrive at in all of the theatre I've seen in the area: I experienced a fit of tear-filled giggles so strong, so overwhelming, that I missed several lines of dialogue.
I've enjoyed every Prenzie Players production I've seen to date, but perhaps none more so than Pericles, Prince of Tyre. That's actually odd to say, since William Shakespeare's tale of the world's luckiest unlucky prince - a seafarer who really should just avoid the sea altogether - wouldn't necessarily be called "fun." Director Andy Koski and his cast, however, manage to find the humor in the script and bring it to the forefront, embellishing it and even adding quips of their own, and elicited lots of laughs from Saturday night's audience.
There's a charming naïveté at the core of the Internet Players' debut production of The Tragedy of Sarah Klein, as the playwright's perspective seems to be one often observed in college students and recent graduates - a belief that "I am one of the very few who sees certain injustices in the world, and I, alone, can wake the world up to them." Wake-up calls of this sort are often attempted with protests, targeted vandalism, or, in the case of Sarah Klein, the stroke of a pen, yet while the Internet Players' Thursday-night performance was poetic in word and impressive in scope - particularly in playwright/director Nathan Porteshawver's staging - it was also pretentious and, at times, dull.
The Harrison Hilltop Theatre's The Graduate provides a respectable amount of fun, considering that almost nothing in it makes the least bit of sense. Adapted from Charles Webb's 1963 novel and/or Mike Nichols' seminal 1967 comedy, Terry Johnson's script frequently feels like the movie version on fast-forward - the playwright clumsily barrels through both the narrative and its complex emotional transitions - and the show's tone and performance styles are all over the map. Yet considering its frequently awkward and unconvincing elements, director Wayne Hess' comedy does at least offer one truly magical ingredient in Erin Lounsberry, whose performance here is insinuating, disturbing, sexy, and richly, deeply funny.
