Andy Koski and Aisha Ragheb in Romeo and Juliet More than a third of the area productions I attended this year - a whopping 35 of them - I saw in the 91-day span from May 17 to August 15. And more than half of those shows - 19 in all - were produced by a combined five theatre organizations: Rock Island's Genesius Guild, Eldridge's Countryside Community Theatre, the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre (CAST), Mt. Carroll's Timber Lake Playhouse, and Davenport's newly established Riverbend Theatre Collective. My experiences with this quintet formed a fascinating theatrical journey, one boasting plenty of highs, occasional lows, randomly bitchy Web-site comments ... .

Meghan Hakes, Lori Dansby, and Joshua Estrada in Chicago All things considered, Friday night's presentation of Chicago at the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre was pretty darned impressive.

Dallas Milholland and Blake Adams in Sweeney Todd There were a fair number of shocks at Saturday's presentation of the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre's Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. But one of the biggest came before the show even started: When the house lights dimmed, I looked down from my chair in the Showboat's balcony, and gazed upon ... nearly a half-dozen rows of completely unfilled seats.

Alison Luff in Thoroughly Modern Millie When he took the stage before Thursday night's presentation of Thoroughly Modern Millie, the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre's producing artistic director - and Millie director - Craig A. Miller mentioned that audiences might notice a couple of changes at the 'Boat this year.

Guys & Dolls ensemble members The Clinton Area Showboat Theatre's production of Guys & Dolls is wonderfully entertaining and loaded with personality, but in the role of Miss Adelaide - the put upon showgirl with the psychosomatic head cold - Kay Ann Allmand is so sensationally enjoyable that her portrayal practically defies description.

Permit me to give it a shot anyway.

You Can't Take It with You ensemble members Thursday's opening-night presentation of You Can't Take It with You at the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre was polished, snappily paced, and almost universally well-performed. But attendance was hardly what it should have been for this venerated Kaufman & Hart comedy - I'd venture that less than two-thirds of the seats were filled - and truth be told, it's not hard to figure out why.

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.