Over the last five summers, I've attended more than a dozen productions directed by the Timber Lake Playhouse's artistic director, Brad Lyons, and the majority of them have been utterly sensational. But I can't recall ever being more knocked out by the man's skills and obvious love for his craft than I was during Friday night's Wait Until Dark, Timber Lake's current - and top-to-bottom stunning - presentation of playwright Frederick Knott's 1966 thriller.
On Thursday night, the Timber Lake Playhouse opened The Wedding Singer, the musical-comedy version of 1998's love-in-the-'80s movie hit starring Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore. Imaginatively and exuberantly directed by Brad Lyons, it's a joyful take on stage material that (in a wonderful surprise) is pretty damned terrific to start with, and Thursday's production was so big-hearted, so funny, so brilliantly costumed, and so smashingly well-performed that I might as well get it out of the way and say that its technical presentation was so routinely clunky that it bordered on the infuriating.
There are nights during the run of a happily manic, door-slamming farce when everything seems to go magically right: The actors hit their marks exactly on cue, the dialogue lands with almost inhuman accuracy, and the set's many doors open and shut with razor-sharp precision. The audience, meanwhile, barely has time in between laughs to catch its collective breath.
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.
In the 11-week period between June 1 and August 12, I saw 28 area productions. And how did you spend your summer vacation?Subscribe & Listen to Reader Podcasts
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