Get Ready to Open Heartland's PACKAGE PLAYS June 6

Heartland Theatre Company's annual 10-Minute Play Festival is always popular, probably because eight short plays are pretty easy to take in. After all, if you don't like the one you're watching, you only have to wait ten minutes for another one!

This year's theme was packages, parcels and presents, which means there are lots of things to open in the plays chosen. And lots of surprises for the audience. Off the top of my head, I can tell you the containers on stage include a bowling bag, at least four briefcases, a delivery container from a famous New York emporium, one huge Fed Ex box, a hatbox, a jewelry box, a small parcel stuck inside a newspaper, a shoebox and a shopping bag. Now you can try to mix and match with these shows:

STANDING ROOM ONLY by C. J. Ehrlich, Chappaqua NY
After a tough day, Charlene is determined not to give up her extra seat on the ferry. Until she meets a stranger who bears a strange resemblance to Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi.

DEAR SUSAN, LOVE HAROLD by James Walczy, Hilton Head Island SC
It’s understandable that a man would be upset when he discovers a box of intimate love letters written to his wife long ago. Who was this Harold, anyway?

DO NOT OPEN by Candace Perry, Wellfleet MA
A big old package lands in the middle of three sisters enjoying a weekend away at the beach. Uh oh. It’s from Mom, who never could resist inserting herself into their lives.

MINCED SPIES by Doc Watson, Bath, Somerset UK
Spies, pies, newspapers, teapots, aardvarks, and, of course, a mysterious parcel… Things can get tricky when you’re testing spies. And pies.

THE CHEESECAKE PLAY by John Frusciante, Astoria NY
Jeff and Andrea fume when the people upstairs are noisy and thoughtless and downright annoying. But revenge can be sweet when their cheesecake wends its way to your door.

A MILLION TIMES OVER by Molly Campbell, Chicago IL
A handsome man keeps bringing pretty little packages to Marie as she rests in a hospital. They look like empty boxes. Except they’re not empty at all in Marie’s memory.

LAST CALL by James McLindon, Northampton MA
Melissa has brought a bowling bag to the bar her dad loved best. Why a bowling bag? She’s dying to tell someone that story.

AND TWICE ON SUNDAY by Brad Sytsma, Kentwood MI
If you wear a trench coat to the park and you sit next to somebody carrying a lethal-looking briefcase, you have to expect there to be… Misunderstandings.

For information on show dates and times, click here, and for reservation info, click here. Opening night is June 6, followed by Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday performances through the end of June. Note that there is no performance on Father's Day, June 16, but there is a talkback with the 10-minute play committee judges after the matinee on June 23.

Finding FAMILY TREE for Your Guest/McKean/Brit Fix

I'm always involved with Heartland Theatre Company's 10-minute play festival -- I sort of chair the committee and shepherd the judging process -- and this year more than usual because I'm (ahem) acting again. I can't quite believe it myself, but there you have it. If all goes well (and probably even if it doesn't) I will appear in two of the eight winning "Package Plays" that open on June 6.

Because the theme for this year's festival involves packages, parcels and presents, and because I traditionally tote up a list of what was written about, or for this year, what was inside all the packages conjured up by playwrights, I have been dealing with a whole lot of boxes, bags, bundles and whatever else somebody wrote about under that Package umbrella.

So imagine my surprise when I fell over a new HBO series, a series with my name written all over it, whose first episode is called "The Box."

The series itself is Family Tree and it started way back on May 12. Somehow I missed the news of its arrival, which is fairly shocking considering it comes from Christopher Guest, one of my favorite filmmakers. Guest created Family Tree with Jim Piddock, an English actor, writer and producer who appeared in Guest's For Your Consideration, the one about a modest movie about Purim that attracts Oscar buzz, A Mighty Wind, about a reunion of leftover folk singers, and Best in Show, the dog show mockumentary.

So Family Tree is about a guy named Tom Chadwick, played by Chris O'Dowd, who is probably best known for Bridesmaids, but was the fairly normal guy in cult sitcom The IT Crowd, as well. The premise of the first episode is that Tom's great-aunt dies, leaving behind... A box! Ta da! Piddock is there, too, as the "Bits and Bobs" man who gives him info on the age and usefulness of some of the objects in the box. His advice -- he says something like "I wouldn't put that in my mouth, Tommy. That's not a musical instrument, it's a Victorian dildo" -- is deadpan, amusing and very familiar in that improvised Guestian style.

