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Home - Theater
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Lies, Cheat, and Steal - |
A sold-out Sordid Lives calls for drastic measures
By David Williams
They are the most ominous of words for would-be theatergoers. “Sold Out.”
As of press time, the Sept. 12 run-closing matinee was the only performance with tickets still available for the hottest show in town, SNAP Productions’ Sordid Lives, the hilariously dark comedy playing in the tiny Shelterbelt Theatre. |
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Cold Cream - |
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Drama can’t become classic unless it dramatizes universal themes, the enduring issues that illustrate the continuing human condition. The Brigit Saint Brigit Theatre specializes in classics and opens its season with a playwright whose work defines the genre. |
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Go Ask Ann - |
Kathy Wheeldon on playing Ann Landers
by Warren Francke
It takes more than a bouffant wig, fake nails and jewelry to transform Kathy Wheeldon into Ann Landers, The Lady with all the Answers, at the Omaha Community Playhouse. It helps that Kathy, like the newspaper advice columnist, is 5’2” and 56, Ann’s age at the crucial time in her life captured by the play. |
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TAG Time - |
Theatre Arts Guild celebrates Omaha’s best
By David Williams
The Hilton Omaha was the setting Sunday night for the 43rd Annual Theatre Arts Guild Awards gala, an event that celebrated the best in a town known for its vibrant stage scene.
Together, the Omaha Community Playhouse and the Blue Barn Theatre took home almost two-thirds (19) of TAG’s 30 awards. |
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Cold Cream - |
The talent pool runs deep in the Omaha theater community, but it’s still a pleasant surprise when you learn that one of your favorite comedic actors was replaced by another one of comparable appeal.
The bad news for Sordid Lives opening Thursday for SNAP! Productions is that Denny Maddux won’t appear, having taken a job with Barnes and Noble in Kansas City. The good news is that Randy Vest replaces him as Earl Brother Boy, fresh from the institution that tried to “cure” him of homosexuality. And the rest of the cast for director Todd Brooks is packed with proven talents. |
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Cold Cream - |
Maybe the fact that it’s the 43rd annual Theatre Arts Guild Award Night doesn’t light your fire, but the performance lineup should. Program co-chair Randall Stevens has booked five of the most moving musical numbers performed in the past season.
Add the move to the Hilton across from the Qwest Center and forget that 43 isn’t the roundest of numbers. Here’s what the Sunday, Aug. 15, event offers:
Dave Wingert hosts honors for on and off-stage talent plus the best songs from the five nominated musicals. For contrast, you’ve got Theresa Sindelar doing her big number from Blue Barn’s Reefer Madness, and the cast of the Omaha Community Playhouse Quilters performing that pioneer classic. |
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Play Within a Play - |
Candy Project returns with inspirational [title of show]
by Warren Francke
The musical called [title of show] opens with “Untitled Musical Number” and lets its creators sing, “Two Nobodies in New York,” while one of their girlfriends warbles, “I Am Playing Me."
That leaves room for such songs as “An Original Musical” and “The Tony Award Song.”
That’s more than a hint of what the Candy Project brings to the Pizza Shoppe Collective in Benson this weekend. It’s known as “a musical about two guys writing a musical about two guys writing a musical.” |
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Cold Cream: Theater News - |
If it’s a crime, I’m guilty. Guilty of loving the discomfort felt by other theater communities when they hand out awards. Timing is everything and once again, just a week and a few days before the Theatre Arts Guild gala reveals the TAG awards, I’m taking indecent pleasure from reading a familiar complaint.
Reporting on honors going to a company that almost folded six years ago, Denver Post theater critic John Moore said its awards (6 of 21) “didn’t settle ongoing questions about the fairness and credibility” of the Colorado Theatre Guild’s Henry Awards. |
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One On One - |
F-Troupe presents a pair of powerful one-acts
By David Williams
In a 2007 review of an F-Troupe Collaborative staging of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker, I compared Michael Arch’s angular features, bulging eyes and slow motion movements to that of a “praying mantis on acid,” so we may as well continue with the phylum arthropoda theme and stick to the insect analogy in discussing the company’s current production of two one-act plays, Pinter’s “The Dumb Waiter” and Edward Albee’s “The Zoo Story.”
Let’s start by noting that the F-Troupe Collaborative is only slightly less prolific than the cicada. While the bug is known for its 17-year life cycle, the six-year-old stage company is just now mounting a fourth production. |
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Cold Cream - |
This is a tale of two cities. Make that an Iowa city and a Nebraska hamlet of some 150 residents. Between them, they’ve been offering theater for 64 years.
Last week, Cold Cream readers heard about Cheaper by the Dozen opening for the Mills Masquers, north of Glenwood in the Tall Corn State. The Masquers started performing 30 years ago, beginning as Bellevue Little Theatre did years earlier with a melodrama, No Opera at the Opry House.
Now you’ll catch up with Guys and Dolls, running one more weekend (the Sunday matinee is sold out) at the Lofte Community Theatre east of Manley. And they’ve been running for 34 years near that town of 150 Nebraskans.
If you wonder whether seven score and 10 citizens can keep community theater going that long, forget about it. Yes, some stalwarts are nearby residents: Kevin Colbert, who performed in Godspell, the opening production in 1977, now directs his daughter Samantha as Sarah Brown, the role played there in 1992 by her mother Betty, now the music director. You can read a nice feature about this on the lofte.com website. |
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Moving Mountains - |
Mountain Birds premieres at the Shelterbelt
by David Williams
Pffft!
I first heard the sound at the 45-minute mark, precisely midway through a performance of Mountain Birds, a premiere run of the original work by local playwright Madeline Radcliff.
Within minutes, the distinctive sound of tissues being pulled from their boxes would be repeated, soon joined by an eye-dabbing chorus of sniffles, sobs and sighs.
