Adam Michael Lewis and Tom Walljasper in Don't Dress for Dinner Nothing about the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse's production of Don't Dress for Dinner makes the slightest bit of sense. Including my liking it as much as I did.

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.

Tanner Bollinger, Jenny Guse, Jacqui Pugh, and Zack Powell in Irving Berlin's White Christmas 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 Seussical ensemble No childless adult should feel the least bit silly about attending the Countryside Community Theatre's madly enjoyable production of Seussical.

But just in case the thought of a family-friendly evening of candy-colored costumes and rhyming couplets gives you pause, know that by missing this production, you'll miss what might stand as the musical-comedy performance of the year. As the Cat in the Hat, Nathan Meyer is giving the sort of fiercely committed, ceaselessly inspired portrayal that feels like the reason God invented musical comedy.

Gryan Woods, Grace Pheiffer, Anna Tunnicliff, and Susan Perrin-Sallak in The Winter's Tale Saturday's Genesius Guild presentation of The Winter's Tale never quite found its tone, but it's hard to be too bothered by that, because I'm not convinced that Shakespeare's play ever finds its tone, either. The bard's work is an unusual, somewhat off-putting blend of high and low comedy, aching tragedy, and pastoral romance, and I can only assume that pulling it off in a way that makes sense requires an extraordinary amount of finesse. Director Patti Flaherty's production didn't display this sort of acumen, yet to its credit, the show was never less than pleasant. Whether The Winter's Tale is meant to be pleasant is another matter entirely.

Spiro Bruskas, Craig Michaels, and Scott Naumann in Flaming Idiots On Friday night, I attended a comedic farce that featured slamming doors, mistaken identities, gunshots, an unhelpful cop, a heavily accented mobster, an attractive woman getting sloppy drunk, and a finale that found characters staring with amazement at a briefcase filled with cash.

And on Saturday, I attended another one.

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.

Angie Keeney, Don Hazen, Jim Pearce, and Don Faust in A Few Good Men Imagine an episode of TV's The West Wing performed at half-speed, and underwater, and you may begin to approximate the experience of the Richmond Hill Barn Theatre's opening-night performance of A Few Good Men.

Dallas Drummond, Chris Castle, and Nathan Batles in Joseph & the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat When I learned that Quad City Music Guild's new presentation of Joseph & the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat would feature a cast of nearly a hundred - 98, to be exact - I was both thrilled and slightly concerned. Thrilled because ... well, come on, what fan of musicals wouldn't want to see and hear an assemblage of that many performers?

But my concern stemmed from wondering what director Harold Truitt was going to do with them all. Even with 56 members of the children's chorus seated on both sides of the stage, apart from the main action, 42 seemed a rather excessive number of participants for this enjoyably featherweight biblical piece. Would Joseph's enormity prove beneficial, or detrimental?

Boib Hanske, Patti Flaherty, and James J. Loula in Medea Euripides' Medea, the title character of the Greek drama currently being produced in Rock Island's Lincoln Park, is a vengeful sorceress who - after discovering the unfaithfulness of her lover, Jason - kills Jason's wife, the king of Corinth, and, in her most monstrous act, her two young sons. And while I'm not sure what it says about me, I may have had more sheer fun at this Genesius Guild endeavor than at any other I've seen over the past two years. With superior direction by Peggy Hanske, this Medea is a vibrantly dramatic, unexpectedly funny, and completely accessible version of the classic tale, and it's the most consistently well-acted Genesius Guild production I've yet seen.

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