The box episode of Family Tree also introduced us to Michael McKean, someone I absolutely love, as Tom's English dad, Nina Conti as his older sister, always seen with a monkey puppet on her hand because of a childhood trauma, and Tom Bennett as his best friend Pete. Ed Begley, Jr., Fred Willard and Don Lake are due to show up later. The second episode of Family Tree ("Treading the Boards") aired  May 19 on HBO, while "The Austerity Games" shows up June 2. You can watch the first two On Demand or with HBO Go right now, which is what I did, or look for them on the HBO schedule.

I love the tone, the idea of a search based on genealogical and identity issues, and the terrific cast. The Internet Movie Database tells us that the June 16 episode is "Coming to America," which I'm going to assume shows Tom Chadwick finding American relatives, the opposite of Christopher Guest finding his English roots (and title).

The tag line on the promo poster at the top tells us that Tom is Finding himself one relative at a time... And isn't that intriguing?

C-U's PENS TO LENS Brings Kids' Ideas to the Big Screen

Earlier this year, the Champaign-Urbana Film Society invited kids from Champaign County in grades K-12 to submit their original screenplays in a competition they called Pens to Lens. Entries were due in February, with nine winners chosen whose stories were turned into actual, real-live short films by area directors and actors. Pens to lens, get it? Outside the nine big winners, other students who sent in screenplays were given the gift of movie poster art created by artists at CUDO, the Champaign-Urbana Design Organization, to reflect the ideas in their scripts.

And all of that art -- movies and posters -- will be on display at C-U's Art Theater tonight at the boffo Pens to Lens Awards Gala, with red carpet arrivals and everything! The winners will walk the red carpet at 6 pm, with showings of the films at 7 and 9:30. Because they are expecting a full house at 7, you are encouraged to try the 9:30 pm show if you can.

The films based on winning screenplays (as listed at the Pens to Lens site) are:

The Devil Uses Purell by Ella G.
Cassie trades the devil her soul for a hamburger but the devil makes a big fuss over it because it's not clean so Sammi and Danielle have to save Cassie from herself.

Dinner Party Antics by Aly.
 Jim and Jenna are waiting outside of Jim's cousin Dave's home and are reminiscing of prior "Dinner Parties."

Even and Odd by Iona H.
Ivy and her dog Idris are invited into a parallel world by her unconscious self to help finish a quest.

Fluffystein by Maya, Madely and Taquia
A little girl's beloved toy bunny goes missing and is used for malicious purposes.

Into The Mine by Blake P. and Logan L.
Two boys are ready to mine, but someone's watching them and they don't know who.

Super Duper Low by Quinn.
Super Quinn teaches Mr. Machine about diabetes during their fight.

Susan and Daisy's Adventure: Episode I by Beatrice, Catherine, David, Dennis, Jonathan, Reuben, & Saewoong
Two poor people need money to get a house so they catch an eel.

Tunnel To Greenland by Ruth C.
 A young girl and boy try to dig a tunnel to Greenland to see snow and ice during the summertime.

Unexpected Trip by Jose, Taeyoon and Dafeny.
The story is about a Mexican family that experiences poverty and immigration problems as they come to the U.S.A.; it is based on a true story and it talks about the lives of illegal immigrants and what they go through.

Because I tend to fall on the theatrical side of things, I've heard about quite a few playwriting competitions for kids, as well as theaters who work with children all year long to put their work on the stage. But making movies -- in our area, at least -- is a great idea, since kids are more likely to be familiar with what a movie looks like and can accomplish. Plus, Pens to Lens offered screenwriting resources geared to specific age groups to help teachers help their students as they worked toward entering the contest. All around, pretty nifty.

You can read more about Pens to Lens at their website, in Melissa Merli's piece for the News-Gazette, or in Mathew Green's article at Smile Politely. They received 120 entries this year in the first ever Pens to Lens competition, but next year, who knows how many budding screenwriters will enter?

New in Town: Mosaic Theatre Company

There's a new theater company in Bloomington-Normal. Or there will be very soon!

Check out this announcement from the brand-new Mosaic Theatre Company Facebook page:

"Ladies and Gentlemen, we are proud to announce Bloomington-Normal's newest theatre: MOSAIC Theatre Company! We are planning on delighting you with great theatre here in central Illinois, starting with our inaugural production, Tragedy: A Tragedy by Will Eno, directed by Kenny Kendall.

"Auditions will be held May 29th and 30th with performances starting July 18th!

"Please support us, and all the theatre in Bloomington-Normal..."

Founder Jennifer Lumsdon, who has in the past directed and acted with local theaters like Prairie Fire and Heartland, has also created a kickstarter page in the hopes of creating some operating capital for the planned Tragedy production. You can visit that page and see what Mosaic has to offer right here. 

The new company's mission statement says they intend to "provide entertainment to the public in the form of professional quality theatrical productions, selected from the full spectrum of published plays as well as original works; and to provide theatrical education and support to the community through classes and mentoring/tutoring programs."

