SWEENEY TODD Brings His Barbery to Eureka College

Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd.

His skin was pale and his eye was odd.

He shaved the faces of gentlemen

Who never thereafter were heard of again...

Stephen Sondheim's lyrics for the musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street explain most of the show right off the top. There it is, the story of a barber who seeks razor-sharp revenge on those who wronged him in the past.

And what if none of their souls were saved? 

They went to their maker impeccably shaved.

Dark humor, murder and mayhem, the most clever and sardonic of lyrics, all sung to Sondheim's terrific score, with Hugh Wheeler's book and Sondheim's songs bringing in meat pies made of people, an operatic barbering contest, a depraved and evil judge, an innocent ward sent to the booby hatch, and 19th century London characterized as a hole in the world like a great black pit.

Isabella Anderson, a student at Eureka College, will be directing this dark, delightful musical for four performances in Pritchard Theater on the campus at Eureka College starting tonight. Performances begin at 7 pm November 1, 2, 3 and 4, with no set ticket price. Instead, it's "Pay What You Decide." To reserve tickets, you can email tickets@eureka.edu or call 309-467-6363 to reach the ticket office.

For more information on Sondheim and Wheeler's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,  click here. Note that the stage musical is not the same as the watered-down, blood-drenched film version from 2007 starring Johnny Depp. The real Sweeney Todd, with all its music intact and people who can actually perform the songs the way they were intended, is much, much, much, much, much better. Like night and day better.

It's Way Past Time for October News

It's a busy month on local stages and screens and I'm already a few steps behind. I took a trip to the Stratford Festival in Canada, and it was wonderful, but it means I wasn't here to put together all these bits and bobs on October 1. I hope you can all handle not finding out till October 5. Let's get this October party started, shall we?

I'm a little late getting the news out about the Illinois Wesleyan production of Sarah Ruhl's Dead Man's Cell Phone, which opened earlier tonight in the Jerome Mirza Theatre in McPherson Hall. Dead Man's Cell Phone begins when a woman in a coffee shop hears a ringing phone that just won't stop, sending her off in search of answers about the person who owned the phone. She finds a lot more questions, which turns out to be a good thing for all of us in this inventive, unsettling play about love, life and technology. Dead Man's Cell Phone plays October 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 at 8 pm and October 9 at 2 pm. 

The documentary The Beatles: Eight Days a Week, the Touring Years, called "Ron Howard's vibrant, joyous musical journey with The Beatles," is on screen at Champaign's Art Theater Co-op tomorrow and Thursday. This film takes a look behind the scenes at the phenomenon that was The Beatles as they played in venues from Liverpool's Cavern Club in their earliest years to San Francisco's Candlestick Park in 1966. The Art Theater is offering The Beatles: Eight Days a Week, the Touring Years at 7 pm on October 5 and 4 pm on October 6. For more information or to get a look at the film's trailer, click here.

Eureka College Theatre looks to Jordan Harrison's 2014 play The Grown-Up, a piece I saw at the Humana Festival of New American Plays, for its October entry, with performances October 6 through 15 at Pritchard Theatre. The Grown-Up is an adventurous romp somewhere between Alice and her Lookingglass and Peter Pan and his pirates. In this instance, the child in search of adventure is a boy named Kai who runs off to see where a magic crystal doorknob takes him. As Kai bends time and imagination, he runs into a salty old seafarer, his sister and maybe even his own future as a grown-up. For Eureka College, Cody Wirth plays Kai, with Garrison Green, Vic Griffith, Haley Joseph and Kendall Katz along on his journey.

The Normal Theater picks up weeks 3 and 4 of its Six Week Film School, focusing on Murder My Sweet on October 12 and The Postman Always Rings Twice on October 26. They're both deadly, delicious mystery movies, with the first following PI Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell) on a search for the double-crossing girlfriend of a mug named Moose Malloy and the second looking into the seamy private lives of an unhappy wife (Lana Turner) and the drifter (John Garfield) she gets to do her dirty work. Both films begin at 7 pm on their respective Wednesdays and they will be followed by a discussion led by ISU professor William McBride. For all the details, click here.

You get a second chance to see Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play, the Anne Washburn play that riffs on The Simpsons as a cultural icon and possibly a religious text in our dystopic future, when it begins at the University of Illinois October 13. Lisa Gaye Dixon directs this Illinois Theatre production in performance through October 23. Mr. Burns and friends will play in the Colwell Playhouse, but you can also see Nathan Alan Davis's Dontrell, Who Kissed the Sea, which began last week, through October 14, and Anna Ziegler's take on The Minotaur beginning October 27, both in the Studio Theatre.

Waiora continues at Illinois State University's Center for the Performing Arts through October 9, while the second and third shows of the ISU season -- two short plays performed together in one evening of theater -- open October 21 in Westhoff Theatre. Those short plays are The Coffee Bar and The Walls, with The Coffee Bar hailing from Egypt and The Walls from Argentina. They are both provocative and political, with plenty to say on issues of privilege, freedom, repression and art. Janet Wilson directs The Coffee Bar with a cast that includes Gina Cleveland, Daija Nealy and Simran Sachdev. Bruce Burningham directs The Walls; his cast includes Daniel Balsamo, Daniel Esquivel and Ryan Groves.

