I can't imagine anyone who likes the music of Patsy Cline not liking the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse's current offering, A Closer Walk with Patsy Cline. Personally, I don't much care for the mid-20th-Century country style of Cline's songs. However, I very much appreciated Friday night's performance for its staging and its remarkable singing, and therefore, enjoyed music I'd otherwise ignore were I to hear it on the radio.
The sequel to Church Basement Ladies, the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse's best-selling show (ever!), opened last weekend. And if this second installment, Church Basement Ladies 2: A Second Helping, isn't enough "Uff da!" for audience members, don't worry: Circa '21 is already considering upcoming performances of Away in a Basement and A Mighty Fortress is Our Basement, the next scripts in the series.
The Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse's latest is Mid-Life! The Crisis Musical, and it's pretty much exactly what you'd expect given the title and exclamation point in the title: a cheeky, kind of forced, kind of obvious song-and-dance revue that pokes gentle fun at memory and hair loss, adulterous urges, prostate exams, and other "wacky" perils of aging.
By the time the title character takes to the skies in the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse's Peter Pan, the effect, while wondrous, is also somewhat superfluous, since the presentation had already been airborne for a good 40 minutes beforehand, and will continue to be for the two hours that follow. If ever a production deserved to be called "ethereal," it's this one, but even that adjective doesn't suggest just how enthralling this Peter Pan truly is.
Upon entering the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse for Friday's evening presentation of Church Basement Ladies, I handed my ticket to longtime lobby host Ed Jones, who greeted me with a knock-knock joke (one of his better ones, I must say) and some happy news: The audience for that day's matinée performance included seven busloads of guests making their first-ever treks to the Rock Island venue, with one tour group traveling all the way from Champaign, Illinois, to see the show.
When the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse produced Charlotte's Web in 2003, I was lucky enough to perform in the show opposite Janos Horvath's Wilbur, and I vividly remember being amazed that someone could give such a touching, wholly credible performance while wearing a rubber pig nose.
Theatre can be a great escape, but it can also be so much more. In 2006, most of the area's challenging works were presented by the New Ground Theatre, My Verona Productions, and the Prenzie Players, and over the past year and a half, I've had the pleasure of interviewing the impresarios of these organizations: New Ground Artistic Director Chris Jansen, My Verona producers Sean Leary and Tristan Tapscott, and Prenzie founders Cait Bodenbender, John Luxton, Aaron Sullivan, and Denise Yoder.Subscribe & Listen to Reader Podcasts
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