2002 - 2003 Season

Charley's Aunt | The Fight Against Slavery | A Child's Christmas in Wales | I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change | A Grand Night for Singing | The Woman in Black

The Woman in Black (2 Reviews)

Ghouls, ghosts and other things that go bump in the night
All walk the stage in 'The Woman in Black' at Actors' Summit
By David Ritchey, The Akron Beacon Journal

Halloween invites us to be pleasantly scared or to pretend to be scared. What adult hasn't faked terror at the sight of a 6-year-old child on the doorstep saying "Trick-or-Treat" in an effort to get a Halloween goody?

That's what happens this Halloween season with "The Woman in Black" at Actors' Summit. This production invites the audience to fake terror. (I was just pretending. I wasn't really afraid.)

The program identifies "The Woman in Black" as a ghost play, with the script adapted by Stephen Mallatratt from the book by Susan Hill. The cast for "The Woman in Black" is two men: Wayne Turney (Arthur Kipps) and Peter Voinovich (the actor). Where is the woman in black you ask? She's dead. But, who is that roaming across the stage and through the theater? Can she be a ghost?

The complicated plot deals with Kipps, who hires an actor to perform a script he has written. However, the script contains a good deal that is autobiographical in a story dealing with accidents, the death of a child and a woman who can't find peace. The story takes place in a theater -- a theater not too different from that of Actors' Summit in Hudson, but this one is in England. Don't forget to add cold weather, rain and a mist or fog. The script-within-a-script calls for the actor-within-the-new-script to play a lawyer who goes to an old mansion that is on a little island. Only one small path leads from the water to the mansion and that path is surrounded by quicksand.

The elderly lady of the house has died, and the young lawyer must go to the mansion to sort through her papers. At the mansion, locked doors open, sounds come from empty rooms, a dog barks and a woman in black strolls through the acting area.

Scared?

Someone died and the butler didn't do it. In fact, several people died. What else do they have to do in an old mansion that is cut off from the world by a thick mist?

Go with someone who won't be surprised if you're pleasantly scared and who won't be embarrassed if you scream.

In The Woman in Black, we see dead people.
Keith A. Joseph, Scene

Even in these post-Halloween days, when half-rotten jack-o'-lanterns and crumpled paper skeletons sit at the curb awaiting trash pickup, there's nothing like a good scare. And few stories over the ages have been genuinely creepier than Henry James's classic story of corrupt valet Peter Quint (R.I.P.) wrestling with a neurotic governess for the soul of a young boy.

Fortunately, the Actors' Summit's rendition of The Woman in Black not only resurrects the back-from-the-grave feel of James's work, but is scary enough by itself to cure a serious case of the hiccups. Based on Susan Hill's 1983 gothic novel of the same name, the play centers around Arthur Kipps's fervid recollections of his youthful days as solicitor, when he repeatedly encountered an enraged specter.

The intrepid Kipps learns that the ghost had once been an unwed mother forced to hand over her baby to her stern sister. The child later drowned in a freak accident, leading the bereaved mother to madness and, eventually, an agonizing death. For the next 60 years, her tortured spirit haunted the village like a vengeful Cassandra in Victorian mourning weeds, foretelling the deaths of young children.

The intrepid Kipps learns that the ghost had once been an unwed mother forced to hand over her baby to her stern sister. The child later drowned in a freak accident, leading the bereaved mother to madness and, eventually, an agonizing death. For the next 60 years, her tortured spirit haunted the village like a vengeful Cassandra in Victorian mourning weeds, foretelling the deaths of young children.

The play-within-a-play shrewdly blends old-time radio sound effects and narration with a stripped-down theatricality reminiscent of Thornton Wilder. An empty chair suddenly starts rocking, suggesting the presence of evil. The woman in black herself, in a breathtaking theatrical moment worthy of Edgar Allan Poe, suddenly materializes at a funeral, shimmering in a blasphemous halo.

Filling the demands of a script nightmarish in both content and challenging structure are Wayne Turney and Peter Voinovich. Radiating a joyous innocence and wonder, and looking quite like a stuffed owl, Turney's experience hosting a children's show is apparent. His Kipps is a reluctant storyteller turned Pied Piper, blithely leading the audience into treacherous territory. Voinovich's controlling actor character, employing the charmingly overenunciated English accent of a road company Sherlock Holmes, balances his co-star's whimsy. He easily covers the emotional terrain, ranging from self-mocking pomposity to wide-eyed fright.