Entering the Halloween entertainment sweeptstakes, the Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts is offering the silent film version of The Phantom of the Opera, played with live organ accompaniment just like it would've been back in 1925, at 7 pm on October 25. Lon Chaney (the original, not Lon Chaney, Jr.) may've been silent, but he set the bar high for all the Phantoms who followed with his portrait of a sad, swirling Gothic monster. As Roger Ebert put it, "[T]he Phantom is invested by the intense and inventive Lon Chaney with a horror and poignancy that is almost entirely created with body language." All it takes is one hand gesture to convey "great weary sadness." And it's that "great weary sadness" that makes his a Phantom to remember.

October 27 to 29 finds the return of the Illinois Shakespeare Festival's annual ShakesFEAR event, combining some of Shakespeare's scary characters with the haunted house concept, except in this case it's the grounds around Ewing Manor getting haunted. Tours leave every ten minutes between 7 and 9:30 pm and last approximately 25 minutes. If you want to get tickets ahead, check out this page for all the information.

As always, I will add individual pieces on other shows and events I find out about in the meantime.

Leaping into March

As we vault over the end of February into March, there are a few shows which made the leap with us. And after that, plenty of shows to keep March roaring like a lion all the way to the end of the month.

Illinois State University continues its production of Street Scene, an opera version of the Elmer Rice play about the denizens of a tenement on a hot day in New York City, with the action shifted to 1946. Kurt Weill wrote the music, with poet Langston Hughes providing the lyrics for this look at the overlapping lives of ordinary working people of different ethnicities and clashing personalities.  Street Scene opened last week, but there are four performances left this week. You have a choice of tonight, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday at 7:30 pm at the ISU Center for the Performing Arts. Click here for more information on upcoming ISU productions or here for ticket info.

Also continuing this week is Dead Guy, a darkly funny play about the dangers of reality television written by Eric Coble, on stage at Illinois Central College in East Peoria. You can tune in to Dead Guy March 4, 5 and 6 at the ICC Performing Arts Center.

Eurydice opens tomorrow night at Eureka College, with performances through the weekend. This surreal, lyrical Sarah Ruhl play takes a different look at the myth of Orpheus, putting Eurydice in the center of the story. Instead of a look at a man who ventures into Hell to find his bride, Ruhl's play takes us along with Eurydice, the woman who dies on her wedding day, as she acclimates to a new world -- the world of the dead -- and how she reacts when her groom comes in search of her. Click here for more information on Eurydice in Eureka's Pritchard Theatre.

You'll find the funny science fiction/horror musical Little Shop of Horrors playing at Community Players in Bloomington from March 11 to 26. The sci-fi and horror come in the form of a "mean green mother from outer space," a bloodthirsty plant known as Audrey II. Little Shop started as a super-cheap black-and-white movie supposedly made in two days by legendary director Roger Corman, with Jack Nicholson in a small role as a dental patient who loves to feel pain. That cult classic spawned an off-off-Broadway musical (that quickly moved off-Broadway and eventually got to Broadway) with music and lyrics by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman. The stage musical was turned into a bigger-budget* movie with Rick Moranis and Steve Martin in the cast, along with Ellen Greene, who'd played Audrey I when the show was off-off and off-Broadway.  For Community Players, Chris Terven plays Seymour, the lowly floral shop clerk who loves a girl named Audrey (Aimee Kerber) from afar and raises Audrey II (voice by George Jackson III) from a sprout into a giant green monster. For more information on all things Little Shop at Community Players, click here.

If you've enjoyed Sticky in the Sticks -- pop-up theater in the form of ten-minute plays set in and performed at a bar -- you'll want to make sure you get to the newest edition, Spring Sticky on March 11. As always, Sticky plays at the Firehouse Pizza and Pub in Normal. This time out, you'll see actors like Connie Blick and J. Michael Grey, co-founders of the B-N "in the Sticks" version of Sticky, along with Ben Gorski, Kari Knowlton, Anthony Loster, Wes Melton, Joshua Miranda, Nancy Nickerson, Terry Noel, Keaton Richard, Jared Sanders, Maureen Steerenburg, Cathy Sutliff and Lucian Winner. Plays performed include work by local author Terri Ryburn and Libby Emmons, Sticky's original New York founder. Admission is $8 for everyone -- you don't have to be over 21 to get in, but you should be aware that the material performed may have mature themes and language. The show will begin at 8 pm, with local folk/blues duo River Salt as the opening act. Be advised to be there early to get a good seat, since the space in the bar is limited.

