Arts@ICC Theater Season Opens Sept 29

Illinois Central College will open its 2017-18 theater season on September 29, when Steve Martin's crazy comedy The Underpants begins a six-performance run in the ICC Performing Arts Center.

Martin based his boisterous farce play on a 1910 satire of middle-class mores written by German playwright Carl Sternheim. The Underpants involves what happens after Louise Markes, the wife of a puffed-up civil servant, loses her undies as she's attempting to get a better look at the king during a parade. Her husband fears his reputation and his career are toast because of his wife's errant intimate apparel, while Louise is starting to get a lot of attention from smitten men who saw her panties drop in public. Those men include two would-be boarders in the Markes household. And hilarity ensues.

Tim Wyman directs The Underpants at ICC with a cast that includes Nathanael Anderson as the king, Darrell Kimbro as Louise, Noah Lane as Theo, Dylan McDonell and Creighton Peacock as the two men who want to rent rooms to pursue Louise, Max Rutschke as an elderly scientist and Adyson TerMaat as the upstairs neighbor.

Tickets for The Underpants are $8 for the general public and $6 for students and senior citizens. Performances run from September 29 through October 8, with Friday and Saturday shows beginning at 7:30 pm and Sunday matinees at 2:30 pm. The show is rated PG for "mild adult situations."

In November, ICC Theatre will offer a dinner-theater option with Bullets for Broadway by David Landau, billed as "an audience participation whodunit that combines music, food….and murder!" Look for Bullets for Broadway and its "The Sopranos meet The Producers" antics November 10 to 19 in ICC's studio theater. The food will, of course, be Italian.

And Then They Came for Me: Remembering the World of Anne Frank by Jim Still is up next. This multimedia experience is "part oral history, part dramatic action, part remembrance" as it focuses on the world of Anne Frank, seen through the eyes of two Holocaust survivors. And Then They Came for Me will play for six performances between February 23 and March 4, 2018, in ICC's mainstage theater. Rated PG for intense material.

Keeping up the intensity level, Martin McDonagh's biting, bitterly funny The Cripple of Inishmaan comes to ICC's studio theater from April 13 to 22, 2018. This tragic comedy centers on an Irish boy whose body holds "a host of troubles." He is a square peg in his small village but dreams of becoming a movie star in Hollywood when a documentary film crew (Robert J. Flaherty's real venture to film The Man of Aran in 1933) comes calling. Let's just say things don't turn out the way "Cripple Billy" hoped. Rated R for adult language.

Both individual and season tickets are available to these shows. To get all the info on ordering, check out ArtsAtICC.com or call the ICC Performing Arts Center box office at 309-694-5136.

Community Players Out of the Gate Fast Announcing 2013-14 Season

Now that it's 2013, Community Players isn't wasting any time. Yesterday, they made their big 2013-14 announcement, cluing everyone in on what they'll be performing on Robinhood Lane through July 27, 2014.

What do they have planned? A challenging season, mixing stage classics with some spiffy new musicals.

When I saw the first two choices, I thought maybe they going to do a whole season of Plays Beginning with A. That might be fun, but for right now, they'll start with the musical Aida in July, 2013, and head on to Arsenic and Old Lace in September.

This Aida (as opposed to the Verdi opera) is a power ballad bonanza, with music by Elton John, lyrics by Tim Rice, and book by Linda Woolverton, Robert Falls, and David Henry Hwang. It's a love story about the transcendent connection between an Egyptian military man, one Radames, and a Nubian captive named Aida. On Broadway, Aida won four Tony Awards, including Best Musical Score and Best Performance by a Leading Actress for Heather Headley, who played Aida.

Arsenic and Old Lace is a totally different kettle of fish. This comedy classic, performed by countless theaters, schools and community organizations, has great roles -- Aunt Abby and Aunt Martha -- for ladies of a certain age. Mortimer Brewster's two aunts are lovely and sweet, providing both the lace and the arsenic, as it happens, knocking off old older gentlemen who stop by their parlor with poisoned elderberry wine. They're only doing it to be kind to these lonely souls, and also to provide "yellow fever" victims for their brother Teddy, who thinks he is Theodore Roosevelt, to bury in the basement, where he thinks he is digging the Panama Canal. It's dark humor and decidedly funny, as poor Mortimer gets put through the wringer by all the nonsense going on in the Brewster household.

In November, Players will unveil Monty Python's Spamalot, the musical version of the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail that won the Tony for Best Musical on Broadway in 2005. Monty Python member Eric Idle wrote the book and the lyrics and contributed to the score with John Du Prez and Neil Innes. Spamalot is a decidedly irreverent retelling of  Arthurian legends, with a little Fish Slapping, some Laker Girls and Las Vegas style entertainment, as well as jokes at the expense of Broadway itself.