In a play that depends on sleight-of-hand staging, where production values are essential, director Neil Thackaberry is not altogether comfortable -- but he does manage to keep the sense of psychological terror intact. Richard B. Ingraham's evocative sound, Dan Polk's sepia lighting, and Mary Jo Alexander's fusty costumes all add the appropriate verisimilitude.

The Woman in Black may not be a fount of profundity or subtlety, but it just may be one of the most satisfying scares since Henry James turned that screw.

A Grand Night For Singing

Actors' Summiit Offers Night of Great Songs
Rodgers and Hammerstein revue filled with romance, nostalgia
By Kerry Clawson, The Akron Beacon Journal

Actors' Summit's Rodgers and Hammerstein revue, A Grand Night for Singing, doesn't have a lot of pizzazz, but it's full of romantic, nostalgic classics that make for a pleasant evening.

The 1994 Broadway revue, nominated for two Tonys, celebrates the work of these famous collaborators, featuring tunes from Oklahoma, Cinderella, The King and I, South Pacific, The Sound of Music, Allegro, Pipe Dream, Carousel and Flower Drum Song.

The Actors' Summit production is a fast-paced performance with seamless transitions. Four actors/singers are backed by an excellent four-member band, led by music director/pianist Marc Baker, obviously a consummate musician.

Baritone Greg Violand is the anchor in this musical production, as a soloist, in duets and in ensemble numbers. He's the most accomplished singer of the four, having sung with Cleveland Opera Company and in a number of Northeast Ohio musicals. The rest of the singers have generally enjoyable voices.

The charming Violand excels in the lovely We Kiss in a Shadow and as the lead singer in Honey Bun, one of the most delightful numbers of the evening.

Here, he begins with a cute verbal disclaimer to this song that extols a woman's great figure: `No offense to anybody. It was the times, you know.''

In this bouncy, jazzy number, the rest of the cast serves as a girl backup band, dancing and miming playing instruments.

Other lively songs include That's The Way It Happens with MaryJo Alexander, Violand and Wayne Turney and the ensemble's perfectly polished show stopper, Kansas City.

Alexander and Maryann Nagel also offer a lot of fun in the jazzy, lounge-style I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out-a My Hair.

Too often, alto Nagel and tenor Turney sound a bit forced and flat. That pairing makes their duet, Shall We Dance, one of the show's weakest numbers.All of these cast members are good actors, though. They offer very honest emoting in Alexander's tender Do I Love You Because You're Beautiful and Turney's painful Love, Look Away. Director Neil Thackaberry has added a number of niceties to the show, including plenty of cute patter between numbers. There's a good flow of actors from different entry points into the stage area, and choreography is simple yet effective.

Costumer Alexander presents a beautiful array of gowns for both her and Nagel, adding great elegance to the show.

Rodgers and Hammerstein lovers will want to tap their feet and hum along with some of this revue's best-known numbers. The actors all look starry-eyed in their finale, Impossible/I Have Dreamed, which features beautiful four-part harmony.

I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change (4 Reviews)

Love changes everything
Little to tweak in Actors' Summit Theater's
'I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change'
By Elaine Guregian, The Akron Beacon Journal

There's built-in appeal in a show with a title like I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change. Anyone who has been in a relationship might be drawn to think about the fact that humans can't resist trying to improve the people we love the most.

The show has caught on in a big way. Originally, it was produced by the American Stage Company in Teaneck, N.J. Since August 1996, it has been running at the Westside Theatre in New York City.

Directed by Neil Thackaberry at Actors' Summit Theater in Hudson, the revue got lots of laughs from an audience made up mostly of seniors at Thursday's preview performance. A polished quartet of performers -- Andrew Brelich, Jenn Goodson, Kari Kandel and Keith Stevens -- made quick costume and personality changes to take on the personas of couples in various stages of dating, marriage, having a family and aging.

Jenn Goodson, a 2002 graduate of Baldwin-Wallace College, made an assured Actors' Summit debut, showing off a voluptuous singing voice that's terrific for musical theater. Each of the other cast members has his/her own distinct appeal. Andrew Brelich had a wary, vulnerable way of looking at the world. Keith Stevens was able to flash a dazzlingly confident phony smile as a young man, send a chill up the spine as a prison inmate or affect a winsome appeal as a widower.

