The government may have shut down, but I still get out and Porchlight Music Theatre still puts on entertaining shows.

It was my first time at The Rhapsody Theater (including under its previous incarnation as the Mayne Stage), although I did see the owner, Dr. Ricardo T. Rosenkranz, perform his magic act, and get called up on stage by him, in 2016 at the now-defunct Royal George Cabaret.

Michael Weber, the Porchlight Artistic Director, also calls people up to the stage, as part of the New Faces programs, to ask them often impossibly-difficult Broadway trivia questions, from which he seems to derive great satisfaction, all in good fun.

But the real entertainment comes from the performances by the young cast (introduced by long-time Chicago area performer and director Johanna McKenzie Miller, who also treated us to a song), some of whom may go on to great things in the theater, as suggested by Weber when he mentioned three recent graduates of the 10-year-old New Faces program who are now making national names for themselves.

This incarnation of New Faces took me down memory lane, as one of the featured shows, the Lucille Ball star-driven vehicle Wildcat, was inexplicably the first Broadway musical album I ever heard. As I listened to Lisa Buhelos and Kaitlin Feely sing Hey Look Me Over, I reflected on how much better singers they were than Ball.

1960 produced some memorable shows, and they were represented, but Weber also likes to extract songs from less-than-successful productions, such as Christine, which probably would have done better had it been based on the Stephen King story of the same name, rather than a book by Hilda Werhner (who?), closing after 12 performances.

The evening ended on a high note, actually two, the one concluding Somewhere from West Side Story, and the one confirming my earlier decision to park on the street, as I observed the long line of people trying to retrieve their vehicles from the valet-only, practically inaccessible, paltry parking lot.