I 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.
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.
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?
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.
The Timber Lake Playhouse's production of Bat Boy the Musical features a cast of 15 playing some two dozen characters, more than a fifth of whom will be dead by the curtain call. Necks are bitten, throats are slashed, overdoses are administered, and through it all, Bat Boy's performers look as though they couldn't possibly be having more fun. En masse, Timber Lake's ensemble just might compose the happiest musical cast I've seen all year, and considering the material they're working with, and the director they're working for, how could they be anything less?
When the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse first produced Goldilocks & the Three Bears in 2002, I was a member of the cast, so I'll admit that there weren't many surprises for me in the venue's new production of the family musical. There was one biggie, though: Beneath the program credit that read "Adapted for the stage by Justin Gebhardt," I saw my own name listed under "With additional material by ... ."
New Ground Theatre's Living Here is composed of five one-acts by local playwrights, each one set in the Quad Cities, and I applaud New Ground's decision to stage this showcase for local talent; the production as a whole is more than inspiring, it's important, and the efforts of these theatrical artisans deserve to be seen.
This is why I love live theatre.
In his director's notes for the Countryside Community Theatre's presentation of The Fantasticks, William Myatt writes that he was honored to helm the production, but also concerned, as Tom Jones' and Harvey Schmidt's minimalist musical wasn't originally intended for a 900-seat venue such as North Scott High School's Fine Arts Auditorium. "Would a show of such intimacy be swallowed by the size of the North Scott theatre?" asks Myatt in his program notes.
Rating its Degree of Difficulty on a scale of one through ten, I'd give Genesius Guild's opening-night performance of Shakespeare's As You Like It... hmm... about a 27.