Illinois State University's Department of Theatre and Dance brings ¡Bocón!(The Big Mouth) by Lisa Loomer to Westhoff Theatre March 25 to 27, 29 to 31 and April 1 and 2. Dr. Cyndee Brown directs this "imaginative fable for the whole family, interweaving fantasy with the violent reality of the 1980s war in El Salvador." Although the show is intended for all ages, the issues involved are deep and real, as a boy named Miguel loses his parents to "enforced disappearance" for opposition to the political regime. Miguel, too, is silenced, and he must take a long journey to find his voice and himself.  Joshua Pennington plays Miguel in this production, with Daniel Esquivel, Vanessa Garcia, Johanna Kerber, Natalie Kozelka, Gabrielle Muñoz, Samantha Peroutka, Thomas Russell and Nick Scott in the ensemble.

Those are the events that rose to the top of my list, but I'll have more about the Normal Theater and its Hitchcock/Truffaut pairings, the University of Illinois's Grapes of Wrath and In the Blood, and whatever else crosses my desk.

*The story goes that the original 1960 Little Shop of Horrors was made for about $25,000 while the 1982 musical movie was budgeted at about $25,000,000. That's 25 thou to 25 mil.

Eureka College Opens EURYDICE Wednesday Night

Eureka College is becoming the go-to place locally for the plays of Sarah Ruhl. This time, it's Eurydice, Ruhl's 2003 re-imagining of the Greek myth of Eurydice and Orpheus. In the original, as well as in most modern adaptations, the story tends to be all about Orpheus, a musician so talented, so inspired, that when his wife Eurydice dies shortly after their wedding, his mournful singing makes the gods and goddesses of Mount Olympus weep along with him. They urge him to travel to the Underworld to retrieve her, and once there, he even convinces Hades, god of the Underworld, to allow it. But Hades sets a condition -- Orpheus can take Eurydice back to the world of the living, but only if he walks ahead and never looks back to make sure she's still there. As in many myths, the temptation is too much, Orpheus turns, and Eurydice is lost to him forever.

What Ruhl brings to the table is a different focus. She sets her story around Eurydice instead of her singing idol husband, showing us her point of view during their wedding, the tragic accident that befalls her, her journey down to Hades and what happens to her there, including reuniting with her father, who passed away years before. When Orpheus comes for her, she has to decide whether she wants to rejoin life in the real world or stay with her beloved dad. It's a whole different story.

Ruhl's script is lyrical and poetic, loaded with emotion as it looks at what it means for Eurydice to be alive and to be dead, to weigh the demands of different kinds of love. It's a challenging play, too, as Ruhl serves up surreal images and strange characters to define her Underworld.

On Wednesday March 2, director Caitlin Herzlinger will bring Ruhl's Eurydice to Pritchard Theatre on the campus of Eureka College for the first of five performances. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday performances begin at 7:30 pm, while the Sunday matinee is set for 2 pm. There is no set price for tickets -- you are invited to pay what you think is best, with all proceeds earmarked for the Heart House of Eureka.

Click here for the Eureka College event page. Email tickets@eureka.edu or call 309-467-6363 to make reservations.

Hang on Tight -- October's Getting Scary!

October is brimming over with Things to Do, ranging from a little musical comedy and a big announcement to a whole lot of drama.

This first weekend in October is a big one for local theater, with events that include Fences, the August Wilson play about a garbage collector who once dreamed of becoming a major league baseball player, opening in Westhoff Theatre at Illinois State University, Little Shop of Horrors and its big green carnivorous plant from Outer Space at Eureka College Theatre unfurling its leaves, and eight characters in the annual McLean County History Museum/Evergreen Cemetery Walk showcasing local history taking their places grave-side in Bloomington. Over in Champaign, Parkland College presents Jennifer Haley's video-game-based scary story Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom tonight through October 10, while the Station Theatre offers Will Eno's The Open House, a quirky and strange dysfunctional family drama, from tonight through the 17th.

Fences is one of Wilson's "Century Cycle," with a play devoted to each decade of African-American life in the 20th century. This one takes place in the 1950s; its original Broadway production earned four Tony Awards, including Best Play, Best Director for Lloyd Richards, Best Actor for James Earl Jones and Best Featured Actress for Mary Alice. Like James Earl Jones and Mary Alice before them, Denzel Washington and Viola Davis won Tony Awards in the 2010 Broadway revival for their performances as Troy Maxson, a garbage man with thwarted dreams, and Rose, his second wife. In a related August Wilson note, Denzel Washington recently announced his intention to produce filmed versions of all ten plays in the "Century Cycle" for HBO, with Fences -- which Washington will direct, produce and star in -- up first. Viola Davis will be there for Fences, as well.

ISU's Fences is directed by Duane Boutté, with a cast that includes Hannaniah Wiggins as Troy, Marixa Ford as Rose, Emmanuel Jackson as their son Cory, Gregory Hicks as Troy's younger brother Gabriel, Bryson Thomas as Lyons, Troy's son from a previous marriage, Timothy Jefferson as his friend Bono and Janiya Franklin as Raynell, a late addition to the family. Performances are scheduled for October 2 to 4 and 6 to 10. For ticket information, click here.

