Melissa Scott, Mike Kelly, Clare VanEchaute, Alex Richardson, Mollie A. Schmelzer, and Greg Bouljon in The Fox on the FairwayThe Playcrafters Barn Theatre's production of The Fox on the Fairway is a bit of a conundrum, as the script isn't as consistently funny as much of playwright Ken Ludwig's other fare, specifically Lend Me a Tenor and Moon Over Buffalo. But his tale of rival golf clubs duking it out at their annual tournament remains riveting nonetheless. While the laughs were there during Friday's performance - and those laughs were oftentimes hearty, if not as plentiful as they could've been - it was the uncertainty regarding which direction Ludwig's tale would go, and the outcome of his plot, that maintained interest in this story.

Alison Nicole Luff, Jennifer Gilbert, Joshua Estrada, and Joshua Wright in I Love You, You're Perfect, Now ChangeI Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change is composed of 20 comic vignettes that explore the difficulty of modern relationships, and at the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre's Wednesday-night performance of the musical, one scene found a young man (Joshua Estrada) overwhelmed by the kid-crazy perkiness of his new-parent friends (Alison Nicole Luff and Joshua Wright).

As the pair gabbed incessantly about baby's first words and his poop, they juggled baby monitors and toys, and at one point, Wright accidentally dropped one of the child's playthings on the floor. Without missing a beat, Luff, in an obvious ad lib, instructed her husband, "Sterilize that," and the vignette would have continued uninterrupted if our audience's delighted, laughing-and-applauding reaction to the improvisation hadn't forced them to pause.

Lend Me a TenorThis is why I love live theatre.

In the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre's production of Ken Ludwig's Lend Me a Tenor, Will Morgan plays Tito Merelli, an egocentric and wildly passionate Italian opera star. Late in Act I, the character discovers that his equally tempestuous wife is leaving him. Merelli subsequently launches into a fit of hysterically inconsolable grief, and on Thursday night, Morgan wailed and moaned with peerless comic abandon.

Yet at the very moment the actor began his tirade, there was an enormous thunderclap, and the evening's rainstorm - which had been percolating for an hour - significantly grew in intensity. For three minutes, the squall outside seemed to echo the personal tsunami that Morgan was enacting on-stage, until finally, with Joshua Estrada's hapless nebbish Max calming him, Morgan's Merelli collapsed on the bed, devastated and exhausted.

And outside, as if on cue, the storm began to subside.

(Titles and dates are subject to change.)

 

Augustana College: Dead Man Walking (February), The Vagina Monologues (February), Festival of Short Plays (February), Stuff Happens (April). (http://www.augustana.edu/academics/theatre/department)