Note the mention of classes, which appears to also play a big part in the Mosaic plan. No word on where those classes will take place, but the first show will be produced at "cometogetherspace" at Roosevelt and Jefferson Streets in downtown Bloomington.

For more information about Mosaic Theatre Company's inaugural production, auditions and even t-shirts, click here.

Better Get to the SPELLING BEE While You Still Can!

Everybody was in a spelling bee at some time, right? We had to spell in our 5th and 6th grade classes at Woodrow Wilson School in Peoria to try to win a spot in the school-wide Bee and then the big Peoria Journal Star Spelling Bee. My sister got all the way to the big one and spelled on TV! I, sadly, did not. I'm afraid I left the C out of ACQUAINTANCE and got buzzed out back at Woodrow Wilson.

The children in the charming and wonderful The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (seen above as they appear in the Community Players production) would understand exactly the pain of leaving out that C. They are misfits, sort of, from strange William Barfée (yes, that accent is for real), who spells with his foot and suffers terrible allergies, to hapless homeschooler Leaf Coneybear, who has a decided lack of confidence; pretty Olive Ostrovsky, whose mother abandoned her for an ashram; Marcy Park, who is good at everything except acting like a live human being; Logainne SchwartzandGrubenierre, trying to keep up with her overachiever dads (she has two, hence the compound last name); and last year's champ, Chip Tolentino, who finds himself suddenly smacked around by puberty.

Spelling Bee has a bright, tuneful score written by Michael Finn and a sweet book by Rachel Sheinkin. It doesn't take itself too seriously, although it has its touching moments, mostly in the neighborhood of parent/child interactions (or lack thereof). It also offers audience members a chance to spell, if they're game. I'm sure I've told everyone I know about the time I went to see The Bee in Chicago on my birthday, got chosen as one of four volunteer spellers, and lasted almost to the end, putting my ACQUAINTANCE ignominy to bed once and for all. (I went out on lysergic acid diethylamide, which you will notice is really three words, not one, but, hey, I wanted to be done so I could go back to the audience and watch the show, so I didn't complain. I still have the juice box I got as a parting gift. Just sayin'.)

The main thing to take away here is that The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is a perfectly adorable show. And you need to see it. And you have four chances left while it's still playing at Community Players. F-O-U-R.

Director Brett Cottone's cast includes Brian Artman, Kallie Bundy, Aimee Kerber, Megan Masterman, Joe McDonald, Joel Shoemaker, Kelly Slater, Chris Stanford and Austin Travis. They will be appearing (and spelling) tonight, tomorrow and Saturday at 7:30 pm, with a matinee Sunday at 2:30 pm to finish off their run. You can order tickets here or check out Bee info at the Community Players website here.

Can you spell M-U-S-T  S-E-E?

The Elusive "You're a Stranger, Not My [fill in the blank]!" Movie

I seem to have a weakness for a certain kind of mystery plot, one that's a little hard to describe. Let's just start by calling it the "You're a stranger, not my [wife, brother, doctor, friend, uncle]!" plot, even though it's not always about a wife. It could be someone Anne Baxter doesn't recognize who says he's her brother, a doctor who claims James Garner has been in a coma for five years, or someone who tells Louis Jourdan that he isn't at all who he thinks he is. The key here is that the person in the middle is suddenly confronted with a world s/he knows isn't true. And what could be more terrifying than that?

I was reminded of my fascination for this plot when Chase a Crooked Shadow showed up on Turner Classic Movies yesterday. I hadn't seen it before, but it's the first I know of in this specific subgenre. Anne Baxter appears as South African heiress Kimberly Prescott, returning to her lovely villa as she mourns the death of her brother a year before. But then a man who says he is that very brother shows up. And even though she knows it's not him, everybody around her says it is, and he has a passport and other identification to bolster his story and convince the local authorities. Anne Baxter was very good at that sort of conflicted, ambiguous heroine, while Richard Todd did very well as the superior and smug brother-who-wasn't-really. We know from the get-go it's a scam. The mystery is why these people are menacing Kimberly. Or who exactly is menacing whom?

A wonderful example of the "You're a stranger, not my [fill in the blank]!" story is 36 Hours, a 1965 film in which Nazis try to convince American intelligence officer Jefferson Pike (James Garner) that it's 1949, not 1944, and that World War II is over, to try to get him to reveal Allied invasion plans. Eva Marie Saint is the alleged wife, in on the scam but warming up to her handsome faux-husband, while Rod Taylor is the bad guy trying to con his patient into giving away military secrets. 36 Hours is based on a true story, too, and it's quite tense and scary as Garner tries to figure out what's what and get himself out of there before the Nazis find out about Normandy beach, even though we all know how the war (and the D-Day invasion) turned out.

