Sunday News from Lancaster, Pennsylvania • 85

SUNDAY NEWS MAY 6, 2007 Section Whats Doing H2 HI Movies H4 Mini Page H6 Puzzles H7 Contact the Editor Michael Long 291-8687 mlonglnpnews.com www.lancasteroniine.com Michael Long Theater Review If might be best in Texas, but -WIKB J. kvpMZy Pi i'J. 1 -4 nn w- 4 A ns iJ Jack LeonardSuNOAV News photos Julia Swartzs new Prince Street gallery is a prime piece of real estate in downtown Lancasters burgeoning art scene. Above, a painting adorns a wall near a window overlooking King Street a 7 By Marty Crisp Sunday News Staff Writer mcrisplnpnews.com If youre paying to visit a lady of the night, you dont want her to, well, just lie there. Thats the problem with Ephrata Performing Arts Centers season-opener, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

Despite a gutsy 30-member cast and a couple of great numbers, the production mostly just lies there. Based on a true story about the infamous Chicken Ranch bordello in La Grange, Texas, Whorehouse recounts in music how the 130-year-old prostitution institution was brought down by a muckraking TV reporter. The show opened on Broadway in 1978, was reconfigured as a movie with Dolly Parton and Burt Reynolds in 1982 and became a touring revival with Ann-Margret in 2001. EPACs production is faithful to the Broadway original, which means it doesnt include the hit Dolly Parton song, I Will Always Love You, from the film version or the finale, A Friend to Me, from the re-, vival. Whorehouse casts one of Lancasters leading actresses, Kathy Long, as Miss Mona, the proprietor of a cleanly run, though technically illegal, cat-house.

Miss Mona allows no kissing on the lips, cause this isnt the prom. Long is in fine voice, bringing a lump to the throat with her lament, Bus from Amarillo. Unfortunately, the voices of the rest of the cast are far more uneven than is typical for an EPAC production. Whole sections of dialogue and lyrics get lost as the actors face different sides of the wraparound stage. Exuberance does break out in dance numbers like The Aggie Song, as Bob Breen, David Brubaker, Eric Gallagher, Zachary Horvath, Tim Reilly, Jose Rivera, Stephen Supeck and Brad Welch two-step wearing nothing but towels to a pulse-pounding Act 1 finale.

Likewise, the Chicken Ranch girls, Jamie Riley DeBord, Erin Lampart, Lakisha Hargan, Grete Miller, Elizabeth Frank, Kate Kierzkowski, Christie Please see EPAC, page H8 Julia Swartz settles into N. Prince St. Editor Round midnight By 11 p.m. Thursday, nearly half of the 400-plus seats in Auditorium 8 were filled with folks who were, by and large, too young to legally consume alcohol but old enough to want to do so anyway. But not on this night.

The drug of choice at this party was hype, and everyone was high. The kid three seats to my right could barely sit still in the Spider-Man costume he made from scratch. He took particular pride in the mask, which he crocheted out of red yam. Is my mask on straight? he asked. I took a look at the black splotches that were supposed to represent Spideys eyes.

The left splotch was creeping back over lusskulL As straight as its going to get, I said. Nearly 800 mostly young adults buzzed around the halls of the Regal Manor Stadium 16 movie theater late Thursday night Each had plunked down $9 (If you think thats outrageous, consider a large popcorn costs almost as much at $7) to be among the very first to see Spider-Man 3. The Associated Press reported the films opening-day haul at $59 million in the United States and $104 million worldwide, both box-office records. At least one young child braved the midnight showing with his teddy bear, and I counted two guys with bald spots and one defiant grayhaired male. But the throng belonged to the instant-media generation.

Their incandescent cell phone screens popped in and out of the premovie half fight like digital fireflies. These handsome youths filtered into the theater in groups of two or three or 12. They came to live the drama, to laugh and rub elbows with strangers at a bona fide movie event. For many of these kids, a midnight showing of Spider-Man 3 is what it means to participate in something bigger than themselves. They would prove dedicated enough to applaud when Marvel Comics chairman emeritus and Spider-Man co-creator Stan Lee made his cameo in the film, but for the most part they werent the kind of gung-ho face-painting types the Star Wars franchise inspires.

Except, of course, for the guy to my right in the homemade suit, who at quarter past 11 could not longer contain his enthusiasm. Launching himself onto the armrests of his seat, he sounded his barbaric Web-slingeryawp. I am Spider-Man! In an instant he was tearing around the theater, frantically spinning imaginary webs. His buddy donned a grotesque mask he was supposed to resemble Spider-Mans latest big-screen nemesis. Venom and gave chase.

Their spontaneous outburst was part vaudeville, part WWE SmackDown routine and earned widespread appreciation from a crowd that still had 45 minutes to wait just to see the previews. If you were to ask afterward, most of the kids who spent an hour-and-a-half navel gazing and texting their friends before the debut of Spider-Man 3 probably would have said the film was worth the wait Forget critics, whove found the three-quel lacking. Criticism is irrelevant to a film that generates its own inertia. Plot lines and plausibility will always finish second to big-budget pyrotechnics, aerial acrobatics and cutting-edge computer animation. At least with this crowd.

Spider-Man 3 radiates big-movie magic, which is exactly what tens of thousands of people across the country experienced in the wee hours of Friday morning. All it cost them, besides too much cash, was a few hours of sleep. Said the gentleman behind me as the credits rolled: Dude, Ive gotta be at work at 6.30. By Marty Crisp Sunday News Staff Writer mcrisplnpnews.com The definition of upbeat: You lose your hair during chemotherapy, but thats OK because you have fun wearing hats. Besides a cure for the lymphoma that threatened her life in 1999, artist Julia Swartzs upbeat spirit seems to have brought her a host of good fortune.

Her watercolor and oil paintings have earned accolades in juried shows from New York to Virginia, and now shes got her own gallery, fulfilling a long-held dream. Swartz, 55, of Lititz, is the newest face in Lancasters burgeoning Please see GALLERY, page H3 Polarized beliefs TSS stages Inherit the Wind 9 role in Dover over intelligent design? Theater of the Seventh Sister revisits the controversy with its production of Inherit the Wind," which opens Thursday at Millers ville Universitys Rafters Theatre. And while cast members don't expect picketers to storm the show, they do hope it will foster debate. The Scopes trial considered the guilt of Tennessee high school biology teacher John Scopes, who taught evo-Please see DEBATE, page H8 By Kelly L. Watson Sunday News Correspondent It never ends.

Playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee were smart to note that the setting for Inherit the Wind, a play based on the 1925 Scopes trial, might have been yesterday. It could be tomorrow. Indeed, biologists and Christians have been sparring over evolution since Darwin published On the Origins of Species in 1859. Anyone recall that rigma Fossil evidence such as this ancient skull supports the biological theory of evolution, which contends huhian beings evolved from apes. Inherit the Wind," which debuts at Theater of the Seventh Sister next week, is a fictionalized account of the famous 1325 trial, commonly known as the Scopes Monkey Trial, that pitted the theory of evolution against Christian creationism.

Michael Long welcomes e-mail at mlongfSlnpnews.com..