What follows are my observations on the past year in local theater as I experienced it. To see year-end retrospectives from other Dane101 contributors and readers, select the 2007 Reflections link.

Favorite overall performances, in chronological order:
– Bug
– “Bake Off,” directed by Stephanie Durrant and “Breast Men,” directed by Meghan McDonnell (two intriguing comedies performed at the Edgewood College Student-Directed One Act Play Festival)
– Urinetown (University Theatre)
– Finale of Disarming by Rob Matsushita (performed at Mercury Hot Pants)
– Dr. Faustus
– The episodic comedy “A Fried Chicken Short of a Church Picnic” by Rick Stemm and the musical “Body by God, Mind by Mattel” by Doug Reed and Drew Szabo, (Blitz VIII, Saturday performance)
– Carousel (Madison Repertory Theatre)
– Death of a Salesman (Madison Repertory Theatre)
– “Dem Fearless Vampire Hunters” (performed at Mercury Hot Pants)
– Uncle Vanya (Strollers Theatre)
– Dork Side of the Moon

Best illustration of what you can get from a play that you can’t get from other media: The Long Christmas Ride Home

Favorite Wisconsin performances outside Dane County: Night of the Iguana (American Players Theatre), “Phoney” (written by Dean Bakoupolos for Alley Stage’s 24 Hour Play Festival), “The Pit and the Pendulum” in Nightfall with Edgar Allan Poe

Noteworthy debuts: Wisconsin Wrights, Blitz Smackdown, the Dramatis Interruptus scenes in Blitz VIII, Alley Stage (the theater is outside Dane County but provided a venue for original plays by Dane County writers)

Favorite performances — dramatic:

• Karen Moeller in Bug
• John Sable in Dancing in Cleo’s Café
• KelsyAnne Schoenhaar in Real Life
• Tony Trout in A Number
• John Gustafson in Othello
• Matthew A. Schrader and Scott Albert Bennett in Rounding Third (Blue Dot Theatre)
• Mark Womack, Angela Ingersoll, Courtney Rioux, and Stephanie Monday in Carousel
• Roderick Peeples, Death of a Salesman
• James Ridge, The Merchant of Venice (American Players Theatre brought this production to Madison in November)
• Sam White and Colin Woolston, Uncle Vanya
• Andy Rice, Claire Haden, Stephanie Monday, and Gloria Montoya, A Nervous Smile

Favorite performances — comic:

• Katy Conley in The Gays of our Lives
• Anne Blust in “Bake Off”
• The duo of Chandler Campbell and Paul Milisch, plus Dustin O’Leary in “Breast Men”
• Andy Blodgett in “Fruity Tutti Loony Tooney” by David Hannes (Blitz VIII, Saturday performance)
• Elliot Shultz in “A Fried Chicken Short of a Picnic”

Best demonstration that actors as young as the characters they’re playing can get the job done and done well: Katie Monk as Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun (Verona Area Community Theater)

Favorite ensemble casts: The Gays of our Lives, Uncle Vanya, Dork Side of the Moon

Best incentive to sign up as an actor in a Blitz: The role of Jim in Daniel Loebl’s “Going Surfing in Nebraska,” which called on the actor to passionately kiss four of the five women he appeared on stage with. The only actor he didn’t kiss had the same last name as him.

Favorite play description I didn’t actually use: The script for “Icarus’s Mother” (Edgewood one-acts) feels similar to the Hank Scorpio episode of The Simpsons as written by Anton Chekov.

Favorite character description I didn’t actually use: Captain Holloway (Brides of the Moon) resembles James T. Kirk as played by Glinda the Good Witch [cheating on this one, since this play was performed in October 2006]

Favorite entrances:
Donavon Armbruster as Frank Butler in Annie Get Your Gun. Appearing on a balcony, lit by a spotlight, wearing a white suit with silvery lapels and singing “There’s no business like show business,” as if he were a sort of spirit of local community theatre.