And all I could do was obsess over the fact that the dinette set on stage was exactly the same as the one in my kitchen.
Pffft! Sniffle. Pffft! Sob. Pffft! Sigh. Repeat.
Some works, it would seem, have a broader appeal for women than men or at least for this man. Having last week reviewed the Omaha Community Playhouse production of Defending the Caveman, I sat there in the dark the other night, hanky-less, feeling like an emotionless, hairy-knuckled Neanderthal as the women, who outnumbered men at least three-to-one, streaked their makeup. |
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Cold Cream - |
Ninety, count ’em, 90 young performers will begin living their stage dreams when they join established stars for the Saturday night Broadway Showcase, Don’t Stop Believing, produced by the Performing Arts Society and the Broadway Dreams Foundation.
Tickets start at $15 for the one-night stand that starts at 7:30 p.m. at the Holland Performing Arts Center. The BDF students, mostly from Nebraska and Iowa, will share the spotlight with a Norfolk native who lived his Broadway dream by starring in the title role as Billy Elliot.
Tanner Pflueger will perform a dance solo from the musical about a boy who wanted to be a hoofer. The young dreamers will also join Shoshana Bean for two numbers from Hair, “Aquarius” and “Let the Sun Shine In.” She starred as Elphaba in Wicked and will perform that character’s “Defying Gravity.” |
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Venus, Meet the Caveman - |
Defending the Caveman is primal fun at the Playhouse
by David Williams
Never before has a prop so begged for greater explanation than the one in the Omaha Community Playhouse presentation of Defending the Caveman, the touring production of the longest-running solo show in Broadway history.
Art history geeks and anthropology nerds will have to wait until later in this review for more on the zaftig, earthenware figurine in question while the rest of us spend the next few drops of ink looking at a work that takes a thoroughly tired and overdone theme the battle of the sexes and gives it a whole new, more meaningful spin in a hilarious exploration of a world divided, the caveman tells us, between “women and assholes.”
That would be us, guys. We may be un-evolved, knuckle-dragging, slack-jawed mirror images of our cave-dwelling ancestors, but there is also plenty of fun poked at whoever will be sitting next to you at this one. It’s the sort of night where both of you will have ample opportunity for wags of the finger, knowing nods and elbow jabs following some of the evening’s most humorously insightful moments. |
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Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow - |
The times they are always a changin’
by Warren Francke
The musical Hair moved from off-Broadway to the Great White Way in 1968. It landed in Omaha nearly 40 years later at the Omaha Community Playhouse and this summer finally made it to the ’burbs.
You’ve got this Thursday through Sunday to see how times they are a changin’ so much that a pot-smoking, anti-war, sex orgy musical can play at the Ralston Community Theatre’s Performing Arts Center without rocking the suburban boat. It’s so safe that the daily paper welcomed it with a feature about three generations of the Gilreath family, including three grandchildren in Hair, contributing to Ralston musicals. |
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Brick by Brick - |
Skullduggery opens world premiere in plush new space
by Warren Francke
Brick: The A Capella Musical brings a world premiere SkullDuggery show to a new downtown venue. And the fact that Andrew McGreevy’s latest creation features the compositions of Ben Folds makes the music new to Omaha theater as well.
Fans of Ben Folds Five will know that “Brick” was one of their biggest hits in the U.S. and abroad. And that may tell them more than McGreevy wants known about his storyline, so suffice it to say that the lead character in his musical is named Ben, who informs his new girlfriend about a previous one he got pregnant. |
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Cold Cream: Theater News - |
The Mountain Birds in the play Shelterbelt are four sisters named Robin, Anna, Wren and Cooperwhich sounds much more appealing than Grosbeak, Crow, Magpie and Woodpecker, the birds currently raiding my mountain feeder.
What’s more important is that the Shelterbelt Theatre is living up to its mission by offering another world premiere by a local playwright, Madeline Radcliff. Her third full-length play, it received a featured reading at the Great Plains Theater Conference in 2009, but this Thursday’s opening marks its fully staged debut. |
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Smiles Twinkline Like a Million Stars - |
Two Gentlemen of Verona is the very best of
musical theater
by David Williams
“So many people struggle with Shakespeare and that’s why this is so great,” said high school English teacher Margie Miller from her front row seat make that front row blanket in Elmwood Park before last Thursday’s Nebraska Shakespeare Festival debut of Two Gentlemen of Verona. “To see it all come to life, and in such an accessible setting in the park, is just wonderful; wonderful for me and wonderful for my students.”
She had no idea how wonderful it would be. |
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Cold Cream - |
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No performance in recent seasons was more memorable than Phyllis Doughman as the poetry professor dying of cancer in Wit at the Blue Barn. When word came a few days ago of her passing, a victim of the same disease, all who saw that brilliant portrayal could see her again as the play ended, rising from her deathbed, unclad and walking toward a bright light. |
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The Baton is Passed - |
Omaha Community
Playhouse Awards Night
by David Williams
That’s all she could give us? A giggled duo of “thank you,” bookending a muttered, unintelligible nothing? Now what was I to do?
It’s something of a tradition to lead the annual nod to the Omaha Community Playhouse Awards Night with a bon mot or two from the always-quotable Theresa Sindelar. A sure thing at the podium this time of year, Sindelar had just accepted the Barbara Ford Award for outstanding female performance in a musical for her work as Sylvia in All Shook Up.
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Omaha Community Playhouse’s Annual Awards Night - |
Honored at the Omaha Community Playhouse’s Annual Awards Night Monday, June 28, 2010 were:
Fonda McGuire Award for the most outstanding performance of the season
* Lois Nemec (female) for her performance as Linda Loman in Death of a Salesman
* Mark Thornburg (male) for his performance as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof |
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