Performing Art

Don’t call Diana Son’s 1998 play Stop Kiss a political piece. It’s a love story. The first time Missy Thibodeaux-Thompson, assistant professor of theater at Illinois College, read the last scene of Stop Kiss, she gasped. Since that moment three years ago, she has wanted to direct the play. This Friday, she gets her chance […]

“My radiation oncologist cruelly resisted my pleas. I begged him to irradiate the unaffected breast so it would be big and perky and glow in the dark like the one they zapped.” — “Degrees of Lucky,” Judith Schlessinger Dyer Judy Dyer, who died of breast cancer earlier this month, left behind a one-act drama about […]

On a Wednesday afternoon in early July, five teachers huddle in a cluttered second-floor office in the Hoogland Center for the Arts to plan the third and final session of summer theater camp. In a week, the Hoogland will be overrun by dozens of noisy fledging thespians, but on this day, as Jason Goodreau puts […]

Eric Thibodeaux-Thompson moved to Springfield three years ago to help build a theater program at University of Illinois-Springfield with his wife, Missy Thibodeaux-Thompson, a fellow actor and director and part-time assistant professor of theater at Illinois College in Jacksonville. Before their move to the capital city, the couple’s pursuit of work in the theater had […]

So much theater is being performed in the region right now, it’s impossible to see it all. Fortunately, I was able to enjoy three excellent productions last week that prove central Illinois a great theater center: Beauty & the Beast in Sullivan, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in Bloomington, and Broadway, a delightful relic of the Roaring […]

The show of the summer is Ragtime. The musical opened last Friday at the Springfield Muni Opera and runs through this Sunday, July 3. There is not one weak performance in this production. In fact, this is one of those times when every single part is absolutely right. Ragtime features Mary Jo Curry, Tony D. Young, […]

Great things are happening on summer stages. I just saw 42nd Street in Sullivan at the Little Theatre on the Square. Having seen back in 1980 the original Broadway production, which began with a slow curtain rising on what seemed to be 100 pairs of tap-dancing feet, I wondered how effective the opening would be handled […]

I’m playing town crier this week for the comedy Rounding Third, which finishes a two-weekend run at the Hoogland Center for the Arts this Friday and Saturday, May 27 and 28. It’s the first production of the just-formed ADHD Productions, and local actors Jason Goodreau and Mac Warren are performing this must-see play by Richard […]

Springfield gets its first look next week at Rounding Third, a new comedy by Richard Dresser that played off-Broadway and has been a hit in theaters around the country. Jason Goodreau and Mac Warren, two local actors, are responsible for the Springfield production, and they play the lead roles. Rounding Third follows Don, a tough, blue-collar, […]