The SCERA Showhouse’s production of “Wedlocked,” a new musical by Marvin Payne and Steven Kapp Perry, demonstrates that a show about marriage need not contain earth-shattering insight in order to be worth watching.

Real-life couple Marvin and Laurie Payne, the only actors in the show, have enough charm and stage presence between them to fill an entire cast. From Marvin’s deep-timbred but gentle bellow, to Laurie’s sweet but strong persona, the two sing and act their way through the show admirably.

They play Val and Elizabeth Utley, a Seattle couple best described as “typical.” Elizabeth, through whose eyes most of the story is told, is a harried and overworked housewife who feels ignored by her husband, who, despite being an accountant, mainly wants to have fun and avoid serious issues.

In an attempt to “start over,” Elizabeth drags Val back to Salina, Utah, where they spent their honeymoon. Val, being impossibly thick-headed — the show was written by men; is this really how we see ourselves? — hasn’t the first clue that Elizabeth is trying to put the spark back in their marriage, or that sparks are even missing. Eventually, everything comes to a head, and the problems are dealt with.

It’s a slight, innocuous storyline, and no major “secrets of a successful marriage” are revealed. Accordingly, the show is shorter than average, though a few minutes could still be shaved off here and there, particularly in the long sequence where Val tries to watch a video while Elizabeth tries to be romantic.

That scene, in particular, points out an interesting problem with the show. Marvin and Laurie Payne appear to have such a good marriage in real life that playing a couple with marital problems doesn’t come naturally to them. As Val fixates on the TV and Elizabeth tries awkwardly to cuddle with him, we get a few chuckles — but it seems overplayed and unreal. The moments that seem genuine are the ones when Val and Elizabeth are on the same wavelength, communicating like the happy couple the Paynes apparently are. (Who ever thought having a great marriage would be a liability on stage?)

Marvin, who is an excellent actor in all respects, is too broad in this show. Just as Val doesn’t take the marriage very seriously, Marvin seems not to treat Val with much depth, either. In the end, while compromise is needed on both ends, it is clearly Val who must do the most changing, when a more satisfying (and realistic) approach might be to have it more equal. But Elizabeth is so much a stronger, more sympathetic character, that it turns out very uneven indeed.

Nonetheless, “Wedlocked” is a reasonably solid production. Add a few more layers to Val’s character, and Perry and Payne will have a musical worthy of greater attention. As it stands, it pleases the audience, cordially doing its thing and politely allowing you to move on. You may be largely unaffected by the proceedings, but you leave with a smile on your face, anyway.

The Little London Dinner Theatre is a good setting for James Arrington’s one-man “Farley Family” shows. The setting is always a family reunion, with the audience members assumed to be fellow Farleys, and what better activity for a family reunion than eating?

Arrington makes the most of this in “The Mylaynniul Farley Dinner Party” (“mylaynniul” being how a Farley, native of Utah, would pronounce “millennial”). While the audience is eating dinner before the show, he comes out as Aunt Pearl (the Farley family “historican”), going from table to table to see how all the Farleys are doing and to give them nametags.

When the show officially begins, Arrington is Heber J. Farley, acting patriarch of the family (old Grandpa Asa only wakes up occasionally) and by-default master of ceremonies whenever the clan gathers. “How grateful to be alive and to feel your sparts (Utahn for “spirits”) when we was supposed to have World War III,” he says by way of introduction.

Heber is Arrington’s best character, capturing perfectly the prototypical Mormon Grandfather. He stumbles over introductions, occasionally gets a bit choked up at “what a blessing” it is that some thing or other has happened, and just generally presides and conducts without any real presiding or conducting skills.

Much of Arrington’s shtick here is the same as in his “Farley Family Xmas,” a perennial favorite in this area. Aunt Viola, who caterwauls “O Holy Night” at Christmastime, sings “Climb Every Mountain” this time around (“When she sings a song, it stays sung,” Heber says without a trace of irony). Her part is brief, but funny.

A highlight of the show is teen-ager Fayreen’s being forced to do one of her cheerleading numbers. Arrington has just the right tone of voice and facial expression for a teen who probably didn’t want to come in the first place, let alone perform for all her stupid relatives, and there’s true pleasure in watching a rather large middle-aged man dressed as a teen-age girl flouncing around the stage, acting like a cheerleader and humming his own accompaniment.

