by Warren Francke The best thing about School of Rock is that the musical gives you so many characters to root for. You get to care about a dozen kids, ages 9 to 12, who not only have the Orpheum rocking but they get the joint jumping. Literally. Someone named JoAnn Hunter is credited with […]
As old Chuck Dickens would have eulogized, it was the best of times and the worst of times. The theater season that ended in the spring of 1994 saw Charles Jones, the dominant force in driving the Omaha Community Playhouse to the top, hospitalized for three months as his health failed. […]
I’d love to have heard the exchanges between director Ablan Roblin and his two leading players, Josh Peyton and Tony Schik, as they rehearsed the Steinbeck classic Of Mice and Men at the Omaha Community Playhouse. On preview night, the results of their collaboration first left me puzzled, then went a long way […]
There didn’t seem to be many millennials in the opening night audience for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in the Crossroads Mall, so a savvy crowd knew what to expect when George and Martha began their abusive games at 2 a.m. after a well-lubricated faculty party. More important, as theater and film-goers learned […]
For the 11th year, it began again with “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club” and wound up with the crowd on its feet, dancing and clapping and singing along with “Come together…right now! Over me!” Half of us had been there before and half were virgins, but Billy McGuigan’s Yesterday and Today—An Interactive Beatles […]
An Act of God at the Blue Barn Theatre is more thought-provoking than funny, but then I’m a believer who found Book of Mormon sophomoric. It’s probably funniest to non-believers who think all believers believe literally every word in the Bible. And (I’m still guessing here) those most literal fundamentalists probably are offended […]
For 43 years, A Christmas Carol has inspired Omaha Community Playhouse audiences, both the newcomers catching it for the first time and those of us who’ve seen it year after year and still shed tears of joy when a reformed Scrooge hugs Tiny Tim and the lad asks God to bless us “every one.” […]
You’ll laugh out loud at The Play That Goes Wrong, the slapstick comedy running through Sunday at the Orpheum Theater. If you find it hilarious when set pieces fall off the walls you’ll laugh out loud sooner than I did. But then I arrived with a “show me” attitude after reading […]
Singin’ in the Rain wasn’t an instant hit when the film came out in 1952, but it grew into a classic ranked by some as the greatest movie musical of all time. So why did it take so long for the live version to land on the Omaha Community Playhouse […]
Funny how Wicked grew in 15 years from a fresh spin-off of “The Wizard of Oz” into the seventh longest-running Broadway musical of all time. I enjoyed it the first time a road company arrived at the Orpheum more than a decade ago, but I skipped the return engagements until Thursday night. Like […]
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