With Passover and Easter celebrations falling at the same time this year, St. Louis theaters were wise enough not to add opening nights to our crowded calendars, and most shows that had already opened have now closed.
A few linger, like Mustard Seed Theatre’s Falling, Deanna Jent’s powerfully moving and imaginatively constructed drama of a family’s struggles with a child on the autism spectrum. It continues through this weekend.
And Stages St. Louis has opened its revival of last summer’s huge hit, Always . . . Patsy Cline, with the original two-person cast, Jacqueline Petroccia as Patsy Cline and Zoe Vonder Haar as the fan who kept up a steady correspondence with her. As the Kirkwood Theatre Guild is about to open its production of the musical 9 to 5 in Stages’ usual home, the Robert G. Reim Theatre in the Kirkwood Community Center, Stages moved Always . . . Patsy Cline to The Playhouse at Westport Plaza. The intimate musical should be a good fit for that cozy space.
Upstream Theatre, which often enlarges our experience of world theater by its choice of plays, continues with its current production of David Milroy’s Windmill Baby, the exploration of Australian theater it began earlier this season with the play Forget Me Not. One of St. Louis’ favorite actors, Linda Kennedy, plays an aging Aboriginal woman who returns to her old home on a cattle station to tell her story about black and white Australians and to deal with business left unfinished.
The Fox Theatre just welcomed another touring production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, in my opinion the most enjoyable of the Andrew Lloyd Weber-Tim Rice collaborations.
If even Joseph seems more challenging than you want for an evening’s entertainment, head out to Chesterfield for Dramatic License Production’s The Nerd. This Larry Shue farce doesn’t rise to the giddy comic heights he achieved in The Foreigner, but given a good cast and director, which Dramatic License has assembled, it’s stuffed with laughs.
If even following a plot is too much effort, wait for the New Jewish Theatre’s Old Jews Telling Jokes, a revue inspired by a website. The title says it all, though some of the jokes have been turned into sketches, and a few songs are tossed into the mix. It claims to be a barrel full of laughs—a kosher pickle barrel, no doubt.
By the middle of May, be ready for the serious stuff. Shakespeare Festival St. Louis returns to Shakespeare Glen in Forest Park with not one but, for the first time, two plays. Together they tell the story of the wayward Prince Hal, son and heir of England’s King Henry IV, and Hal’s reformation and rise to greatness as King Henry V, perhaps Shakespeare’s ideal ruler. Shakespeare took three plays to tell Hal’s story, but the Shakespeare Festival is combining Henry IV, Part 1 and Henry IV, Part 2 into one Henry IV. Henry V reunites the director, Bruce Longworth, and the star, Jim Butz, of Shakespeare Festival’s brilliant Hamlet from four years ago. Tim Ocel directs Henry IV, with Butz playing the young prince, and the others in the cast continuing in their roles from play to play. The two plays will usually appear on alternate evenings, but on a couple of Saturdays, you can spend the whole day with the two Henrys and their friends and enemies.
Photo : John Lamb, Falling at Mustard Seed Theatre
