25
Jul
2016
In 1971, Jim Jacobs took his experiences attending Chicago's Taft High School and, together with Warren Casey, wrote the book, music, and lyrics for a musical titled Grease. You may have heard of it.
Thursday's preview performance of the District Theatre's High Fidelity was, during its first act, a painful experience ... because by intermission, my facial muscles actually hurt from smiling so much. While this musical - composed by Tom Kitt and Amanda Green, with a book by David Lindsay-Abaire - is, in itself, a lot of fun, director James Fairchild and his cast rocked the hell out of it, presenting its story of a record-store owner's most recent breakup (in a long line of them) with infectious energy.
Among Bye Bye Birdie's signature numbers is the show-tune staple "Put on a Happy Face," and barring one intentionally, gloriously sour exception, the cast for the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre's winning and energetic production of this Broadway warhorse has done just that.
By the time the titular character entered the play, I'd resigned myself to having to endure two more hours of few-and-far-between laughs during Friday's performance of The Nerd, while also fighting off a sleepiness fostered by the unusually high temperature in the Richmond Hill Barn Theatre. However, appearing in only his third stage role, Jordan L. Smith woke me up and held my attention with his annoyingly nasally delivery of playwright Larry Shue's monologues. The best reason to see The Nerd, it turns out, is the nerd himself.
I adore the movie version of Grease, and think it's one of the few musicals in which the film is an improvement on the original stage version. The theatrical musical is less cohesive in terms of the timelime's flow, forcing the audience to fill in the gaps between scenes, and I kind of hate that about it - unless a stage production transcends the script's weakness, in which case, like the movie, I love it. However, while I did not hate Friday's performance of Grease at the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse, I didn't exactly love it, either.
I approached Thursday's preview performance of Quad City Music Guild's Grease with preconceived opinions, not the least of which was that Grease is one of the few stage musicals that greatly improved in its transition to film. Not one of the half-dozen or so stage productions of this 1950's-themed high school musical I'd seen convinced me that the show was much good in its theatrical form; at best, I hoped for some notable performances in a musical I still wouldn't like. I didn't expect that great performances from the entire cast would have me re-thinking my entire opinion of Grease. They did.
I love TV's The Office for many reasons, but the most basic is that nowhere else on television will you find a weekly ensemble of 16 performers, each of whom is consistently in character, and each of whom is consistently funny. No matter where your eye lands in a group scene, you find yourself grinning - if not laughing out loud - at some priceless reading or reaction, and that's what routinely occurs throughout the Timber Lake Playhouse's current, knockout presentation of Grease, a production that, coincidentally, also boasts an ensemble of 16 stellar comedians. (Seventeen, if you count the hysterical, wordless, run-on cameo by Jake Bollman.) And Timber Lake's troupe even tops the sitcom's office drones in one regard, because damn, but this staff can sing.
I got pretty choked up at Quad City Music Guild's production of It's a Wonderful Life: The Musical, especially when George started yelling at his kids. (They were so cute!) I was truly affected by the anguished performance of John VanDeWoestyne in the Richmond Hill Barn Theatre's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
