Mark Knows It All

Last week my wife and I, on the advice of one of the musicians in the show, drove to Salem to see Meshuggah-nuns at the Salem Community Theater. It was a fluff piece, another in the Nunsense series of musicals featuring singing and dancing nuns. The story centered around a cruise ship that was staging a production of Fiddler on the Roof , and all of the cast became ill except for the guy that played Tevya. The cruise company, in turn, hired the Little Sisters of Hoboken to join the Jewish lead in an ecumenical extravaganza of Catholicism and Jewry. The show was a lot of fun, especially the Say It In Yiddish song which compared Latin and Yiddish, the most expressive language known to man. Here’s the thing. The cast was good. The production values were good. The musicians were outstanding…and the theater was packed. I mean packed. All of the shows were pretty much sold out…in Salem, Ohio….in August….on a beautiful, sunny evening. So what gives with community theater? Why the attraction...