* The last weekend in the merry month of May more than compensates for the penultimate one that was absent new theater openings. Suddenly we get Wicked, Guys and Dolls, My Big Gay Italian Wedding, Leaving Iowa and Nana’s Naughty Knickers plus the Saturday start of eight full days of drama at the Great Plains Theater Conference. You can read more about the GPTC and the Omaha Community Playhouse G&D musical elsewhere in this issue. If you think it’s tough catching up with the stage action, consider the Playhouse cast, which will miss much of the conference and the Great Plains organizers who must wait for later in the run to hear “Adelaide’s Lament.” SNAP! Productions promises “to blow the closet doors wide open” with Stephen Michael Shelton and Ryan Eberhart as Andrew and Anthony, the gay Italians who plan to get married with more help than wanted from a loud ethnic mother played by Lorie Obradovich. Director Todd Brooks was worried that we’d think it was a musical, and his fears seemed justified when it was mentioned under the heading “musical theater” in the Sunday daily. More quirky was the fact that its title appeared as My Big Gay Italian, sans wedding, in the Theatre Arts Guild Newsletter. That doesn’t explain why my mind keeps adding “Fat” to the title. To see Leaving Iowa , you leave the metro for Manley, Neb., and the Lofte Theater. For Nana’s Naughty Knickers, you leave Nebraska for the Mills Masquers at the Barton Theater north of Glenwood, Iowa. It may sound like a relic of another era, but it’s a new comedy first performed last year; and the cast includes the actress with that memorable name, Lois Pitchfork. I’m determined to get to Manley eventually, and it’s always a treat to motor down to Glenwood, but what’s a guy to do when he wants to see the dolls at the Playhouse, attend the SNAP! comedy and see the best of the GPTC events? The latter includes the Sunday evening performance of Alchemy of Desire/Dead Man’s Blues , which promises ghosts, love and war at the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s Weber Fine Arts Building. For me, it doesn’t hurt that those three events are three (Playhouse), five (UNO) and 10-minute (SNAP!) drives, which isn’t a bad deal even with gas prices dropping a few pennies in the last few days.

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