Illinois Wesleyan enters the fall theatrical fray with the Midwest premiere of Blown Youth, a play that serves as playwright Dipika Guha's response to Shakespeare's Hamlet. Guha muses, "It was borne out of my desire to challenge the notion that Hamlet (the character) is the embodiment of human consciousness when he is, in fact, a man. Where Hamlet’s madness smacks of genius, would a woman in his shoes be seen as just as stunningly witty and seductive -- or just a pain in the ass hysteric?" IWU's production of Blown Youth is directed by Nancy Loitz and opens with a performance at 8 pm on October 6. Call 309-556-3232 to reach the box office.

October 6 is also the date for the big announcement of what the Illinois Shakespeare Festival has planned for next summer. They promise a "spectactular" season coming up in 2016, but you'll have to wait till after the 6th to find out exactly what that entails.

The theatre program at University of Illinois kicks off its fall season with Michael Gene Sullivan's 2006 adaptation of George Orwell's 1984 opening October 15 in Colwell Playhouse at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. Tom Mitchell directs this stage version of the classic science fiction novel that introduced concepts like "Big Brother," "doublespeak" and "thought crimes" to the lexicon. Click here for more information.  

You can also catch a free concert version of the musical Dreamgirls at Krannert Center presented by the Banks, Bridgewater, Lewis Fine Arts Academy on Sunday, October 18th. Local C-U singers Noah Brown, Crofton Coleman, Sherrika Ellison, Tyra Nesbitt and Erica Smith will light up the Henry Krieger and Tom Eyen score, which features big pop hits like "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going," "One Night Only" and "I Am Changing."

Whose Live Anyway? with a cast that includes Jeff B. Davis, Greg Proops and Ryan Stiles, as well as Nashville heartthrob Charles "Chip" Esten, returns to the Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts on October 17 for one performance only at 7:30 pm.

On October 23, Illinois State University's School of Theatre and Dance is back with Dale Wasserman's stage version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, directed by Lori Adams for the Center for the Performing Arts. Cuckoo's Nest was an award-winning (and frequently banned) book written by Ken Kesey before it became a play, and an award-winning movie directed by Milos Forman afterwards. The role of rebellious mental patient Randle McMurphy, played by Kirk Douglas and Jack Nicholson on stage and on film, will be played by Kyle Fitzgerald for ISU, with Kate Vargulich as his nemesis Nurse Ratched, and Josh Pennington and Matt Frederick as fellow inmates. I haven't seen an image for the ISU production, so that is Ken Kesey's book cover you see here.

Walking With My Ancestors, Ama Oforiwaa Aduonum's powerful examination of the ghosts of slavery as expressed in song, dance and words, returns to New Route Theatre, again directed by Kim Pereira, for one night only on October 23. This time, Walking With will be presented at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Bloomington at 7:30 pm on the 23rd. Tickets are available in advance by e-mailing New Route at New.Route.Theatre@gmail.com or at the door on a first come/first served basis for a suggested donation of $10.

And that's what I have for you to pencil into your calendars right now. Stay tuned for updates as I get them!

ROMEO AND JULIET Bring Their Tale of Love and Woe to Eureka College

It's time for the world's most famous pair of teen lovers to take center stage at Eureka College. No, not the kids from Titanic. Instead, it's Romeo and Juliet, an early work by Shakespeare that invented the concept of star-crossed lovers.

In Shakespeare's tragedy, Juliet Capulet and Romeo Montague come from families that don't get along. At all. In fact, it's unthinkable for a Capulet to think she belongs with a Montague in 16th century Verona. It's swelteringly hot in the streets of Verona, passions and anger are running high, and our teen lovers do not want to be thwarted by stuffy oldsters or feuding cousins who think they know what's best. And Shakespeare doesn't pack any punches -- he has his narrator tell us right from the get-go that this story will end in death. When we get to the end, we hear that there "never was a story of more woe....Than this of Juliet and her Romeo."

Is it a tale of love that cannot be denied? Of how dangerous it is to ignore what your parents want for you? A cautionary tale about taking rash action or trying to defy fate or trying to keep love alive in a hostile world?

Whatever it is you think Shakespeare was trying to say with his Romeo and Juliet, it has proven to be one of his most popular plays. It's the one that the Victorians revived with a happy ending (as recreated in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby), the one that got a ballet from Prokofiev, the one that shows up in dozens of operas and pop songs, the one Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim turned into a modern musical gang war in West Side Story, the one Joe Calarco set in a boys' school in Shakespeare's R&J, the one Franco Zeffirelli and Baz Luhrmann both put on film, and the one we see Will Shakespeare working on in Shakespeare in Love.

Professor Marty Lynch directs Romeo + Juliet (note the spelling reminiscent of Lurhmann's movie) for Eureka College with a production set in contemporary America. The rival Montague and Capulet families are now warring political factions. Lynch has indicated he hopes to emphasize the humor in the piece in the early going, with the intention of making the tragedy at the end stand out in sharp relief. Eureka College notes that the production will contain violence and some crude humor.

