After serving her time in prison, Percy Talbot dreams of starting over in a new place – specifically, in a small town she found in a travel book. But when she gets there, she finds a town hit by hard times, where people don’t often open up and don’t easily trust an outsider with a troubled past. The Spitfire Grill is a show about people who have lost hope in their communities, their families, and their own lives. Percy’s belief in what the town has to offer starts to turn things around, but is it too late for the other characters to change their ways? Cross Community Players picked an interesting space for their production of The Spitfire Grill ; the room they used at St. Joseph Catholic Community was not designed as a theater and was not even totally enclosed, but it worked surprisingly well for staging this show. As a bonus, coinciding with the run of the show, the church had on display an exhibit featuring poetry by incarcerated people. A church member told me that they had b
How do you live your life when tomorrow’s not guaranteed? The characters of Rent try to create art, fight the systems of power, and have fun – but in the end, what matters are their connections with each other. Theatre 55’s production of Rent may not be the edgiest or the sexiest version of the show you’ll ever see on stage (there was at least one cut of some racier material), but this production delivers where it matters most, in the sense of connection between the characters on the stage and between the performers and the audience. One element that helped this was the space; Gremlin Theatre’s thrust stage and steep seating put the actors and the audience very close to each other. (Gremlin is in a very cool spot, sharing a building with a brewery and other businesses; one downside of this space, though, was that the seating is a little cramped.) But the most essential element in the emotional impact of this show was the cast. The characters in Rent are young adults, but it w