10
Aug
2015
While I expected to enjoy Quad City Music Guild's Mary Poppins on Friday, I didn't anticipate being as mesmerized as I was by this stage adaptation of the Disney film. The movie's songs by Robert and Richard Sherman are there, with additional tunes by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe, and a book by Julian Fellowes that adds elements from P.L. Travers' children's-lit classic. And the result, while three hours long, is an improvement on its cinematic inspiration, with the additional material even more interesting than the familiar story elements.
Urinetown is one of my top-five-favorite musicals, due to the many songs with memorable, singable melodies by composer/lyricist Mark Hollmann and lyricist Greg Kotis, as well as Kotis' sharply funny, self-referential book. Unfortunately, I was almost immediately disappointed with Quad City Music Guild's production of the show during Wednesday's final dress rehearsal, because the first full minute of director Heather Beck's staging had the ensemble cast frozen in place (and for what actually felt like two to three minutes) during the overture. Yet while my heart sank seeing this dull, uninteresting start to such a creative piece of musical theatre, thankfully, once the overture ended, I wasn't disappointed at any other point during Music Guild's presentation.
As much as I love theatre-in-the-round, I recognize that not all plays work in a 360-degree environment. Take, for instance, Noises Off, the current offering at the Richmond Hill Barn Theatre. A farcical comedy about the staging of a play (within the play) titled Nothing On, the show's second act offers, essentially, a view of the first act's goings-on seen from backstage, and the production's set is typically turned 180 degrees during the intermission to allow for that behind-the-scenes look. Consequently, prior to Thursday's performance at the Barn, I was baffled as to how director Jalayne Riewerts would pull off, in the round, this production of author Michael Frayn's farce. She does it, it turns out, by not staging the piece in the round.
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.
I had an utterly fantastic time at Quad City Music Guild's preview performance of The Drowsy Chaperone, director Bob Williams' high-spirited and hysterical presentation of the long-running Broadway hit. Yet I'm embarrassed to say that I may have inadvertently missed 10 of its most entertaining minutes, because I made what was, in retrospect, a terrible mistake: I left the auditorium during intermission.
The audience at the Richmond Hill Barn Theatre's Saturday-night performance of Christmas Belles - 
I'm sure there are those of you who don't think Mel Brooks' musical comedy The Producers is all that enjoyable, especially if your only acquaintance with the show is 2005's film version. But even if you felt burned by that woebegone adaptation, I urge you to check out Quad City Music Guild's current take on Brooks' modern classic, so you can see just how sublimely hysterical this material can actually be; I'm guessing that the only audiences who could possibly leave director Kevin Pieper's glorious show-biz satire in a bad mood are the easily offended and the abjectly humorless. (And you know who you are, because upon reading that, you instinctively presumed I was referring to you.)
If you peruse your program before the Quad City Music Guild's current production of Once Upon a Mattress, you'll see that Joe Urbaitis plays a character named Prince Dauntless the Drab. While watching the actor, it probably won't take long for you to decide that Urbaitis is colossally miscast in the role, as his inventive, fearlessly funny performance in this musical comedy is anything but drab.
