Community Players Announces 16-17 Season

Community Players has announced what's in store for 2016-17 at their theater on Robinhood Lane, with six shows on the horizon.

Scheduled for September, 2016, is the comedy Boeing Boeing, a French sex farce from the 60s. It's set in the Parisian bachelor pad of a playboy named Bernard -- the swinging bachelor thing was a standard trope of the 60s, no matter how improbable it seems now -- with hot and cold running stewardesses in and out of the apartment. They are different nationalities, with one who flies for Air France, one for Lufthansa and one for British Airways, and Robert's sex life is carefully calibrated to those airlines' flight schedules. Although the play's English translation was a huge hit in England (playing for seven years), it wasn't as big a deal on Broadway, where it eked out 23 performances in February 1965. Still, it got a movie that same year, with Tony Curtis as Bernard and Jerry Lewis as his old friend Robert, and a popular revival in England in 2007 that brought it back to Broadway. 

November brings Avenue Q, the sly and irreverent puppet musical that snared the Best Musical Tony in 2004. Avenue Q is a musical meant for the grown-up Sesame Street generation, with puppets who send up characters like Bert and Ernie and Cookie Monster. Avenue Q is quite a bit more adult than Sesame Street, however, as its puppet and human characters (one of whom is named Gary Coleman, like the child actor who was in Diff'rent Strokes way back when) sing about mature issues like sex, racism, pornography and the notion of "schadenfreude," or taking pleasure in someone else's misfortune. It's a lot of fun. Outrageous, absolutely. But fun.

The classic Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire takes the January 2017 slot. Its story of a faded southern belle named Blanche DuBois never goes out of style, perhaps because Blanche is such a great role for a woman who is no longer 20. Actresses like Gillian Anderson, Tallulah Bankhead, Cate Blanchett, Blythe Danner, Uta Hagen, Rosemary Harris, Jessica Lange, Vivien Leigh, Nicole Ari Parker, Natasha Richardson and Jessica Tandy have all taken on Blanche. But it's the role of Stanley Kowalski, Blanche's brutish brother-in-law, that put Marlon Brando on the map. After Stanley, Brando was a star.

Another classic is up next, with West Side Story on the Players stage in March 2017. Leonard Bernstein wrote the music for this updated version of Romeo and Juliet set in 1950's Hell's Kitchen, while Stephen Sondheim did the lyrics, Arthur Laurents wrote the book, and director/choreographer Jerome Robbins gave the original Broadway version its distinctive look and feel. Juliet becomes Maria, a Puerto Rican girl who works in a dress shop, with Tony, a boy of Polish and Irish descent, as her Romeo. Instead of fueding Capulets and Montagues, there are rival gangs -- the Sharks and the Jets -- whose turf war keeps the lovers apart. You will recognize songs like "Tonight" and "America" in West Side Story's fabulous score.

The 39 Steps, a hilarious play inspired by an old Alfred Hitchcock movie, is Community Players' May 2017 selection. Par for the Hitchcockian course, an innocent man is accused of murder and then caught up with an international spy ring (and romance!) when he goes on the run to escape the police and the real murderers. Patrick Barlow's 2005 play version gets its laughs from the fact that only four actors play everybody from the movie, which means rapid costume (and hat and wig) changes, and a general air of craziness as we wait to see how they're going to pull off the next crowd scene. I laughed myself silly the last time I saw The 39 Steps.

The season finishes up in July 2017 with the kid-friendly The Little Mermaid, the stage musical based on the 1989 Disney animated film. The Little Mermaid took a little longer than most to get from screen to the Broadway stage, mostly because they had to solve the problem of how you showcase undersea denizens on dry land. And no, they didn't build a giant aquarium and truck in a whole lot of water. Ariel and her friends the crab, the eels and one special flounder all use stage magic to maintain their seaworthy appearance. The other problem was that a stage version required more songs than the film, but the original lyricist, Howard Ashman, had passed away. The end results includes the Ashman/Menken songs you remember from the movie -- "Part of Your World," "Under the Sea" and "Poor Unfortunate Souls" among them -- with new songs written by movie composer Alan Menken along with new lyricist Glenn Slater. Trivia note for locals: Broadway's Ariel was played by Sierra Boggess, who happens to be the niece of Bloomington-Normal's Nancy Slattery. It's a small world, after all!

And that should get you (and Community Players) from September 2016 to July 2017 with plenty of entertainment. If you are interested in joining in in some capacity, you can find a button that says "Apply Now" at the top of this page.

February Fever!

February is a great month to shake off the dust and expand your mind with a play, a movie, a book... Something!

This month, I'm recommending SOUTHERN COMFORTS, by Kathleen Clark, playing at Heartland Theatre from February 18 to March 7th. Heartland calls it a "tour-de-force journey of a widow and widower who meet later in life and find a way into each other’s hearts." SOUTHERN COMFORTS stars two terrific local actors -- Carol Scott and Michael Pullin -- as the widow and widower, and is directed by Heartland Artistic Director Mike Dobbins. I'll write a full review once it opens, so come back and look for that!

One other reminder about Heartland -- the annual 10-minute Play competition closed on February 1, but Heartland's New Plays from the Heartland competition for one-act plays is open till March 15th. You can see details at Heartland's website, linked at left.

On other area stages, you can catch the Greek classic LYSISTRATA, about women who withhold sex to put an end to war, at Illinois Wesleyan, running February 16-21, or two very different plays at ISU. ISU is offering DON JUAN COMES BACK FROM THE WAR, by Ödön von Horvath, at ISU's Westhoff Theatre February 17-21, and Tennessee Williams' A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE at the Center for the Performing Arts from the 18th through the 27th.

This DON JUAN is, like LYSISTRATA, about war and love. Set after World War I, the play looks at what happens when Don Juan decides to look for his lost love in a landscape of bitter cold and terrible post-war deprivation. Everything has changed; nothing has changed. What's a Don Juan to do?

STREETCAR is more familiar to American audiences, and it's always intriguing to see what a college-age cast can do with such iconic characters as Blanche DuBois, the faded Southern belle in search of softer lighting, and Stanley Kowalski, the rough-and-tumble man's man symbolized by the raw slab of meat he brings home to his wife. Even after all these years and a whole lot of productions, STREETCAR is still a fascinating play.

Also on my must-see list for February is the mini-Audrey Hepburn festival at the Normal Theater, with one of my favorites, SABRINA, playing on the 11th and 12th, and BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S on the 13th and 14th. Either movie could work nicely for your Valentine's celebrations and I'll try to review them both before they hit the screen.

At the bookstore, you'll find a sure-fire way to heat up your winter in Jess Michaels' NOTHING DENIED, where a Regency-era shrew is unleashed more than tamed. The book is available right now from Avon's Red line (its spicier, sexier imprint), and I'll be posting a full review a bit later in the month. (FYI: Jess Michaels is one of local author Jenna Petersen's alter egos.)