That will be followed by a radio play version of It's a Wonderful Life, in December, of course, and the drama The Diary of Anne Frank to start 2014. The original stage version of Anne Frank, adapted by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett from the diaries the young schoolgirl wrote while hiding out from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic during World War II, played on Broadway in 1955. A new adaptation by Wendy Kesselman also came to Broadway, this time in 1997, with Natalie Portman in the title role. The newly adapted Diary of Anne Frank is scheduled for performances from January 17 to 26, 2014, at Community Players.

The March musical choice is Dolly Parton's 9 to 5: The Musical, the show IWU performed last semester. Dolly wrote the score, while Patricia Resnick contributed the book of this female empowerment musical that takes a leap back to the late 70s to show the comical side of revenge against a male chauvinist pig. Remember when we said "male chauvinist pig"? I do!

9 to 5 will be followed by Neil Simon's The Odd Couple, with performances from May 16 to 25. The Odd Couple is a perennial favorite, with the original stageplay, film and TV versions, scripts written for men and for women playing the mismatched roommates, and a 2002 updated Odd Couple (called Oscar and Felix: A New Look at the Odd Couple) that includes more current references. Which one is Community Players performing? We'll have to wait till we're a little closer to find out. (The image at right is from the film version, starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. A little bit of trivia: Matthau was also in the Broadway original, where he played Oscar opposite Art Carney's Felix.)

The last show of this ambitious season will be Shrek the Musical, a Broadway show about a sweet green ogre and the enchanted princess he falls in love with. Lots of fairytale humor in this one, with a prince who is not at all charming, exiled fairies and elves and Pinocchio, and a talking donkey who becomes Shrek's best pal. Jeanine Tesori wrote the music for Shrek the Musical, while playwright David Lindsay-Abaire contributed both the lyrics and the book. The wonderful Brian d'Arcy James and Sutton Foster played Shrek and his beloved Princess Fiona on Broadway. And Christopher Sieber, one of the original cast members of Spamalot, took on the diminutive Prince Farquaard, the bad guy in the mix.

For schedule details and audition dates for all these shows, check out the Facebook announcement from Community Players here.

Adventure, Music and Drama at U of I's Summer Studio

The University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign has announced the selections for this year's Summer Studio Theatre at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts.

Krannert's summer season begins June 1, but tickets go on sale Monday, May 7th, for three shows and one special cabaret offered for only two nights in June.

"Shipwrecked! An Entertainment: The Amazing Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (as Told by Himself)" is first up, opening June 1 in the Studio Theatre. This picaresque adventure is by Donald Margulies, who won a Pulitzer Prize for "Dinner With Friends." "Shipwrecked" couldn't be more different from that realistic look at marital woes and friendship; this one is about a young man, the same Louis de Rougement mentioned in the title, who takes off from London on a ship-board journey, only to encounter a shipwreck, an octopus, an Aborigine romance, and a place back in London as a storyteller of tall tales. With eight performances from June 1 to 22, "Shipwrecked" begins the Summer Studio season.

Then there's "Gone Missing," a collection of songs and sketches based on the lost and not necessarily found. What kind of lost items are we talking about? How about "a black Gucci pump, an uncle’s fortune, Sniffle the doll, Atlantis, a sweetheart’s photo, various body parts. Based on interviews with New Yorkers, this witty musical tracks emotional and philosophical responses to life’s transient pleasures and the many ways we cope." Sounds intriguing, even though I just found the sweater I'd been missing for awhile. Sometimes, there are happy endings (although the missing body parts thing sounds ominous.) "Gone Missing" opens June 7, with ten performances before June 23.

"Gone Missing" was created by the Civilians, who bill themselves as "investigative theater." This piece was written by Steve Cosson, based on interviews conducted by the company, with music and lyrics by Michael Friedman.

A two-night cabaret called "Sprung and Awakened" will spring into the Studio Theatre on June 16 and 17, with Paul Johnston on the piano and Kent Conrad offering his vocal stylings on the subject of change. "Using a mixture of biography and invented truths, a series of meditations on the effects of change—real or imagined—are presented through monologue and song," Krannert's press materials tell us.

And the last show for the summer will be "The Diary of Anne Frank," newly adapted by Wendy Kesselman from the 1955 play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, telling the story of a young girl sent into hiding with her family to escape from the Nazis during World War II. Bright, lovely Anne Frank tries to maintain her optimism and hope for the future, even as the world turns very dark outside. U of I's summer production will feature local adult actors from the Champaign-Urbana community as well as younger actors Dominique Allen and Max Keagle.

"Anne Frank" will have the Studio Theatre to itself for 12 performances from July 5 to 21.

You can order your tickets beginning at 10 am on Monday the 7th, with a variety of options. You can shop online at KrannertCenter.com, phone the box office at 800-527-2849 or 217-333-6280, email kran-tix@illinois.edu, or visit the ticket office in person at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts on the U of I campus between 10 am and 6 pm daily.