I can question like: What is it?

If you just chanted, "Verb, you're so demanding," then you're probably in your late 30s or early 40s.  I'm referring, of course, to a lyric from the most dynamic installment of Schoolhouse Rock!, a series of edu-taining cartoon shorts aired between Saturday morning commercials in the 1970s on ABC. 

Theatrebam Chicago, a troupe whose first presentation was a one-man biography of Charles Manson, compiled and premiered Schoolhouse Rock Live! which played to eight months of sold-out houses.  I say "compiled" because there's very little original writing in this jukebox musical; its few dozen spoken lines are mostly eye-roll-inducing connective beats amounting to little more than, "Hey, that reminds me of another song!" In Olympia Family Theater's production, running two more weekends in the Kenneth J. Minnaert Black Box at South Puget Sound Community College, Tim Goebel plays Tim Goebel, an educator so ill-prepared to teach grade school it's slipped his mind that women were ever denied the vote.  That's OK, because first-day jitters and a fortuitous sighting of Schoolhouse Rock explode his frazzled superego into seven singing incarnations of lessons from the series.  I'd always heard the scripted dialogue was atrocious, and it rarely disappoints.

Read the full review here.

Schoolhouse Rock Live!

Through June 6, 7 p.m. Thursday-Friday, 3 p.m. Saturday-Sunday. $8-$15
SPCCC - Kenneth J. Minnaert Black Box, 2011 Mottman Road SW, Olympia
360.753.8586