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Meet ‘Moon Over Buffalo’ queen of dirty looks, Dena Galyean

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Moon 004LThe CFABS Community Players are producing five performances of Ken Ludwig’s hysterical farce Moon Over Buffalo. Dena Galyean plays Roz Hay, whose parents are idiosyncratic theater icons who appear to be breaking up because dad has been having an affair with the young actress who took Roz’s place in the theater group when Roz decided it was time to get a real job and a saner life as an advertising executive. One small problem: she’s still in love with Paul, the Moon 033Lman who runs mom and dad’s theater group even though she’s now engaged to a weatherman by the name of Howard who couldn’t possibly be more ridiculous.

Galyean’s Roz is her mother’s daughter. But her plight is doubly droll. She has to deal with not one, but two irascible men or settle for a goofy star-struck weatherman who harbors theatrical aspirations of his own. Galyean plays the role brilliantly and could patent the look of Moon 079Lexasperation and disgust she shoots off and on throughout the play. As a blond, she conjures images of Renee Zellweger in Chicago, but when she dons a short raven wig in the play’s final act to single-handedly perform the opening scene in Private Lives, she’s all Catherine Zeta Jones!

Galyean is one of the hardest working thespians in all of Southwest Florida, and she always seems to land fascinating roles. She last appeared in Theatre Conspiracy’s season-ending production of Noli Timere as the sister of a priest who finds himself in a duel for his soul with a demon who just might be Lucifer himself. She didn’t enjoy many lines or much time on Moon 085Lstage, but she hit all the right notes as a party girl with a potty mouth who’s dedicated to her brother and concerned like a mother hen for his physical and spiritual welfare.

Prior to Noli Timere, Dena portrayed Alithea in The Country Wife. Other recent roles include Elaine Navazio in Last of the Red Hot Lovers at the Broadway Palm Off-Broadway, the sexually-charged preacher’s daughter Elaine Harper in the CFABS Players’ Arsenic and Old Lace, Vixen, the indignant, conflicted and quietly resigned victim of SMoon 140Lanta’s sexual harassment and assault in Lab Theater’s 2015 Christmas hit, The Eight: Reindeer Monologues, and Louise in Lab Theater’s 2015 summer stock production of Steve Martin’s The Underpants.

Dena has also been an understudy on the Seminole Gulf Railway Murder Mystery Train and reigned for a year as Matlacha’s Mermaid Queen. Other credits include Jane Tate in It Runs in Moon 142Lthe Family (at Stray Dog Theater in Tinley Park, Illinois), Eleanor in The Middle Ages (at Moraine Valley in Palos Hills, Illinois) and a slurry of other wonderful shows in her beloved home state of Illinois.

July 20, 2017.

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