17
Dec
2008
For the third year in a row, I've composed a list of 12 area-theatre participants who devoted their time, energy, and skills to numerous theatrical organizations and venues during the past year. And once again - happily and inspiringly - it hasn't been necessary to repeat names from one year to the next; local theatre, to the great good fortune of local audiences, never seems to run out of talent.
Church Basement Ladies is a show I'd love to be hateful towards, because it sort of compresses everything I don't traditionally enjoy in musical theatre into one convenient package, and because its four-nonsecular-girls-and-a-guy conceit is such a blatant ripoff of those pitiful sequels to Nunsense, in which creator Danny Goggin decided to spice things up by adding a man to the mix. (I'd call Church Basement Ladies an unapologetic ripoff, except we Lutherans are apologetic about damn near everything.)
Mel Brooks' musical The Producers - currently being produced at the Timber Lake Playhouse - received 12 Tony Awards in 2001, more than any Broadway musical before or since. And so I say this with all the deference and reverence that Brooks' historic achievement deserves: When Timber Lake's Justin Banta was throwing himself around the stage as a mincing Adolph Hitler in the show-within-a-show Springtime for Hitler, I was laughing so hard I almost freakin' wet myself.
If you've ever had the desire to catch British comedian Rowan Atkinson on stage, especially as his famed Mr. Bean character, the Timber Lake Playhouse's presentation of The Foreigner may well satisfy your urge - the wizardly Jeremy Day is performing mime-clown routines that Atkinson himself would be happy to steal from.
The difficulty in reviewing Smokey's Joe's Café, the Timber Lake Playhouse's season-closing musical, doesn't lie in knowing how to start, but when to stop. A plotless assemblage of '50s and '60s rock & roll hits, bluesy love songs, and novelty tunes by composers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, this jukebox revue finds its nine-person cast performing nearly three dozen numbers, and based on their presentation here, I could make a fair case for devoting 500 words to each of them.
You might think it odd that, for its penultimate summer production, the Timber Lake Playhouse is staging Irving Berlin's White Christmas, thereby celebrating the holiday season a good two or three months before the malls will. But the actual presentation turns out to be stranger still. Not only are you getting White Christmas here, you're getting three or four different White Christmases; the results aren't bad, necessarily, but the show winds up feeling a bit like the Bing Crosby classic as co-directed by Michael Curtiz, Tommy Tune, and Rip Taylor.
The Timber Lake Playhouse's production of Bat Boy the Musical features a cast of 15 playing some two dozen characters, more than a fifth of whom will be dead by the curtain call. Necks are bitten, throats are slashed, overdoses are administered, and through it all, Bat Boy's performers look as though they couldn't possibly be having more fun. En masse, Timber Lake's ensemble just might compose the happiest musical cast I've seen all year, and considering the material they're working with, and the director they're working for, how could they be anything less?
The scariest thing about the Timber Lake Playhouse's world-premiere production of Dracula is the set, and I mean that as a compliment. Designed by Joseph C. Heitman, the industrial playing space includes a series of metallic walkways with perilous inclines, some 20 feet above the floor, and the walkways themselves are slightly askew. The best way I can describe Dracula's architecture is by saying that, if the set were an amusement-park attraction, you'd be both ecstatic and petrified about riding it.
