The Clinton Area Showboat Theatre's The Drowsy Chaperone is fantastically fun. Of course, it helps that the book by Bob Martin and Don McKellar, and the music and lyrics by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison, are filled with amusing lines, scenarios, and situations. It also helps that this summer's Showboat cast is so talented, appearing in one impressive production after another, including Thursday night's performance.

What happens if you give a mouse a cookie? Nothing good, if you're the cookie giver. If, however, you're watching what unfolds by way of the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse's current youth-theatre offering, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, it's a delightful experience.

I had an utterly fantastic time at Quad City Music Guild's preview performance of The Drowsy Chaperone, director Bob Williams' high-spirited and hysterical presentation of the long-running Broadway hit. Yet I'm embarrassed to say that I may have inadvertently missed 10 of its most entertaining minutes, because I made what was, in retrospect, a terrible mistake: I left the auditorium during intermission.

"I think it came from going to church," says area actor Pat Flaherty of his childhood interest in theatre. "Because I'd go to church, and I'd see this guy who was holding everybody's interest through the whole service. It was very dramatic - they'd light the candles and ring the bells and everything - and for a while I thought I wanted to be a priest because of that.

"It turned out I just wanted to be on stage."