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.

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.