10
Oct
2006
Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened at the Richmond Hill Barn Theatre last Thursday, and I may as well preface by admitting that, before the show started, I couldn't have been more excited, as this classic has long been one of my absolute favorite plays.
It's easy to understand how, in a musical devoted to a famous recording artist, certain aspects of the performer's history will fall through the cracks. How do you comprehensively detail an artist's life - anyone's life - in the span of two hours? But until I saw the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse production of Stand by Your Man: The Tammy Wynette Story, I never experienced a musical biography that delivered too much information. Marriages, divorces, children, addiction, electro-shock, tabloid romances, a kidnapping attempt - the show is so chockablock with facts and minutiae that it's like the stage adaptation of Wynette's Wikipedia listing.
My Verona Productions' The Nonconformists Double Bill is composed of two comedic, one-man performance pieces; Jason Conner and Adam Lewis star, arranged the material, and serve as the show's directors. In the show's first half, Conner enacts a half-dozen vignettes from bohemian performance artist Eric Bogosian's Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll; in the second, It's Just a Ride: A Tribute to Bill Hicks, Lewis has fashioned a 40-minute monologue from the stand-up routines of the late comedian. And while the work is a local debut, I'm probably one of the few people in the area who initially caught the production when it opened out-of-town.
Offhand, I can think of no type of play more annoying than one that won't stop insisting on how clever it is.
As their character names would suggest, the show's titular trio - Patty (Suz Adamson), LaVonne (Susan Brodin), and Maxine (Judi Gronseth) - performed classics of the 1940s with Andrews Sisters harmonies while engaging in good-natured repartee. An energetic, malapropism-prone emcee named Yannis (Timothy Shawn) danced, flirted, and told corny jokes. A backup band - Bobby Argyle & His Sox - smoothly accompanied the performers to such standards as "In the Mood," "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree," and "I'll Be Seeing You."
There are a number of fascinating and entertaining elements in the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre's production of Cabaret. But at the show's opening-night performance last Thursday, what fascinated and entertained me most was watching how Cabaret's thematic storyline was being unwittingly enacted by Cabaret's audience.
Last August, in writing about the Richmond Hill Barn Theatre's production of Over the Tavern, I prefaced my review by mentioning the conversation I had with the couple sitting next to me; none of us had previously heard of the Tom Dudzick comedy we were about to see, and were looking forward to the surprise.
At any musical performance, the applause and cheers of a large, captivated audience are thrilling to experience, and at Saturday night's splendid production of Ain't Misbehavin' at the Timber Lake Playhouse, the crowd, on more than a few occasions, did indeed go nuts.
About halfway through the overture for the Quad City Music Guild's preview performance of The Wizard of Oz, my friend, sporting a huge grin, turned to me and whispered, "I feel like I'm watching the movie." With the thrillingly familiar strains emanating from music director Valeree Pieper's splendid orchestra, I agreed completely, and it's fair to say that over the next two-and-three-quarters hours, that feeling almost never waned.