Lynch's cast includes Coleman Payne and Hattie Standridge as Romeo and Juliet, with Kristen Franz as Mercutio, Jake Geiger as Benvolio, Jason Punke and Veronica Kudulis as Romeo's dad and mom, Belle Grober as Tybalt, Anna Dabrowski as Juliet's nurse, Christopher Tam and Cathy Sutliff as Juliet's parents, Gretchen Schlossler as the friar, and Emmalie Dabrowski, Hannah Lane, Trevor McDaniel, Kirstin Meyers, Jessica Rogers, Ben Schultz and Emily Smith completing the ensemble.

Eureka's Romeo + Juliet begins at 7:30 pm on February 25, 26, 27 and 28 at Pritchard Theatre. Tickets are priced at $10 for general admission and $7 for students. For reservations, contact the box office at 309-467-6363, e-mail tickets@eureka.edu, or go to www.eureka.edu/events to pick a specific performance and purchase online. 

Fill Up Your September Calendar with a Wide Variety of Entertainment

Entertainment is pretty much a year-round deal around here, with something happening every month. But even so... Once our local universities and colleges gear up in September, the calendar starts to get crowded. That means you may want to get out your day planner or your phone or whatever vehicle you use you keep your appointments and start taking notes. It's going to be a fast month.

Heartland Theatre's annual 10-minute play contest is open for entries as of September 1. This year's theme is the Class Reunion, something that should be familiar to almost everyone. Whether you hide out and go nowhere near yours or head up the organizing committee, there's fertile ground for drama there. You have plenty of time to work and rework your short play -- the final deadline isn't till February 1, 2015 -- but you may as well get that first draft going now. And if you get it in by January 1, the judges can ask for revisions if they think that's warranted. Check out all the details here.

Richard Linklater's journey through one boy's life, Boyhood, continues through September 11 at the Art Theater Co-op in Champaign. Linklater came back every year for twelve years to film the same boy, played by Ellar Coltrane. This is "Mason," as he's called in the movie, growing up right there on film. Click here to check the schedule -- the Art is fond of switching things up and offering a variety of times during the run.

New Route Theatre will hold auditions September 6 and 7 for its world premiere production of Walking with My Ancestors by Dr. A. Oforiwaa Aduonum.The show, amounting to a "pilgrimage," a "crusade" and a "search for identity," tells the story of Dr. Aduonum's journey to confront her past and her ancestors' past, through the Middle Passage into slavery, with its terrible impact on generations of lives. Her narrative includes song, dance and the spoken word, and New Route will be looking for male and female actors, singers and dancers to fill out the tableau. See all the details on New Route's audition process here.

If you've never been to the University of Illinois Department of Theatre's Costume and Prop Sale, you (unlike me) don't own a hoop (not the skirt, just the hoop), a Regency mermaid gown or a weird hippy vest that could blend into any forest. You never know what you'll find when they open those vaults. This year's sale commences at 9 am at U of I's Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. Costumes will be showcased in the Studio Theatre on the 5th floor, with props down on level 2. That 9 am start time is for the people who buy a $3 ticket to get a head start, and presumably to put the kibosh on lines around the block or aggressive shostling for position. Check out the info here. And get there early!

U of I's Krannert Center has a whole lot of other offerings in September, as well, including Roseanne Cash: The River and the Thread on September 13, the St. Louis Symphony on September 14, dance and theatre from Susan Marshall & Company in a piece called Play/Pause on September 23, and a few pieces of Champaign-Urbana's Pygmalion Festival, including music and poetry, on September 25 and 26.

The Philadelphia Story, the 1939 divorce comedy played out in the mansions of Philadelphia's Mainline, comes to Community Players beginning September 4 with a preview performance. The Broadway stage version was a comeback of sorts for Katharine Hepburn, as her pal, playwright Philip Barry, penned another play just for her. And then Kate starred in the movie, too, opposite Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart, creating a fizzy, fabulous piece of film history. Rich heiress Tracy Lord is in the midst of planning her wedding (her second), this time to "man of the people" George Kittredge. But her ex, the suave and debonair C. K. Dexter Haven, and two reporters from Spy magazine pretending to be friends of Tracy's older brother while really trying to get the inside scoop on the big society wedding, are throwing all kinds of obstacles in her way. Who will Tracy end up with? What do privilege and place have to do with who belongs with whom? Is is better to be a goddess or a living, breathing woman? You can get all your answers when Players' production, directed by Tricia Stiller, opens this week, running through September 14.

Julia Cho's "wryly beguiling" play The Language Archive, winner of the 2010 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, opens at Heartland Theatre on September 11 with a pay-what-you-can preview, followed by performances September 12-13, 18-21 and 25-28. Kathleen Kirk directs this look at the lapses between love and language, where a language archivist named George faces losing his wife because he just can't find the right words to make her stay. In the midst of that, George's assistant in the lab nurtures a major crush on her boss, and two visitors from a strange land -- the last speakers of a language called Elloway -- come to the lab to share their tongue before it disappears forever. Bruce Clark and Devon Lovell play George and Mary, the couple who have such trouble speaking from the heart, with Michelle Kaiden as Emma, the lab assistant, Nancy Nickerson and Mark de Veer as the last speakers of Elloway, Vanessa Houssian as a language instructor, Chris Stucky as Mr. Baker, and J. Michael Grey as Zamenhof, the inventer of Esperanto.