The show ends with an adorable little girl giving the closing prayer. I applaud Arrington for having the guts to poke gentle fun at the way little kids pray — not at prayer itself, of course, but at how our children do it.

A great treat is when Heber introduces a special guest — James Arrington himself (or “Arlington,” as Heber calls him), who comes out to do a high-energy, giddily stupid magic act. It’s a display reminiscent of an old Steve Martin routine as Arrington grins like a fool while doing the dumbest magic tricks imaginable, again humming his own “exciting” music — and the result is hysterical.

The show drags in several places, though, particularly when the non-Utah Farleys make appearances. Texas hick Uffer K. Johnson is proud of his daughter, Queezledean, for making it as a professional wrestler, but he’s not terribly funny. And fatuous lounge singer Vonell Farley is similarly challenged. Doing a dead-on parody of Utah families and their customs is funny and full of potential; making fun of lounge singers has been done to death.

“Grabnet: We Aim to Police” is a fairly straight-forward parody of “Dragnet”-style TV shows, without all the pop-culture references that normally get thrown in at the Desert Star Playhouse.

Is it a bit late to be satirizing “Dragnet”? Well, yes. Is it wrong for Desert Star to borrow not just lines but entire scenes from the “Police Squad” TV series and the “Naked Gun” movies that followed it, both of which definitively parodied the deadpan-cop genre of entertainment? Emphatically, yes.

But if you put aside issues of timeliness and originality, “Grabnet” is a typically loony evening at the Desert Star, full of jokes that make you groan and jokes that make you howl with laughter. (Often, these are the same jokes.)

Small-business owner Denny Fell (Julie Ann Christensen), who is so named just for a joke later in which someone says “then he fell” and is mistaken to have said “Denny Fell” (which is one of those “Police Squad” rip-offs, by the way), is being harassed by the local Mob. The Mob is run by Granny Twyes (Kathleen Richardson), her balloon-breasted assistant Bubbles (Kori Hazel), and her low-life grandson Tommy Twyes (Steven Fehr). (The family’s last name is Twyes because it sounds like “twice,” which enables a character to say, “I shot twice” and have people think she shot Twyes — another “Police Squad” theft.)

Anyway, cops Joe Thursday (Scott Holman) and Frank Smith (Spencer Ashby) are on the case, as is young cop Will Gannon (Rick Miller), who is smitten with Denny. They are assisted by a surf-shop owner (Jonathon Phipps) who has some information on the case. (“We want some names, Mister!” the cops tell him. “Didn’t your parents give you names?” he replies.) (That joke is original, as far as I know.)

The case is solved, everyone’s happy, and the cast does the traditional post-show Olio, this time centered around swing music and rather clunkily choreographed, except for one hysterical scene with Ashby dressed as a woman, dancing with Holman, both of them destroying the furniture and each other.

I feel like a broken record every time I review the Desert Star Playhouse, but Scott Holman is still the best performer they have. No one onstage is funnier, and that’s always true, regardless of the size of his role. (One of his best moments here as stone-faced Thursday is when he “disguises” his voice on the phone without changing it at all, and the person calling still falls for it.) His partnership with Ashby, another genuinely talented comic actor, is very good, and they are well supported by their co-stars, particularly Kori Hazel, showing more comic intuition than a character like Bubbles would normally get.

Those familiar with the works of Irish playwright Martin McDonagh will be interested to know that “The Cripple of Inishmaan,” now being performed at Pioneer Theatre Company, does not shine the spotlight on the human trait of cruelty quite as brightly as some of his other plays do.

That’s not to say the downtrodden, tiny-village-dwelling Irish folks that inhabit this play (and all McDonagh’s plays) don’t exhibit some cruelty, both emotional and physical. They certainly do. The town gossip (though he’s not very good at it — he thinks a goose biting a cat is newsworthy), Johnnypateenmike (Craig Bockhorn), is trying to kill his aged mother (Patricia Fraser) by making her drink herself to death. The devil-tongued Helen (Michelle Six) cracks eggs on the skull of her brother Bartley (Corey Behnke) and is an assassin-for-hire when it comes to neighbors’ pesky animals. Everyone refers to Billy (Liam Christopher O’Brien), a physically deformed but mentally superior young man, as “Cripple Billy.”

