Kyle Szen, Amanda Hendricks, and Justin Verstraete in Wait Until DarkOver 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.

Kyle Szen and Meredith Jones in The Wedding SingerOn 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.

David Herr, Eli Pauley, and Phillip Newman in Lend Me a TenorThere 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.

Kaci Scott and Thomas Stewart in GreaseI 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.

"Cabaret" In the 11-week period between June 1 and August 12, I saw 28 area productions. And how did you spend your summer vacation?

Considering the overall great time I had last summer, though, I was hardly dreading this relentless schedule. I'd spent 10 whole months eagerly anticipating my return to the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre (CAST), Mt. Carroll's Timber Lake Playhouse, and - for Genesius Guild productions - Rock Island's Lincoln Park; the summer-theatre triad would be responsible for 17 of those 28 offerings. (Summer 2006 would also provide my introduction to Eldridge's Countryside Community Players, whose Cinderella I missed last year.)

I am prepared to ignore and/or forgive the technical glitches that accompanied the opening-night performance of The Wizard of Oz at the Timber Lake Playhouse, and this is no small task, as the glitches in question caused the production, at times, to be borderline embarrassing.

Yes, the monkeys flew, as did the Wicked Witch of the West and a bizarre creature called the Jitterbug, and when the flying effects worked, they were magical. Our first airborne sight, in fact - that of Miss Gulch pedaling her bicycle across the stage - earned a rousing ovation from the audience and deserved it, and the twirling, chirping winged monkeys were sensational; at sporadic moments, this Wizard of Oz was as fanciful and enchanting as you wanted it to be.

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