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Pure Entertainment At Playhouse

By Carol Horning Stacey | 09/15/2017

The Lake City Playhouse has opened for the season with “a divine musical comedy” titled Sister Act, which will run through October 8 at the little theatre at 14th and Garden in Coeur d’Alene. The script was written by playwrights Bill and Cheri Steinkellner, with music by Alan Menken and lyrics by Glenn Slater.

This play, which premiered in 2009, is taken from the 1992 film starring Whoopi Goldberg. The heroine Dolores, played by the amazing Alyssa Jordan, is a nightclub singer who, by chance, witnesses as murder. Never mind that the murderers are her gangster boyfriend and his pals. She knows too much. The police put her in witness protection - in a convent. You take it from there.

Now that almost nobody takes the veil for life, actors have been getting a lot of mileage by cavorting in traditional medieval habits and throwing piety to the wind. The Nunsense series carries it a bit too far, perhaps, but Sister Act is not related to Nunsense and  to it’s credit is just as boisterous but less crude. And it’s so entertaining!

Alyssa Jordan, blessed with a big voice and a comic gift, leads an able cast. Countering her subversive energy in the plot, Callie McKinney Cabe as the  sweet Mother Superior gives a strong performance  as the grown-up in the convent. She despairs that she “hasn’t gone a prayer” against Deloris’s worldly influence.  The Monsignor (Olivier Moratin), on he other hand, delights in the new sister’s fund raising skills.

Some scenes merit special notice: I loved Dolores’s wonderfully awful number with her two chorus boys. The gangsters have an indecently good time in their villainy. And how appropriate that the nuns, in going to Dolores’s defense, arm themselves with rulers – it’s so right for a teaching order. But these are but a few of the nice touches director Lance Edwin Babbitt uses to polish the simple story.

Sister Act plays Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 and Sundays at 2pm through October 8. Call 208-676-7529 for reservations or check boxoffice@lakecityplayhouse.org.

The Lake City Playhouse  production is handsomely framed as set pieces transform church rooms into barrooms, all with ease and good effect, thanks to the design of Matthew Day. This is not an easy theater for designers. The stage is narrow and deep, but here those problems did not matter.