Prior to Friday night, my only experience with Driving Miss Daisy was with the remarkable film version starring the incomparable Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman. Although its tenderness sticks with me, for some reason I don't recall Alfred Uhry's script being terribly funny. And with the Playcrafters Barn Theatre's production of this material, I'm now wondering why I don't remember the humor, considering how loud and often I laughed during director Donna Weeks' presentation.

Director Jennifer Popple's decision to set her Augustana College production of As You Like It in the 1960s is one of the most appropriate changes in time-setting for theatrical material I've yet witnessed. Such shifts sometimes seem gimmicky, or are better in concept than execution, but here it works, and works well.

Near the end of our recent interview, I ask David Casas a question that, I think, most people would want to ask a professional magician who spends much of his time making doves appear and disappear: "Has anything really awful ever happened during your act?"

He smiles and replies: "The only thing that's really happened was at one of my first shows. Every time I used to produce a bird, I would always hold them close to me. So I was doing that at one show, and people started laughing, but I didn't know what they were laughing at. So I just kept going with my act, and they kept laughing, and I think I went to grab a silk or something ... . And then I see this big line of bird poop running down my coat.

"And I was like, 'Oh-h-h-h ... now I get it,'" says Casas. "I just shook my head and said, 'That'll happen with birds,' and kept going, you know? And I learned that when I produce the bird, I need to hold it out."

St. Ambrose University's Commedia Dell'arte, which closed its one-weekend run on April 19 *, was like nothing I'd previously seen on a local stage. Director/writer Daniel Rairdin-Hale and composer Dillon Rairdin put together a production that felt like a sequence of sketch-comedy bits and musical numbers, but one linked by a story about a mistaken romance forbidden by two fathers. Servants step in to help the young lovers, and hilarity ensued by way of juggling, dancing, singing, the playing of instruments, and comical gags both aural and physical, with most of the actors performing in mask.