Thompson Playhouse managed to almost fill the house at R.D. Parker Collegiate's Letkemann Theatre Nov. 3 for its production of Chicago playwright Jack Sharkey's (aka Rick Abbot's) 1980 comedy Play On! Co-producer Donna Wilson said opening night on Friday for the two-night run had a slightly smaller but equally enthusiastic turnout.
Sharkey was born on May 6, 1931. He taught school for two years from 1953 to 1955 and in mid-1955 enlisted in the U.S. Army. He was stationed at Sandia Base, New Mexico as a special services worker. He wrote, produced, and directed one show per month for the Enlisted Men's Club. After the army, he worked as a copywriter for Sears, Roebuck and Company from 1957 to 1958. In 1958, he went to New York to begin a full-time freelance writing career. Sharkey wrote science fiction stories and novels, humour articles and mystery novels.
He wrote his first stage comedy in 1965. Soon afterwards, he went exclusively into playwriting, publishing 82 plays written under his own name and four others - Rick Abbot, Monk Ferris, Mark Chandler and Mike Johnson. Sharkey died on Sept. 28, 1992.
Last November, Wilson, and Wally Itson, principal of R.D. Parker Collegiate, who once again acted as co-producer for Play On!, produced Dixie Swim Club, which Wilson also directed.
Wilson took a step back this year from the director's chair and Coral Bennett, who was on stage for Dixie Swim Club, made her directorial debut alongside Sue Colli, who directed a previous Thompson Playhouse production, Murdered to Death.
Play On! is the story of a community theatre group rehearsing to perform an original murder mystery, Murder Most Foul, just four nights days from opening night, in spite of maddening interference from a haughty author who keeps revising the script. Act I is a rehearsal of the dreadful show, Act II is the near disastrous dress rehearsal, and the final act is the actual performance in which anything that can go wrong does.
Play On! marked the eagerly awaited debut of Ryan Land, Vale Canada's Manitoba Operations manager of corporate affairs, and former principal of R.D. Parker Collegiate, to the Thompson stage as Billy Carewe (aka Stephen Sellers). Land showed considerable panache and brought some real presence to his role(s) in some fine scenes with both the duplicitous Saul Watson (aka Dr. Rex Forbes), played by Kevin Hopton, a technology and trades instructor at the University College of the North here, who grows in stature as a villain every time out, and Serena Puranen, a lawyer who works for Manitoba Legal Aid, and is endowed with considerable assets, which were again on display, as they were last March as Cherry Bakewell in the Thompson Playhouse dinner theatre murder mystery Come Dine With Us at the Juniper Centre, only this time in her role(s) as Violet Imbry (aka Lady Lassiter) in Play On!.
Also on stage were Robyn Foley, Kathleen Ropson, Brian Colli, Melissa Lister, Debby Belyea and Angela Wolfe.
"We have cast of people that are pretty familiar faces in the community," noted Wilson in an earlier interview.