The show's appeal is a lot like comfort food. The flavors of these stereotypes and jokes aren't as sharp anymore, and for someone in the mood for familiarity, that may be OK. Men who like to lie around on the couch, watching sports and scratching, aren't new territory. Neither are women who leave their men holding the bag, literally, while making marathon shopping trips for -- what else? -- shoes. It's a relief when the characters occasionally stop acting like such airheads. Kari Kandel infused I Will Be Loved Tonight with a sweet hopefulness, providing a sincere respite from all the banter.

There are moments when Joe DiPietro, who wrote the book and lyrics to music by Jimmy Roberts, scores a zinger. Goodson and Brelich were hilariously desperate as sex-starved parents who finally strapped on sexy undergarments right over their regular clothes and did the tango as their children shouted their demands from offstage.

While the acting cast went all out to sell the revue, pianist John Franks and violinist Jennifer Berlyoung were short of their snappy precision. With such a small cast, every musical line counts, and the singer/actors carry more than their share of the burden in this production. Good thing that they are so up to the task.

Entertaining musical revue roasts modern relationships
By Fran Heller, Jewish News

Dating and mating rituals may not have changed very much since Adam first met Eve.

Or so, "I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change" would have us believe. This clever musical revue about the trials and tribulations of modern relationships is at Actors' Summit in Hudson, Ohio, through July 28. The entertaining show, with book and lyrics by Joe DiPietro and music by Jimmy Roberts, may not tell us anything we already didn't know about how men and women connect in an angst-filled, neurotic age, but it provides a lot of chuckles along the way.

What director A. Neil Thackaberry's production lacks in polish, including a lackluster musical combo and some clunky scene changes, is more than compensated for by a skilled quartet of actors whose well-honed comedic talents overshadow any variance in vocal abilities.

Andrew Brelich, Jenn Goodson, Kari Kandel and Keith Stevens play a variety of men and women. Appearing in short scenes, some more humorous than others, the quartet navigate the emotional minefield of love and marriage. Some 30 vignettes ranging from the first date, upended expectations and fear of commitment, through wedding bells, child rearing and divorce, make the show too long, and the format wears thin, particularly in the less funny second act.

Stevens and Goodson are a perfect pair in a satirical takeoff on dating, in which the too-busy couple fast forward from their first meeting to the end of the relationship. They are joined by Kandel and Brelich in an amusing takeoff on an engagement celebration in which parents' giddy expectations of wedding bells are foiled by their not-quite-ready-to-commit son and my-career-comes-first future daughter- in-law.

Goodson, a recent graduate of Baldwin-Wallace College and a fine musical comedy actress, is a riot in the not-so-undesirable state of being "Always a Bridesmaid." Stevens is equally droll as a one-armed convict and serial killer who, incarcerated for life and still single at 50, scares a reluctant couple straight to the altar in an interfaith singles gathering at the local state prison.

Robert Stegmiller's minimalist set serves in a variety of inventive ways, including four chairs on wheels that simulate the family car. The intimacy of the theatre suits the chamber musical revue well and it is a credit to the actors that every word of the fast-flying lyrics could be heard without miking. With as many costume changes as scenes, Mary Jo Alexander's design palette is a running source of delight.

"I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change" opened off-Broadway in 1996 and is now the longest running musical revue in off-Broadway history. It's a fun show and it resonates at whatever stage of the mating game you're in.

I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change Pleasant at Actors' Summit
By Roy Berko, The Times Newspapers

Now in its 6th smash year I LOVE YOU, YOU'RE PERFECT, NOW CHANGE Is currently Off-Broadway's longest-running musical. Written by Joe DiPietro and Jimmy Roberts, the show opened on August 1, 1996. Since then productions have been mounted in more than 150 cities worldwide. Since its opening, I LOVE YOU, YOU'RE PERFECT, NOW CHANGE has become the most proposal-friendly show in history. On thirteen reported occasions a young man has taken the stage to make a surprise proposal to his sweetheart. In all cases, the brides-to-be accepted as the audience roared with approval.

The show takes the audience on a musical ride through the difficulties and joys of connecting with another person. It specifically probes dating, dating rituals, romance, marriage, lovers, husbands, wives, in-laws, sex, the effect of babies on a marriage, and late life relationships. The cast portrays over 50 roles in a collection of scenes and songs. Actors' Summit is the first local theatre to present the review.

Though slowed down by extensive set changes, most of which could have been eliminated by allowing the audience to imagine the various settings, the production is an audience pleaser. The young cast is pleasing but uneven in their performances. The singing, which is the center of the production, is generally fine, but sometimes there are problems in vocal blending. The musical accompaniment is generally good, but the violin and piano sound is shallow and on occasion the performers have precision difficulties.

