Saluting the best of the year’s school theater productions

There are so many local theater productions in the course of a year that it's easy for the good work to get lost in the mediocre. Next week, I'll list what I consider the year's best in Vegas dramatics. Below is a brief (and painfully incomplete) mentioning (in no particular order) of some the highlights in the academic playhouses.

I'm listing academics separately, because learning institutions have certain advantages over community troupes (talent recruitment, budgets, available labor).

• Brooks Asher's tour-de-force in Neil Haven's original "The Playdaters" in October (directed by Josh Penzell) at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas' Fall One-Act Festival. Asher showed the playwright to his best advantage. Whether impersonating a sadistic young German, or a drunk trying desperately to appear sober, or a circus clown lamenting his life, Asher was effortlessly realistic and mesmerizingly funny.

• Michael Barakiva's playful direction of Nevada Conservatory Theatre's May mounting of Meredith Wilson's "The Music Man." The guest artist used a skilled blend of union performers, students and community actors and turned what is perhaps America's greatest musical into an evening of light-hearted pleasure. Local Sheri Brewer was a particular standout as an eccentric and wholesome mother, desperate to find her daughter a husband.

• Gary Carton's set and Dustin Conwell's lights for the College of Southern Nevada and Insurgo Theatre's May showing of Euripides' "Medea" (directed by John Beane). Carton achieved a sometimes stunning visual opulence, with simple black and white platforms and a small, functional wading pool; Conwell offered with his lights a story bathed in pre-Raphael-eloquence.

• Susan Lowe for her role as a tormented wife in CSN's April staging of "The Goat" (written by Edward Albee, directed by Erica Griffin). She did the near-impossible by convincing us that she really believed her respectable husband was having an affair with the title character. Lowe has repeatedly proven herself an actress of great depth.

• Drew Lynch in just about anything at the Las Vegas Academy of International Studies, Performing and Visual Arts. He was cerebral and vulnerable in the title role of October's "The Elephant Man" (written by Bernard Pomerance and directed by Terry McGonigle); a bit Tina Turner, Elton John and Jerry Springer in the campy title role of February's "The Wiz" (written by Charlie Smalls, directed by Robert Connor); and an angry and menacing killer student in March's "Bang! Bang! You're Dead!" (by William Mastrosimone, directed by John Morris). I can't imagine what this high-schooler can't do.

• The entire ensemble of Las Vegas Academy's November production of "The Diviners" (written by Jim Leonard, Jr., directed by Glenn Edwards), in which the youthful cast got us to believe in an emotionally powerful Depression-era story about a boy psychotically fearful of water. The cast caught the drama going on underneath the lines and brought to life this serious tale in a way that only well-trained actors can.

Anthony Del Valle can be reached at DelValle@aol.com. You can write him c/o Las Vegas Review-Journal, P.O. Box 70, Las Vegas, NV 89125.