14
Jul
2014
Legally Blonde: The Musical is, of course, based on the 2001 hit starring Reese Witherspoon, a movie that led to a rather woebegone sequel in 2003's Legally Blonde: Red, White, & Blonde. Yet while watching the original film's stage version on Thursday, I felt that Red, White, & Blonde also would've been a fitting title for Quad City Music Guild's terrifically peppy new presentation, considering that this solo-star-driven show came off, instead, as pretty wonderfully democratic.
I quite like the tone of the Richmond Hill Barn Theatre's More Than Meets the Eye, as director Joseph R. DePauw's production brings a natural feel, and a welcome lack of affectation, to a play that kind of screams for affectation. Instead of overplaying the plot's cross-dressing humor, Friday night's performance offered a softer, more realistic approach to its comedy that rendered the jokes more subtle, but still laugh-out-loud funny. Unfortunately, the laughs in author Fred Carmichael's play are, if not few, fairly far between (though when the jokes do hit, they're good ones), and it doesn't help that DePauw's pacing is a bit on the slow side, lengthening the wait between punchlines.
Thank the theatre gods for Denise Yoder, as her presence livens up New Ground Theatre's production of Anton in Show Business every moment she's on stage. Portraying a handful of characters, Yoder really gets to showcase her range; whether she's playing a somewhat ditzy stage manager, or a race-conscious black woman directing a play-within-a-play, or a self-assured, bad-joke-telling, male underwriter, Yoder's sense of pace and comic timing are flawless. (Her director is a particular hoot, and her aggressively annoyed attitude as the stage manager T-Anne - who grows more and more impatient throughout the piece - is hysterical from beginning to end.)
In the Harrison Hilltop Theatre's current take on John Steinbeck's Of Mice & Men, actor Jim Seward plays the chatty, friendly ranch hand Candy, and at one point tells a story about his boss treating the workers to a gallon of whiskey for Christmas. It's a charming little reminiscence - Candy, in the terrifically ingratiating personage of Seward, giggles with delight at the memory - but it's also one that would probably be quickly forgotten if the scenes that followed didn't keep bringing it to mind.
Countryside Community Theatre's current, charming presentation of Annie Get Your Gun is directed by married couple Christina and William Myatt, and stars married couple Sheri and Wayne Hess as Annie Oakley and Frank Butler. (You'll also find the wedded Cheryl and John Wagner among the show's 38 cast members, plus several parent/child and sibling/sibling combinations.) Yet the production's most endearing, unexpectedly inspired couple turns out to be two performers who don't share 40 years between them, and whose characters you're probably unfamiliar with if your only exposure to this Irving Berlin classic comes via Ethel Merman's glorious blare.
The Harrison Hilltop Theatre's The Graduate provides a respectable amount of fun, considering that almost nothing in it makes the least bit of sense. Adapted from Charles Webb's 1963 novel and/or Mike Nichols' seminal 1967 comedy, Terry Johnson's script frequently feels like the movie version on fast-forward - the playwright clumsily barrels through both the narrative and its complex emotional transitions - and the show's tone and performance styles are all over the map. Yet considering its frequently awkward and unconvincing elements, director Wayne Hess' comedy does at least offer one truly magical ingredient in Erin Lounsberry, whose performance here is insinuating, disturbing, sexy, and richly, deeply funny.