Executive Producer Casey Sean Grimm in Blitz VIII, introduced with funk music and emerging decorously from behind the curtain wearing a tuxedo

Memorable uses of props:
The mixing bowl and spoon threateningly wielded by Rita in “Bake Off”

The thumb sketch in Kumquats for Bambi (Rabid Badger Theatre Company)

The hot dogs in “Running on Empty” by KelsyAnne Schoenhaar and Wendy Prosise (Blitz VIII, Saturday performance), which were not only eaten but smashed with an ax

The piano cover in Ultimate Improv’s Madison West High School performance, used to represent a ghost that enveloped people

The hula hoops in episode 6 of Doug Reed’s The Flight of the Hindenburg (performed at Mercury Hot Pants), used to create Venn diagrams comparing the four characters’ geographic origins and political sympathies

The popping device used by Radio Active, which consisted of four rows of short, narrow PVC pipes. A Styrofoam cork was inserted in the lower end of each pipe and a wooden rod was placed in the upper, capped with a Styrofoam piece that was wide enough to fit snugly within the pipe. The sound effects artist pushed down on the wooden rod, causing the cork to come out with a popping sound.

The empty wheelchair at the end of A Nervous Smile

Best kiss: Karlin Younger and Leanne Schmidt in “Going Surfing in Nebraska”

Best accents: Ananda Mirilli (who comes by hers naturally), Jess Evans

Notable costumes: The Pillsbury Doughboy in “Bake Off,” Dr. Faustus (and not just for the ladies’ fashions; Mephistophilis’ coat was pretty sweet), Carousel, Dork Side of the Moon

Notable sets: Urinetown, A Number, Rounding Third, Carousel, Death of a Salesman

Best performance by a pantsless local historian: Stu Levitan in “Just a Little Dim” by Gwendolyn Quirk, Blitz VIII, Saturday performance

Favorite musical re-arrangement: Andrew Abrams’s lounge singer performance of “Oh What a Beautiful Mornin’” (Four Seasons Theatre, A Grand Night for Singing)

Memorable lines:
“Ya got some dough balls?!” (A combative Rita to the Pillsbury Doughboy in “Bake Off”)

Anything from Dr. Faustus

“A world where veterinarians hit Mennonites has gone horribly wrong!” (Doug Reed’s How the War Started (Actor’s Factory); rough approximation)

“Don’t kill. That’s a rule God takes seriously. Not like masturbation.” (The Angel in “A Fried Chicken Short of a Church Picnic”; rough approximation)

- I can’t believe you drew me like this!
- I was thirteen.
- [CORRECTING] You were horny.
- Yeah, that’s what I said.
(Scotty and Raven, Dork Side of the Moon)

Favorite you-had-to-be-there lines:
“Millions.” (In Bug, Agnes’ response to looking in a microscope at the tooth Peter has extracted from his mouth, which he claims to be the source of their infestation.)

“The bodies? They talk back. Yeah.” (A CSI addict discussing the show in Lauri Brenning’s “This Just In,” Kumquats for Bambi.)

“I got an extra lump in my brain. It talks to me.” (Lucy Mae in “A Fried Chicken Short of a Church Picnic”)

“I am The Gurge!” (Doug Holtz as a competitive hot dog eater in “Running On Empty”)

“I just came here for a mean while. [Another character says “A what?”] Meanwhile…” (the Scottish narrator announcing a transition in The Flight of the Hindenburg, part 4)

- You know what else I like about Madison?
- What’s that?
- Michael’s Custard.
- Is that Michael’s Melted Custard?
- No. Michael’s Frozen Custard!
(Madison visitor Justin Abarca correcting an omission in response to prompting from Madison native J.D. Walsh in Ultimate Improv’s West High School performance.)

Favorite unscripted moments:
Bonnie Balke saying “Was that the doorbell?” after a few moments of silence in The Gays of Our Lives; a doorbell was heard soon after.

Getting a wink from one of my favorite female actors at the curtain call for a Madison Rep performance.

Most efficient ticket buyers: The audience for Blitz Smackdown, which Mercury says sold out in three minutes. With 75 seats available and no advance sales, that’s a pair of tickets being given out every five seconds.