Also at Heartland, look for auditions for Deanna Jent's Falling, a moving look at a family dealing with an autistic child who is getting too big to handle. Director Lori Adams has cast Karen Hazen and Rhys Lovell as the parents of this "difficult to love" child, and she will be looking for actresses to play teenager Lisa, who wishes her family were a lot more "normal," and Grammy Sue, whose entrance into the family dynamic shakes things up. Auditions for these roles will take place on Sunday, September 21, from 7 to 9:30 pm, with callbacks scheduled for Tuesday, the 23rd, if necessary. Performances will take place in November.

The Department of Theatre and Dance at Illinois State University sneaks a show into September with Hay Fever at Westhoff Theatre September 24 to 28. Sonja Moser directs this lighter-than-air Noel Coward classic about a theatrical family enjoying a weekend in the country in the 1920s, tormenting their guests with their eccentricities and their charmingly awful behavior. Moser's approach may make this Hay Fever look very different from any other Hay Fevers you might've experienced. We'll just have to wait to find out. (The Playbill at right is from the 1985 Broadway production of Hay Fever that starred Rosemary Harris as Judith Bliss. Don't you love that hat?)

Eureka College begins its semester by bringing back the musical You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown to Pritchard Theatre. Holly Rocke directs a cast that includes Christopher Tam as Charlie Brown, Krissy Franz as his sister Sally, Jake Geiger as his dog Snoopy, Austin Bristow II as his pal Linus, Isabella Anderson as Linus's sister Lucy, and Rahmell Brown as Schroeder, the piano player Lucy fancies. The last time Eureka did Charlie Brown, two names you may recognize -- Brandon Burling and Joel Shoemaker -- headlined the cast as Chuck and Snoopy. This Charlie Brown and its perennial youngsters will sing for their "Suppertime" from September 25 to October 4.

Illinois Wesleyan also launches its fall season this month, with Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind, opening September 30. Shepard's play deals with spousal abuse, brain damage, family dysfunction, gender gaps and crimes of the heart. It packs a punch, that's for sure. The original off-Broadway production featured Harvey Keitel, Geraldine Page and Amanda Plummer, while Keith Carradine, Maggie Siff and Laurie Metcalf took roles in the 2010 revival. IWU's production play from September 30 to October 5. Click here for information.

September is also the month of choice for a lot of television premieres, both for returning shows and new ones. I'm going to save those for a different post, but in the meantime... Let's all go out and support our local entertainment!

What May May Have to Offer

May is a funny month for entertainment options in Bloomington-Normal, as students move out and theaters finish up their spring seasons. That means you'll have to act quickly to catch the last performances of the gripping drama Iron at Heartland Theatre in Normal, starring Lori Adams and Alyssa Ratkovich as a mother and daughter attempting to reconnect after years of separation due to the mother's incarceration, and Parkland College's production of Monty Python's Spamalot, the fizzy and silly musical about knights of the round table looking for a grail, holy or otherwise. They are certainly different sorts of theater, but both shows finish up this weekend, and both have received very good notices, so if you can get your hands on a ticket, they're both well worth your time.

Also in Champaign, the Station Theatre continues its run of Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities, directed by Kay Bohannon Holley and starring Steven M. Keen, Carolyn Kodes-Atkinson, Joi Hoffsommer, Joel Higgins and Kate Riley as the wealthy but dysfunctional Wyeth family of Palm Springs. Baitz's newest play was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

If you are a fan of British films or of the amazing Jim Broadbent or Lindsay Duncan, you'll want to check out Le Week-End at the Art Theater Co-op in Champaign, on screen till May 8. The premise of the film -- that long-married couple Nick and Meg travel to Paris for a second honeymoon to try to find the spark their relationship has lost -- is set up nicely in the film's trailer. Le Week-End was directed by Roger Michell, known for rom-com Notting Hill and the recent soft-focus FDR pic Hyde Park on Hudson, and is described as a "magically buoyant and bittersweet film." Le Week-End will also move into the Normal Theater for a short stay from May 29 to June 1.

Before that, the Normal Theater is focusing on Audrey Hepburn as directed by Stanley Donen for four nights, starting with Charade, the delightful 1963 romantic caper/spy film that paired Hepburn with Cary Grant, on May 8 and 9. The Hepburn/Grant romance is given even more sparkle by the terrific Henry Mancini/Johnny Mercer song also called "Charade" that pops up in the movie. Then it's time for Funny Face, the 1957 musical where Audrey is a beatnik turned into a fashion model by photographer Fred Astaire, on the 10th and 11th. As it happens, May 10 is Fred's birthday. You can celebrate by catching Funny Face at the Normal Theater, taking a look at Holiday Inn on the RETRO channel on May 16, or staying up till the wee hours for The Belle of New York on Turner Classic Movies on May 22.