Broadway bound Jenn Goodson has both a strong singing voice and nice comedic timing. Her version of "Always a Bridesmaid" was especially endearing. Kari Kandel has a nice singing voice. A show highlight was her rendition of "He Called Me," about the habit of men forgetting to call after promising to do so. Keith Stevens is a delight, especially in "The Baby Song," portraying the idiocy associated with being a new father. Andrew Brelich has some good moments as in his rendition of "Shouldn't I Be in Love With You." Other show highlights are "A Stud and a Babe" about nerds finding love and "Not Tonight, I'm Busy, Busy, Busy" about contemporary speed dating."

I LOVE YOU, YOU'RE PERFECT, NOW CHANGE is a delightful concept and a perfect summertime escapist break from world and personal problems.

A Perfect Date at Actors' Summit
Humor is the best aphrodisiac
By David Ritchey, West Side Leader

"I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change" is the perfect date play. Most of us are familiar with the date movies -- a film that's the prelude to a romantic evening. But, date plays are a bit rare. Now Actors' Summit Theater has staged the ideal date play with its most recent production by Joe DiPietro (book and lyrics) and Jimmy Roberts (music). Few "date" problems have occurred that aren't brought to the stage in song or in dialogue with this wonderful musical review.

People in the audience were laughing so much that the actors had to wait for the laughter to drop enough for them to go on with their lines.

DiPietro wrote "Over the River and Through the Woods," which was popular with Actors' Summit audiences last season. "I Love You" is a much better, much funnier script than "Over the River."

The cast has four of the most charming, talented performers gathered on any local stage in a long time. Andrew Brelich, Jenn Goodson, Kari Kandel and Keith Stevens play DiPietro's various characters, who, in the script, are aged somewhere between 20 and death. These four Ohio actors have more than enough skill to bring this script to life and charm the audience into having the best time since the first date was invented.

In an opening song, the cast sings about the problem of dating and confesses that we all have our share of "emotional baggage." After a particularly bad date with an egomaniac, one woman sings, "I could grow old alone, just fine."

In another sequence, a wedding has ended and the bridesmaid catches the bouquet. She wears a typically bad bridesmaid's dress -- pink and white ruffles -- and sings a song with the lyrics, "Too many weddings, too many dresses." The song is a litany of the description of dresses she's bought to wear in other people's weddings.

One of the most interesting sequences shows a meeting of a singles group in the local prison. In a "Scared Straight" parody, a prisoner in a "scared married" program scares a single man and single woman into marriage. A scene played by two senior citizens (a man and a woman) in a funeral home brought some of the loudest laughs of the evening. During their impromptu meeting, the two talk about the funeral homes they used when their spouses died -- this leads to an hilarious discussion of the comparative comfort of chairs at the local funeral homes.

"I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change" may be the best laugh-filled show of the summer, or, perhaps, of the whole season. It is the perfect show for a summer's night -- bright, witty and romantic.

If the play has a moral or a lesson it's this: love and marriage are mighty good and very funny.

Neil Thackaberry (director) helps the four-person cast create dozens of wacky, in-love characters. This bit of comic confectionery is one of Thackaberry's best directing efforts since Actors' Summit moved to its new theater in Hudson.

John Franks (piano and musical direction) is on stage with Jennifer Beryoung (violin) for the length of the performance. These talented musicians accompany the songs and provide appropriate background music at other times. The quality of the musical performances is superior, and Franks deserves the credit for the uniformly excellent performances of the songs and the emotional interpretation of those songs.

Don't miss "I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change." It's adult, it's charming and it's a laugh machine. Humor can be one of the best aphrodisiacs.

A Child's Christmas in Wales

Poet's boyhood tale is an elegant holiday treat
Actors' Summit play `Child's Christmas in Wales' is charming
By Kerry Clawson, The Akron Beacon Journal

A Child's Christmas in Wales is holiday storytelling at its best -- simple yet elegantly beautiful.

The Actors' Summit production, which is becoming a seasonal tradition at the Hudson theater, brings to life the wonderment of Christmas as seen through a child's eyes. That child is the young Dylan Thomas of Wales, who as an adult poet rolls all the warm, toasty memories of his childhood Christmases into one wonderful snowball.

This play, set in 1930s southern Wales, has plenty of magical moments. But on Thursday evening, its first act didn't elicit the same warm glow I experienced last year from the moment the actors assumed the stage. This year's cast -- which features nine regulars and five new actors -- seemed to get into a more cohesive Christmas spirit by the second act.

