If you attend The Green Room's current production of Angels in America: Perestroika, I assume you know that you'll be entering playwright Tony Kushner's work halfway through, as part one of this two-part saga, Millennium Approaches, debuted at the Rock Island venue on Halloween. The back page of Perestroika's program provides a very bare-bones summary (or refresher) on what previously occurred in Kushner's epic exploration of the 1980s, but, I'll venture, your enjoyment of this second outing will be significantly enhanced by familiarity with the show - and not just familiarity with the Green Room's first installment.

Never having done one, I can only imagine the challenges and pressures inherent in performing a one-person play that lasts over an hour, and I'm betting those challenges and pressures exponentially increase when you're also the play's author and co-director. I therefore doff my cap to Adam Michael Lewis, whose solo vehicle Mono-Blogs: Suffering Fools - currently running at the Harrison Hilltop Theatre - is a 60-plus-minute verbal marathon of rants, diatribes, and (as crass-tastic auteur Kevin Smith happily calls them) dick and fart jokes that Lewis delivers with unwavering fierceness and intensity.

I've seen worse musicals than A Wonderful Life, the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse's new stage version of Frank Capra's film classic It's a Wonderful Life. I've even seen worse stage versions of It's a Wonderful Life, one of them, produced way back in 1987, at Circa '21.

A bridegroom - petulant, abused, and unwilling to utter the five words that would please his family most: "I adore hash brown potatoes."

His father - abrasive, tyrannical, and ready to walk out on his family ... though he will be back for mealtimes.

His mother - overbearing, hypochondriacal, and vociferously proud of her questionable child-rearing tactics. ("I gave you your first spanking!")

And the bride-to-be - nearly mute, and the possessor of feet like Shrek's and two noses ... which would be fine if her intended didn't prefer a fiancée with three noses.