A musical based on the Weekly World News' tabloid-famous Bat Boy screams "camp." Augustana College's production of Bat Boy: The Musical, however, is not campy enough, as a couple of the leading actors played their parts too seriously or sincerely during Friday's performance, softening the effect of this musical's craziness.
Would it be possible to get a cast recording of the District Theatre's Parade? Because the production is so well-sung by its cast members, I wouldn't mind listening to them perform composer/lyricist Jason Robert Brown's songs over and over again. The solos are stirring, as characters sing about their relationships and roles in a Georgia town gripped by the rape and murder of a 13-year-old girl. But some of the ensemble numbers gave me goosebumps during Saturday's performance - particularly the hauntingly sad "Funeral Sequence: There Is a Fountain / It Don't Make Sense," performed as the townsfolk remember the young lady whose body was found in the basement of a local pencil factory.
Brad Hauskins elicited the largest laughs during Friday's performance of Spreading It Around at the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse, starting with the moment he first walked onstage with his frozen-hip shuffle. His psychologist character Dr. Ward doesn't actually appear until the middle of the second act of this comedy, which concerns the efforts of the widow Angie to share her wealth (and that of her fellow retirees) with those in need, rather than leaving it to their ungrateful children. But with little stage time, Hauskins squeezes out every ounce of comic possibility from his role, relishing his awkward pauses, and dryly delivering his lines with the slightly high-pitched, mildly shaky voice stereotypical of the elder person he's portraying.
By the time the titular character entered the play, I'd resigned myself to having to endure two more hours of few-and-far-between laughs during Friday's performance of The Nerd, while also fighting off a sleepiness fostered by the unusually high temperature in the Richmond Hill Barn Theatre. However, appearing in only his third stage role, Jordan L. Smith woke me up and held my attention with his annoyingly nasally delivery of playwright Larry Shue's monologues. The best reason to see The Nerd, it turns out, is the nerd himself.
Playwright Tom Dudzick's Don't Talk to the Actors seems a good fit for the actors at Scott Community College. This story of a young playwright's first play to be produced in New York City includes a range of characters to suit many acting styles - from meek and innocent to hammy and bawdy - and director Steve Flanigin's cast elicited many laughs during Thursday night's handling of Dudzick's material.
Many cast members in the Prenzie Players' current offering, Titus Andronicus, are at their best expressing physical and emotional pain. There's Aaron E. Sullivan's shift from utter despair to cackling insanity as the title character, Catie Osborn's post-rape brokenness as his daughter Lavinia, and Jessica White's shrieks as she watches her character's son slaughtered. The desperation is so penetrating in its realism and sincerity that I was often uncomfortable during Friday night's performance - which is to say that the production is shockingly effective at delivering the darkness of Shakespeare's work. I walked away in awe.
I attended Quad City Music Guild's The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee on Monday, and before proceeding, it's important to stress that the performance I saw was actually a dress rehearsal that took place three nights before the show's official opening.
Friday's performance of the Center for Living Arts' Spring Awakening wasn't perfect. But it was in the production's imperfections that its main strengths were revealed, because the earnestness in the actors' portrayals wound up overshadowing the pitch problems, and the enthusiasm of director Dino Hayz's young-adult cast - who performed the hell out of the piece - proved so infectious and stirring that the show still proved effective.
New Ground Theatre's current offering, Mr. Marmalade, is about four-year-old Lucy and her imaginary friends. Suicidal, coke-snorting, physically and mentally abusive imaginary friends. And it's incredibly funny. One particularly dark scene during Thursday's performance, in fact, had me laughing so hard, for so long, that I was wiping away tears by the end of it.
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