Community Players takes a break from musicals to offer the Neil Simon classic The Odd Couple, opening May 15. Brian Artman and Tom Smith play mismatched roommates Oscar and Felix for director Jeremy Stiller, with a supporting cast that includes Stacy Baker, Andy Cary, Drew German, Allen Popowski, Thom Rakestraw and Bridgette Richard. Performances of The Odd Couple continue through May 25. Tickets for this show and for the 2014-15 Community Players season are available now.

Players will also hold auditions for their upcoming production of Shrek: The Musical from 6 to 7 pm (for kids from 3rd to 8th grade) and 7 to 9 pm (for everybody older than 8th grade) on May 18, 19 and 20. For all the details, check out the Shrek Auditions Facebook page.

As part of its Summer Arts Festival, Eureka College Theatre will hold a stage combat workshop in Eureka in collaboration with Western Illinois University beginning May 19. The workshop will include 30 hours of instruction in stage fighting with single sword and quarterstaff, with additional "Dueling Arts Certification" in unarmed and small sword categories. At the end of the workshop, students will be tested for Society of American Fight Directors certification. Please note that enrollment is limited to 18 and that college credit may be available for participants. Click here to see costs and other important information.

Instead of Whose Line Is It, Anyway? -- the TV improv show that started in Britain and then spawned two American versions --  the Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts will host Whose Live Anyway? at 7:30 pm on May 31. I feel the need to point out that it should probably be "Who's" to indicate "Who is live?" as opposed to "Whose," which really makes no sense in this context. But I guess these are improv performers, not people who necessarily know their "whose" from their "who's." Anyway, a quartet of performers who frequently visited Whose Line , including Ryan Stiles, Greg Proops, Jeff B. Davis and Charles "Chip" Esten, who has since broken out as an actor on ABC's Nashville, will take on some of the games they did on the television show as well as some new ones. This is not the first time Whose Line personnel have visited Bloomington, but it may be the first time since Esten became a major TV heartthrob. For more information, click here.

April Showers Us with Entertainment

April is certainly being generous with the showers so far. Luckily, it's also loaded with entertainment choices. I suggest you get out of the rain and get into a theater forthwith. As it happens, I will be spending my weekend at Actors Theatre of Louisville's Humana Festival of New American Plays, and I will report back on everything I see there next week. Meanwhile, back in Central Illinois...

Illinois State University's production of The Exonerated, the sharp piece of documentary theater by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen about eight people wrongfully sent to death row, is officially sold out through the end of its run this weekend. But you can always try to get on the wait list through the ISU Center for the Performing Arts box office. The Exonerated benefits from a terrific production brought to life by director Cyndee Brown and a committed cast. Let's just say it's worth the wait list.

Also continuing through this weekend is New Route Theatre's Gidion's Knot, a new play by Johnna Adams. A parent, played for New Route by Gabrielle Lott-Rogers, confronts the teacher, played by Kathleen Kirk, who suspended her son, raising issues of discipline versus free expression, conformity versus eccentricity, and, of course, the balance between parenting and teaching when it comes to controlling  -- or not controlling -- our kids. Because the play is set in a classroom, director Don Shandrow has placed his production in one, too. That classroom is in the Mt. Moriah Christian Church on Washington Street in Bloomington. For all the details, click here to see New Route's Facebook page for the event.

Emily Mann's Mrs. Packard, another ISU production about wrongful incarceration, opens tomorrow night with the first of eight performances in the Center for the Performing Arts. Like The Exonerated, Mrs. Packard is based on real events and real people, although in this play, the title character is not sent to prison, but to a mental hospital. . The real Elizabeth Packard was shut away in an asylum in Jacksonville, Illinois in 1860 when her vindictive husband decided her political views were dangerous. Emily Mann (Execution of Justice) not only wrote Mrs. Packard; she directed its world premiere at the McCarter Theatre, where she is the artistic director. Third-year MFA directing candidate Vanessa Stalling, who did The Maids and A Midsummer Night's Dream last year, is at the helm for ISU.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is getting some TV commercials right now, giving you a hint of what this "filigreed toy box of a movie," as Peter Travers called it in his Rolling Stone review, is all about. He went on to say the movie is "so delicious-looking you may want to lick the screen." Licking the screen or not, there's a lot to be attracted to in The Grand Budapest Hotel, which is making believers out of even the anti-Wes Anderson crowd. In this one, Anderson concocts a beautiful trifle of a story, set in a European hotel over decades of its life, with eccentric characters, gorgeous art direction, and a lighter-than-air plot that may just waltz away with  your heart and any early 20th century romantic notions you're carrying. Although The Grand Budapest Hotel isn't playing in Bloomington-Normal, it is in Champaign, where the Art Theater Co-op has screenings scheduled through April 10.

