‘Tis the season of the turkey, both theatrically and gastronomically. A theatrical turkey is a family-friendly show produced between Thanksgiving and the New Year and stuffed with spectacle, music, dance, comedy and sentimentality. One could say the turkey season kicks off with the Macy’s Parade, struts its stuff with various Nutcrackers and goes to roost with “Die Fledermaus” in Vienna on New Year’s Eve. Among theater practitioners the term has come to mean a really bad show or a flop. I shall use the term in its original meaning.

Kerri Rae Hinman plays Brooke Wyeth who returns home after a six-year absence and explains to her father, played by Doug Orear, why she is writing a memoir about the suicide of her brother Henry.

Eastlight’s  turkey is “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” and it has been very successful since Eddie Urish first staged it many years ago. Mr. Urish may currently be seen as Mr. Banks in “Mary (gobble, gobble) Poppins” at the Palace Theater in the Wisconsin Dells.

Peoria Players just finished a hold over run of a tasty bird, “The Sound of Music.” Unlike “Joseph” that features a score with many musical styles, “TSoM” has a glorious, unified masterpiece of a score by Richard Rodgers. This bird is no spring chicken. It premiered on Broadway in 1959, and the book is showing its age. But as the title implies, music is the star, and the Players production did not disappoint. Anita Rowden as the Mother Abbess literally stopped the show and figuratively brought down the house with her rendition of “Climb Ev’ry Mountain.”  The children, who are at the heart of Act 1, sang and cavorted through their numbers. Rodgers’ music for “Do-Re-Mi,” the yodeling and sheer fun of “The Lonely Goatherd” all combined to completely charm the audience.

Paul Gordon directs rehearsals for “Other Desert Cities,” a drama exploring deep, underlying tensions in the Wyeth family during the Christmas season in 2004. The play was a finalist in 2012 for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Crucial to the success of the show is the chemistry between the leads, Maria and the Captain, played by Dedra Kaiser and Bruce Colligan. The alpine sizzle they brought to their folk dance in Act 1, understated but with excellent eye contact, created the necessary tension and confusion which was resolved in their lovely duet, “An Ordinary Couple” when they give themselves to each other in Act 2.  Mrs. Kaiser’s lovely, controlled soprano in the title song and Mr. Colligan’s rich baritone in the quiet, sensitive “Edelweiss” created the foundation for the entire evening.

All of these beautiful melodies of Mr. Rodgers delight no matter how many times we hear them, but they are set in counterpoint to politics and the rise of the Nazis.  Oscar Hammerstein’s lyrics in  “No Way to Stop It” explore the helpless, if misguided, feelings of the late 1930s as people faced the end of the old order and the rise of the Brown Shirt mob.  The song is a trio for the sub-plot characters of Elsa and Max, along with Von Trapp who realizes at the end of it that politics has come between him and Elsa. She will collaborate, he will resist and Max is noncommittal. It is an odd, rather dark song that stops the action for a discussion on human nature and, as such, is one of the most nuanced moments of the play.

To provide an example of what would be called “a real turkey” using the second meaning of the term, one would need  look no further than the recent broadcast on NBC of “Peter Pan, Live.” It was the most confused uneven program I can remember with the Darling children cast with kids but the lost boys cast as beefy chorus boys and Smee with tats looking for all the world as a refuge from a rave. Perhaps the most confused casting was Christopher Walken as Hook. He played the role as if he had been into Rush Limbaugh’s medicine cabinet and could hardly rouse himself to arch an eyebrow. By intermission the local Facebook page commenting on the broadcast had retitled itself  a “snarkfest.”

For those who prefer a more contemporary American story I highly recommend “Other Desert Cities” at  the Cornstock Winter Playhouse opening Jan. 23.  The play by Jon Robin Baitz ran on Broadway to critical acclaim in 2011 and features a treasure trove of local actors including: Doug Orear, Helen Engelbrecht, Cindy Hoey, Kerri Rae Hinman and Andrew Rhodenbaugh. Go for the acting and the writing. You will not be disappointed. The box office number is 676-2196.