My in-laws invited my husband and I to a small local theater that puts on about 4 musicals a year. The Village Theater is in a Seattle suburb called Issaquah, it seats 488. We had 3rd row center seats.

I don't get out to plays very often and musicals even less often -- my husband really doesn't enjoy seeing plays, and he enjoys musicals even less. (I love it.) His mother asked him what he thought after and he replied, "I figure I get big brownie points for that one."

I didn't know going in that The Ark was written by Michael McLean or that he was LDS. I vaguely recognize the name but I couldn't tell you anything about him. I kind of thought, "What is there to tell about the ark story? This is going to be boring." But it wasn't. It was fun and interesting.

Fun because the audience is supposed to be all the animals, and the actors sing directly to you and come out into the audience a couple times, focusing on a person here or there as if they were an animal. Interesting because it looks at what it would've been like to be cooped up on a boat with a bunch of animals and your family for 40 days -- the monotony, the fighting, the hardship, the goofiness.

The play has very little dialogue -- the story is almost entirely told in song. The actors were all very good, but the mother and Egyptus (a black woman playing Ham's wife) really stood out as wonderful talents. Ham was played by a young man with the last name of McLean, but I didn't discover if he was related to the playwright or not.

It wasn't horrendously cheesy, and there was even a scene that made me tear up a little. The music was good, and some numbers were really good. It was also interesting to see how the author wove in little bits of Mormon doctrine (Noah and his wife singing about marriage in a number called "It Takes Two") and terminology (generic things like "the spirit" and "revelation.")

I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. It wasn't spectacular, but I liked it more than the production of West Side Story I saw there last year.

Susan M