All in all, you can't help but be won over by this charming family story. The pleasant tale begins with young Dylan saying his evening prayers on Christmas Eve, digging into his Christmas stocking the next morning eating a breakfast of cockles and laverbread (a traditional Welsh breakfast).

He plays with his two best friends and comes back to the house for presents and dinner with his aunts, uncles and cousins. After dinner, the intergenerational family makes merry with old-fashioned storytelling. In between, Dylan and his friends engage in some believable rivalry with his snotty girl cousins.

As Peter Voinovich's grown Thomas describes all these familiar, heartwarming scenes, he creates wonderful word pictures. We can just picture the ``big, woolly ginger dog'' Dylan prays for for Christmas and just smell Mrs. Thomas' wonderful Christmas pudding.

In one of the show's most magical moments, the actors playing Dylan, his friends and his girl cousins unfold a beautifully surprising prop to represent the glistening, frozen sea that they're playing on. When this occurred, you could hear the oohs of delight from the audience.

But for some reason, that 'sea' proved more treacherous this year than last, with actor Thomas Cummings losing his footing but recovering and Voinovich actually taking a tumble at the end of the scene. He recovered well, ad libbing about the 'ice.'

Actors' Summit's two-tiered stage looks warm and inviting with a lighted Christmas garland snaking around a proscenium, a Christmas tree and pretty white lights glowing through a sheer white fabric backdrop. The set mainly features the interior of the Dylan home, with graceful couches, chairs and a dining room table.

A Child's Christmas in Wales is full of lovely music, including traditional carols both set to their original lyrics and changed to continue the storytelling.

In the play's opening song of In the Bleak Midwinter, Mindi Bonde (Aunt Nellie) stood out like a sore thumb Thursday night because she didn't look animated in the least. The rest of the cast looked very pleasantly animated while in song. The finest singers of the bunch are Jason Brown and Thomas Cummings, who play youngsters Tom and Jack, singing O Come All Ye Faithful in Latin.

Dylan's colorful family includes killjoy Uncle Tudyr (Robert Keith), neurotic Aunt Bessie (Deb Holthus) and very political Uncle Glyn (James Brown). In this family, everyone has to participate in the Christmas storytelling with riddles and ghost stories. It's a daylong experience that leaves the young Dylan feeling completely satisfied and should make audience members feel the same.

The Fight Against Slavery

Play puts passions of history on stage
Fight Against Slavery premieres in Hudson
By Kerry Clawson, The Akron Beacon Journal

Whether regarded as a terrorist zealot or a hero, abolitionist John Brown was right about one thing: Much blood would have to be shed before this nation would be purged of the crimes of slavery. "The crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood,'' Brown wrote in his final note to his jailer before he was hanged in Virginia for treason in 1859.

That telling quote is repeated a couple of times in Neil Thackaberry's world premiere of The Fight Against Slavery: John Brown & Federick Douglass, which opened last weekend at Actors' Summit in Hudson. The play is appropriately staged in the town where Brown grew up on his father Owen Brown's tannery, later running his own tannery north of town.

Playwright and director Thackaberry, who has studied the close relationship between Brown and former slave Douglass through their writings for years, said he wanted this play to be more than a history lesson. He wanted to bring alive the real drama of these two men, allowing audiences to both learn something and enjoy themselves. Thackaberry, who plays Brown, and his co-star Mark Gates, who plays Frederick Douglass, have succeeded in offering a riveting historical drama. They have great material to work with, considering Brown and Douglass were both impassioned, eloquent orators who offered rich descriptions of their experiences.

Using Brown's and Douglass' own letters and other writings, Thackaberry has created a piece of theater that flows well and tells a valuable story. Despite these men's differences, both were figures of great importance in 19th-century American history. Through three key confrontations, this play brings alive both their unlikely friendship and their deep respect for each other. Thackaberry offers us a biting, single-minded Brown who won't back down. Gates' Douglass is the more complex character, who has the same goal of abolishing slavery but is much less sure about how to do so.

Brown was a man willing to die in his fight to end slavery. His whole life as well as the lives of his family members were devoted to this mission. In the beginning of this story, former slave Douglass, a pacifist, is ideologically opposed to Brown's extremism. Brown supported any means to end slavery, including violence.

