Theater
The Drawer Boy The final show in a season of trifles at the Rep, The Drawer Boy has a winning humility and an old-fashioned sense of what a serious theater company owes its audience. The story of a Montreal actor who shacks up with a couple of farmers to bone up for a play about rural life, the show, as directed by Jeff Church, is crafted, planed and polished, smartly staged and superbly performed. As a farmer suffering brain trauma, Gary Holcombe is scrupulously unmannered, never risking realism for sentiment. As his caretaker, Gary Neal Johnson is a gritty marvel, funny as hell but also touching. Johnson’s comic rapport with David Graham Jones, a gifted cityboy actor playing an ungifted cityboy actor, carries the show. The actors nimbly manage a shift from bright comedy to the darker second act, which examines truth, memory and the question of who owns whose stories. Through June 1 at the Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s Spencer Theatre, 4949 Cherry, 816-235-2700. Reviewed in our May 22 issue. (Alan Scherstuhl)
Full Frontal Comedy Making it up as it goes, Tina Morrison’s risque-but-not-dirty Full Frontal Comedy troupe has spent a decade pioneering long-form improvisation in Kansas City. The idea: Mine audience suggestions for an entire story with characters, act structure and lots of laughs. For this weekend’s Y’all Come Back Now, FFC introduces “Small Town,” a new long-form format, but also promises a bevy of old-school improv games and scenes. Tickets cost $10. May 30 and 31 at Union Station’s City Stage, 18 West Pershing, 816-420-2020. (Alan Scherstuhl)
Perfect Wedding It’s a farce, so that title is a joke on just how over-the-top imperfect things are going to get, but it’s at the American Heartland, so it’s also a promise. No matter what comic hell gets unleashed when a groggy groom awakens on the morning of his wedding with a beautiful stranger beside him, the feel-good crew at the Heartland is as professionally obligated to make with the gowns, flowers and true-love-forever happy ending as it is to validate your Crown Center parking. That’s not to say this might not be worth your commitment. The cast features Heidi Stubblefield, Jan Chapman and Jessalyn Kincaid —- enough comic talent to sharpen even the most blunted material. Through June 15 at the American Heartland Theatre in Crown Center, 2450 Grand, 816-842-9999. (Alan Scherstuhl)
The Who’s Tommy Here’s some fun. Take a room of second-language students — kids who have never heard of the Who in general or Tommy in particular — and ask them to parse this least grammatical of titles. Be sure to lay tarps to catch the exploding brain stems. Then maybe take them to this Barn Players production, the inspirational tale about how deafness, blindness and speechlessness need not impede a career in professional pinball, and hope that a community theater’s pit band might somehow capture the grandeur and abandon of Live at Leeds. The Barn Players have pulled off more than their fair share of coups, but, shit — Tommy? Even the Broadway version? In Mission? Through June 15 at the Barn Players, 6219 Martway in Mission, 913-432-9100. (Alan Scherstuhl)
