There was much to love about the Timber Lake Playhouse’s opening-night presentation of Gypsy. But if pressed for a favorite moment in this dynamically entertaining musical, it might’ve been the one in Act II in which a third-rate burlesque show loses its featured stripper, and our protagonist Mama Rose, without apology or shame, volunteers her long-ignored, wallflower daughter Louise for the job. It wasn’t the narrative turn that got me; it was the response of Timber Lake’s audience, who released a collective “Oh no she didn’t!” gasp-and-laugh implying they were legitimately shocked – shocked! – at Rose’s readiness to pimp out her child. Was this crowd somehow under the impression that, despite all previous evidence, Mama was actually not a monster?

"Tell your story!" "But who will listen?"

Those opening lines from A Woman Called Truth, now playing at the Playcrafters Barn Theatre, get the audience ready to hear a character's tale. What the audience does not yet get in those opening lines, however, is how very important that story is, and how beautifully it will be told by a diverse and talented cast.

As a child of the '60s and '70s, I favored rock groups such as Kansas. My older sister Shari loved pop music. For many kids, music was a way to escape the turmoil of those decades, and for Shari, it meant listening to Bobby Sherman or folk singer John Denver. Being the youngest, I sometimes teased her about the lameness of her music – and still do, for that matter. However, even for a precocious little brother, the music of Denver always struck a chord of enlightenment in my heart, and that's exactly what happened again at the Timber Lake Playhouse's opening-night performance of Almost Heaven: Songs of John Denver.

"There's a hole in the world like a great black pit, and it's filled with people who are filled with shit. And the vermin of the world inhabit it, and it goes by the name of London."

No lyrics better summed up the setting for a musical than these particular lines from Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and Augustana College's latest production delivers in filling the Potter Theatre with the polluted gloom and human hell that was 1840s London.