This play shows Douglass' evolution toward accepting violence as a way to end slavery. Yet Douglass couldn't join in Brown's feverish plans to form an armed force that would hide in the Appalachian mountains and devote itself to daring raids to free slaves, one plantation at a time.

Douglass' soliloquy reacting to both Brown's mountain plot and the new constitution he has written is both telling and slightly humorous. Gates' finest moments include a fiery abolitionist Fourth of July speech in Rochester, N.Y. Here, Douglass condemns all those who celebrate freedom yet allow slavery to continue. Douglass respects and is awed by Brown's heroism. He has never met a white man who would give up his life to end slavery.

The drama reaches its height at a secret meeting between Brown and Douglass at an abandoned quarry in Pennsylvania. Brown reveals his plan to capture the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Va., to lead a slave uprising. This is where the friends split forever.

In The Fight Against Slavery, real historical events and the words of real men provide more drama and passion than any tale of fiction could. The years just before the Civil War broke out were desperate times that extremist Brown believed called for desperate measures.

Charlie's Aunt

A Fine Farce
Actors' Summit warms up a tasty chestnut in Charley's Aunt
By Marie Andrusewicz, Scene

Actors' Summit shares its digs in tony downtown Hudson with an antiques gallery, a shrine to old-time charm crammed with floral-print postcards and milk-glass candy dishes. Currently on view in the theater across the hall is an antique every bit as quaint, yet somehow still fresh: Charley's Aunt. Relying on the timeless comic device of a gent forced to masquerade as a lady, this late-19th-century farce is a delightful synergy of oldfangled wit, taut staging, and eye-catching visuals -- including a pretty set lorded over by a portrait of Will Shakespeare, himself a great champion of the sexquerade.

The plot is as fluffy as meringue. Charley and Jack are two lovesick lads, debating how best to profess their tender feelings to the respective objects of their affection, Amy and Kitty. Ah, but how to express their sentiments appropriately in that too-proper era of corsets and high tea? A chaperone is required, and when Charley's Aunt Donna Lucia, who was to fulfill that role, fails to show up on time for a scheduled visit, a substitute is found: Charley and Jack's chum Lord Fancourt "Babbs" Babberly will impersonate the aunt and take on the role of chaperone. "I'm from Brazil," trills Babbs. "Where the nuts come from."

To complicate matters, like many a theatrically hatched cross-dresser before her, the black taffeta-clad ersatz Donna Lucia attracts a couple of suitors of her own. Babbs must dodge their advances while maintaining the ruse, which becomes exceptionally difficult when the real Donna Lucia does turn up -- with Babbs's own long-lost love interest in tow. It should come as no surprise that, by the end, the various maneuverings and misunderstandings have been neatly repackaged in a heart-shaped box, tied up with a big satin bow.

The crew at Actors' Summit has done a crackerjack job of animating this comic warhorse, making it well worth the trek to Hudson, even if you know Charley's Aunt (or its musical version, Where's Charley?) from its countless incarnations in community theaters and high school auditoriums, or you're familiar with the most famous film version, which featured the deliciously dry Jack Benny in petticoats for the title role.

The young players in this production provide the decorous yet hormone-driven fuel for the farce. Jack Fairbairn makes for a sassy Jack, and Thomas R. Cummings is fine as the hapless Charley. A wee bit hammy, but effective overall is Tim Keo as the star-crossed cross-dresser Babbs; clearly, the actor is having big fun taking the audience along for the wild ride. Alisa Mae and Diane Mull hit the right pitch as cookie-cutter-pretty love interests Amy and Kitty, and Sasha Thackaberry contributes otherworldly grace to the role of Babbs's girl Ella.

Nor is there a weak link to be found among Charley's more seasoned board-treaders. Paula Kline-Messner brings a Dolly Levi-esque bon vivant sensibility to the role of the real Aunt Donna Lucia, while Tom Stephan and Frank Jackman turn in solid performances as misled suitors Sir Francis Chesney and Stephen Spettigue. Although not a featured player, Robert Snook is a true pleasure to watch as Brasset the butler.

Add to this tight, cutie-pie staging and costumes that are lovingly detailed to such a degree they dazzle, and you have a feast for the senses and a rollicking old-time good time at the theater.

Actors' Summit is a professional, not for profit, 501-c-3 professional arts organization. We are seeking volunteers and board members. For more details, email us or call MaryJo or Neil at 330-342-0800.

Actors' Summit is working under a developmental agreement with Actors' Equity Association (the Union of professional Actors and Stage Managers.)