Number of times I saw the word “conceit” used in theatre reviews after it appeared in the A.V. Club Madison September 2007 guide to pretentious theater terms: Two

Least-flattering third-party abstract of something I wrote: “La Ronde by MATC Performing Arts ‘has ten two-character scenes, each introduced by a narrator’”

Most discouraging online forum post related to theater: “…there are women out there who like the symphony, theater, and jazz clubs…It's just that some of us don’t like to go out alone--and have mostly married friends who are seldom able to get away for an evening without their husbands. It makes meeting people in the ‘right’ places very hard indeed.” Discouraging if you’re single and go out to the theater alone, anyway.

Original works by Dane County writers performed in Dane County:

• Six of the seven plays of Broom Street Theater’s 2007 season
• Mercury Short Shorts/Hot Pants (monthly event)
• Blitz Smackdown
• The Fabulous Crone Show (Positive Aging Theatre)
• Real Life
• Marcia Legere Student Play Festival (Wisconsin Union Directorate Student Performance Committee, annual event)
• People Like Us (Undergraduate Theatre Association)
• Kumquats for Bambi (Rabid Badger Theatre Company)
• Mai Spy, Stoughton Village Players for Syttende Mai
• The Queen of Janesville by Greg Lawless, for Wisconsin Wrights (which were “just” readings rather than full productions, but expertly done)
• Accent Adios by Kurt McGinnis Brown, for Madison Repertory Theatre’s Madison New Play Festival, also read at Wisconsin Wrights under the title Recovering the Real Me
• Airlines (Mazer Comedy)
• Queer Shorts (Stage Q, annual event)
• Blitz VIII (annual event)
• Homicide for the Holidays and Sweet-Cannoli Nuptials(WhoopDeDoo Productions)
• Always On (Undergraduate Theatre Association)
• Tidings... from the Seasonally Affected (Encore Studio for the Performing Arts)

Lamented departure: Kathie Rasmussen, who passed away in June. Local actor and producer Marcy Weiland had this to say:

Weirdest way to introduce the results of a survey about favorites in local arts & entertainment: “While Madison is still small potatoes compared to New York and Chicago or even Minneapolis/St. Paul when it comes to music and theater…” Come on.

Weirdest local arts story quip: “To some, theater is becoming the last reserve of ‘family entertainment’ in the worst sense of the word. People flock to productions of You Can’t Take It With You or Harvey because they are little time-machine cocoons where the nasty influences of the 21st century won’t intrude. They’re not avoiding corrupt-to-the-core politicians or impending environmental disasters, mind you. They mostly are fleeing sex, violence or the f-word.” Yeah, take that, Strollers Theatre and Sun Prairie Civic Theatre supporters. Is Copenhagen (premiered in the U.S. in 2000 and won the Best Play Tony for that year) an aesthetically regressive play because Niels Bohr doesn’t say to Werner Heisenberg “What the fuck is up with this Nazi shit?” and get into a UFC-worthy brawl with him? And it’s not like you automatically get a Bug or a Superbad just by throwing sex, violence, and profanity into the pot.

Dane County performance seen (* = and posted about on Dane101):

1. Mercury Short Shorts: January
2. Bug*
3. Gypsy*
4. Mercury Short Shorts: March (arrived late)
5. Dancing in Cleo’s Café*
6. The Prom Committee Family Reunion*
7. Edgewood student-directed one-acts
8. Real Life*
9. Marcia Legere student play festival
10. The Gays of our Lives*
11. Urinetown
12. Mercury Hot Pants: May
13. Home
14. How the War Started and Macbess
15. Dr. Faustus*
16. A Number*
17. Wisconsin Wrights* reading: The Queen of Janesville
18. The Long Christmas Ride Home
19. Kumquats for Bambi*
20. Annie Get Your Gun
21. Mercury Hot Pants: June
22. Airlines*
23. Othello*
24. Blitz VIII (Saturday performance)
25. Rounding Third
26. Carousel
27. Mercury Hot Pants: August
28. Funnel*
29. Mercury Hot Pants: September
30. Death of a Salesman
31. Mercury Hot Pants: October
32. La Ronde*
33. The Merchant of Venice (American Players Theatre touring production)
34. Uncle Vanya
35. Lombardi/The Only Thing (seated one row behind David Maraniss, author of When Pride Still Mattered, the Lombardi biography that inspired the play)
36. A Nervous Smile*
37. Dork Side of the Moon*

January 3 update (see the comments below for context):