Less spy-riffic and more straight-out mystery, in the tradition of stageplays like Sleuth and Deathtrap, is a 1986 TV movie called Vanishing Act, where Harry Kenyon (played by Mike Farrell of M*A*S*H fame) claims his wife has disappeared. But then someone claiming to be her shows up, in the form of Margot Kidder. Who do we believe? And why would someone be pretending to be Mrs. Kenyon? Local cop Lieutenant Rudamayer (Elliot Gould) will surely get to the bottom of it. Vanishing Act is a lot of fun, based on the play Trap for a Single Man by Robert Thomas, who also wrote the screenplay. There's more humor here than the others, with enough clever twists and turns to keep it entertaining and involving.

But my absolute favorite -- and the only one without a poster as well as the only one not available on DVD -- is Run a Crooked Mile, another TV movie, this time from 1969. A man (played by suave French actor Louis Jourdan) witnesses a murder and then gets clonked on the head. When he wakes up, he is told that a) it is two years later, b) he's been in a coma since he had a polo accident, c) he is a different person than he thinks he is, and d) Mary Tyler Moore is his wife! I have to think the "crooked" in the title is a call-back to Chase a Crooked Shadow, and both films inhabit the same world of posh European society, but that's really where the similarities end. Crooked Mile is much more about unraveling the conspiracy, while Crooked Shadow is all about the cat-and-mouse game. TCM has a listing for Run a Crooked Mile, which gives me hope that they'll dig it out and show it sometime. In the meantime, it's supposedly on Youtube in ten parts, uploaded by some kindly fan who knew how many people were out there clamoring to see it again after all these years. I'm going to go  watch it now...

LES GIRLS Is Just Too Too!

When Les Girls, a 1957 movie musical directed by George Cukor, came up on the Turner Classic Movies schedule, I realized I hadn't seen it since... Well, in a very long time. Whether it came up on my local Late, Late Show in 1966 or 1970 really doesn't matter. I did see it when I was young, even if I didn't remember much.What stuck with me was a) Gene Kelly as an entertainer taking his show on tour around Europe, b) Kay Kendall as one of the three women in his act, and c) big technicolor production numbers to show off a tuneful Cole Porter score.

And, yes, that's all still there. What I didn't remember was the Rashomon-style storyline, set into motion by a tell-all memoir written by Kendall's Lady Sybil. After she characterizes the romantic events that transpired during their show biz days in a rather lurid fashion, she ends up in court, sued for libel by Angèle Ducros, the French member of the trio, played by Finnish actress Taina Elg. (I knew Elg from her days as Olympia Buchanan, presumed dead wife of One Life to Live patriarch Asa Buchanan, as well as a stint as Guido's mother in Kopit and Yeston's Nine, which happens to be the first Broadway show I saw, with, yes, Elg in the cast. But I did not remember her from Les Girls at all.)

On the witness stand, Sybil stands pat with her story about an affair between Angèle and Kelly's Barry Nichols that ended badly, while Angèle says Sybil was the one involved with Barry. Oh, and she was a major lush to boot. To try to figure out who's telling the truth, Barry Nichols himself takes the stand, but his story... Doesn't accord with either of theirs. Instead, he matches himself with Joy Henderson, the American member of the female trio, played as a straight arrow/good girl by Mitzi Gaynor.

Each story involves singing and dancing with Gene Kelly front and center (of course) and some romantic hijinks. Even though that includes a suicide attempt, alcoholism and lying, the tone of the movie is silly and bright, befitting the Cole Porter score and such tunes as the cheeky "Ladies in Waiting," bouncy (and kind of crazy) "You're Just Too Too!" and "Why Am I So Gone (About the Gal)?," which attempts to cast Kelly as a motorcycle tough in a leather jacket. Yeah, that doesn't work. At all.

But the movie is a lot of fun, and Kay Kendall, a star who died much too young, is really quite adorable. Gaynor is also fun, even if she is MIA for the first 2/3 of the movie. And I admit it, the storyline hooked me enough to keep going to get to the end and find out "the truth." What is the truth? Les Girls doesn't really answer that question, and it never quite pulls off the mix of dark humor, sly innuendo and fizzy pop it's looking for.

Les Girls was Gene Kelly's last movie for MGM until he did That's Entertainment! in 1974. Kendall did only The Reluctant Debutante with husband Rex Harrison and Once More with Feeling after Les Girls. As a testament to Kelly at MGM and Kendall's career, Les Girls is certainly worth a look.