Illinois Wesleyan Theatre gets back in the game with The Drowsy Chaperone, the fizzy little musical about a man who lives through his cast recordings. As our "Man in Chair" opens the show, he puts a record (yes, an actual vinyl record) from his favorite 1920s Broadway musical on the turntable and the show suddenly comes alive, with its entire tap-dancing, plate-spinning, ditty-singing, roller-skating, airplane-flying cast right there in his walk-up apartment. In the right hands, The Drowsy Chaperone is delightful. Director Tom Quinn is banking on Elliott Plowman as his "Man in Chair," Erica Werner as Janet Van De Graaff, the show-off Broadway star/bride-to-be in the show within the show, Marek Zurowski as her intended groom and Jenna Haimes as the chaperone in the title. The Drowsy Chaperone plays in IWU's McPherson Theatre from April 8 to 13.

Eureka College's production of the musical Godspell opens April 9. The pop/rock/folk/gospel score for this quintessential 70s musical about Jesus and his apostles was composed by Stephen Schwartz, now better known for Wicked. That score included the song "Day by Day," which broke out as a hit single. Godspell started at Carnegie Mellon University and then played LaMaa off-Broadway. By 1972, it had hit Canada, where its cast included Victor Garber, who would play Jesus in the movie version, as well, along with a host of names from Second City Toronto, like Martin Short, Gilda Radner, Eugene Levy and Andrea Martin. I saw the show in Chicago when I was in high school, with Joe Mantegna as Judas. Chip Joyce is directing and choreographing for Eureka College and the always excellent Joel Shoemaker, a Eureka alum, is part of the cast. Tickets are $5 for performances through April 13. Click here for all the details.

Iron, Rona Munro's gripping drama about a woman in prison and the daughter who tries to reconnect, opens at Heartland Theatre on April 17. Munro is a Scottish playwright who has a way with emotional tension and human fallout in her plays. In this one, Munro is exploring how we hurt each other and yet still keep reaching out to connect. Christopher Connelly, recently named Heartland's new artistic director, directs Lori Adams as Fay, who is in jail for killing her husband, while Alyssa Ratkovich plays opposite as her daughter Josie. Ashley Donahue and Marcus Smith check in as the two guards who rule Fay's world. Performances of Iron will continue through May 4, and you can get show times and reservation information at the Heartland website.

Also on the 17th, director David Ian Lee and his cast bring Shakespeare's Pericles to ISU's Westhoff Theatre. Storm-tossed Pericles, Prince of Tyre, loses and finds his wife and his daughter (named Marina because she was born at sea) as he wanders through dangerous waters and even more dangerous lands ruled by evil people of various stripes. There's incest, attempted murder, a very bad riddle, pirates, sailors, kings, a bordello and a virgin, pulled together by a narrator named Gower. In the cast list posted last fall, grad student Faith Servant was slated to play Gower, with another MFA actor, Ronald Roman, as Pericles, Molly Briggs as Thaisa, his wife, and Andrea Williams as daughter Marina. Pericles will take its voyages at Westhoff from April 17 to 26, and, as always, tickets are available through the CPA box office.

Just after Iron opens, Heartland will hold auditions for its annual (and very popular) 10-Minute Play Festival on April 21 and 22 from 7 to 9 pm. Winners were announced April 1, and they include Joe Strupek of Bloomington-Normal, whose play The Decoy involves a wooden duck. Each of the eight winning Fowl Plays involves a bird of some sort, from a small bird in a box in Blaise Miller's Bird on a Ferry to a man who thinks he used to be an owl in Whoooo? by Russell Weeks, a woman pretending to be a parrot in Ron Burch's Polly, crows on paper as drawn by a child in The Murder of Crows by Nancy Halper, crows made of paper in Claire BonEnfant's The Caw-Caw Conspiracy, a pair of eagles that may break up a couple in Tim West's Two in the Bush and a beautiful bird in the park that may bring two artistic women together in Fly Girl Fly by Brigitte Viellieu-Davis. There are some 23 roles available in these eight plays, with all age ranges invited to audition.

If you enjoyed Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities at Heartland Theatre earlier this year and you'd like to compare/contrast with another production, or if you missed that one and you'd like to catch up, you might want to try the Station Theatre in Urbana, where Kay Bohannon Holley directs the piece in performance from April 24 to May 10. Her version of the wealthy Wyeth family of Palm Springs features Carolyn Kodes-Atkinson and Steven M. Keen as matriarch and patriarch Polly and Lyman Wyeth, Joi Hoffsommer as Polly's sister Silda, and Kate Riley and Joel Higgins as Brooke and Tripp, Polly and Lyman's conflicted daughter and son. It's when Brooke comes home with a tell-all book that things start to get interesting Chez Wyeth.

The Normal Theater begins a salute to Harold Ramis, the actor/writer/director/all-around great guy who passed in February, with one of his best movies. Groundhog Day, wherein Bill Murray relives one day of his life again and again, is on screen at the Normal Theater on April 24 and 25, followed by another Ramis/Murray collaboration, the army buddy comedy Stripes, on the 26th and 27th. They're both worth a look as a reminder of the genius of Harold Ramis, a fantastic writer, a brilliant director and an Illinois boy done good who left us much too soon.

And if all of that's not enough to keep you busy in April, I don't know what is!