14
Jun
2016
Within this review, be prepared to read the gushings of a 33-year-old man re-living a childhood story he has not experienced in probably 15 years. In re-living it, after a decade-plus of growing, there's also some disappointment in struggling to r...
Let's say you're a young, male biology professor who has landed a job at a small New England college. After a faculty party and lots of drinking, you and your wife are invited for a nightcap at the home of a middle-aged history professor whose sexually charged spouse happens to be the college president's daughter. It's 2 a.m., the liquor keeps coming, and your hosts start to argue. Do you stay? Of course you do. What could go wrong?!
Quad City Music Guild's Les Misérables has the look and feel of the local community theatre producing its own, specific version of the Broadway favorite, with its music by Claude-Michel Schönberg and lyrics by Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel. And that delights me, given that I wanted to see the group's take on this much-loved musical, rather than an attempt to recreate one of its previous stagings.
While Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart falls into too many theatrical traps - primarily, having major actions described rather than physically rendered on stage - the author avoids one of the most common by making her play's second act funnier and more interesting than its first. While I liked the first act of New Ground Theatre's Saturday-evening production, I enjoyed its second half a lot more, laughing heartily with Henley's characters as they cackled over serious subject matter such as their grandfather's lapsing into a coma.
The District Theatre's Xanadu is perhaps the silliest, cheesiest, guiltiest-pleasure piece of musical theatre I've yet seen on a local stage ... and I loved it! Director Tristan Tapscott plays up the goofiness of this self-referential take on the 1980 cult-film favorite, finding delight in its pokes at the movie's ridiculousness and in the infectiously energetic songs, and the resulting mix of fluff and flash adds up to two hours of pure entertainment.
At the start of the intermission to Friday night's District Theatre performance of Company, my partner turned to me and said, "I don't remember this show being that funny." He was right, because director David Turley accentuates the funny parts in this musical by composer Stephen Sondheim and writer George Furth. He does so, however, with subtle nudges and winks that almost cross over into silliness but don't, and that keep the production from sinking into sappy sentimentality.
Judas is angry. Jesus is angry. Everyone's really angry in the Harrison Hilltop Theatre's Jesus Christ Superstar.
Odd as it may seem now, there actually was a period in the Harrison Hilltop Theatre's history - a run of 12 shows, to be precise - in which the company didn't produce any musicals whatsoever. Yet after staging a dozen plays between June 2008 and May 2009, co-founders Tristan Tapscott and Chris Walljasper chose to open the theatre's second season with a production of Jonathan Larson's rock musical tick ... tick ... BOOM!
A day after seeing it, I still can't decide whether I like playwright Jim Leonard Jr.'s And They Dance Real Slow in Jackson, but I do know that I appreciate director Patti Flaherty's efforts in staging this nonlinear tale for New Ground Theatre. During Friday's performance, I struggled to follow the action, as Leonard's script confusingly jumps back and forth in time. Thankfully, however, Flaherty's directorial work helps create some clarity to the "when" with which we're dealing.
With its whopping cast size and an equally daunting song list, Guys & Dolls doesn't seem like the best choice for a rookie director. But that didn't stop local actor Jason Platt from taking the helm of Quad City Music Guild's first summer offering, and making a darned good run of it. To be sure, the Thursday-night preview show either needed a few major cuts to shave off at least 20 minutes of the two-hours-and-50-minute (including intermission) run time, or a quicker musical pace set by music director Charles DCamp. However, the lead vocal performances were phenomenal, the female dance numbers were great fun to watch, and the set design and high-quality costumes effectively represented New York City, circa 1940.