There’s more cruelty, too, but I won’t spoil it.

The difference between this and some of McDonaugh’s other plays (“The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” for example, which Salt Lake Acting Company did not long ago) is that the depths to which these bleak, desperate characters sink don’t weigh the entire play down. Yes, there are lies and suffering and pain — but the end result is surprisingly upbeat, especially considering what we’ve been through.

Oddly, this upbeat ending almost seems non-McDonaugh-ish, and not as satisfying as it would have been if things had ended as drearily as we guessed they would.

The plot centers around the island of Inishmaan in 1934, when an American filmmaker was coming around to film a documentary. Billy, eager to leave this village of gossips and critics, winds up getting whisked to Hollywood for a shot at being in pictures.

Meanwhile, his two aunts, who have cared for him since his parents died young, fret about his well-being. The slightly sane Aunt Kate (Mary Fogarty) even begins to talking to rocks, while the mostly sane Aunt Eileen (Tandy Cronyn) tries to go about running their impoverished little country store, which sells mostly cans of peas.

The world of these characters is dismal, enhanced greatly by Peter Harrison’s magnificent set design, in which the dingy, jagged walls of the country store jut upwards toward the gray sky behind it. Yet despite it, they all have sense of humor. This humor can often be dark and even mean-spirited, but it is humor nonetheless. As a result, the play itself is more comedy than tragedy, albeit a pitch-black one. (“It will all end in tears,” predicts Eileen of some turn of events. “Tears or death,” says Kate, with which Eileen readily agrees, as if those two possibilities are equal both in likelihood and appeal.)

O’Brien is outstanding as the crippled Billy, hopelessly in love with the vulgar Helen. Michelle Six is a stand-out, too, as Helen, making her positively mean with just a hint of vulnerability (which she keeps well-hidden).

The entire cast, in fact, is right on target, leaving no weak links. The characters, who are all either insane, odd or stupid, resonate and come to life with their bickerings, stubbornness and human weaknesses. This is a darkly funny, altogether very satisfying play.

Dan Goggin’s goofy musical “Nunsense,” now at Hale Center Theater Orem, is about a group of nuns who must put on a show in order to raise money to bury a bunch of their sisters who died after eating bad soup at the convent.

Fifty-two died; only 48 were buried, though, before the Mother Superior spent the rest of the convent’s money on a DVD player. Until the burial money is raised, the remaining four dead nuns are being kept in the freezer — until the Board of Health finds out, that is.

If this sounds like an extraordinarily distasteful storyline for a musical, well, you’re right. (I won’t even mention the part where one of the nuns accidentally gets high on inhalants.) But its outlandishness can be forgiven when presented in such a whimsical, giddily morbid fashion. There is something inherently funny about seeing women dressed in full nun regalia dancing around like the Rockettes (one of them even does a cartwheel!), and you have to respect a show about nuns that, by its own admission, never stoops to doing “penguin jokes.”

“Nunsense” is the name of the show that five of the surviving nuns are putting on, and we are their audience for that show (they therefore assume we’re all Catholic, by the way). We also see some behind-the-scenes drama, though, as the street-wise Sister Mary Robert Anne wants to do her own number; Sister Mary Amnesia struggles to remember who she was before a crucifix fell on her and wiped out her memory; Sister Mary Leo wants to be a ballerina; and Sister Mary Hubert wants to be Mother Superior.

There are some wonderful jokes and one-liners. While thumbing through the convent’s cookbook “Baking with the Blessed Virgin Mary,” they find Mary Magdalene Tarts, which two of the sisters observe must be “easy and cheap” to make.

The only potential problem with the show is its mockery, sometimes gentle and sometimes quite pointed, of Catholicism. When it’s being done by Catholics for a Catholic audience, everyone can laugh together. But there’s something uneasy about Mormons making fun of Catholics for a Mormon audience — and the fact that the Mormon audience laughs really hard at it. I would bet that if Catholics did a show in this valley making fun of Mormonism, it wouldn’t go over very well. People would get all huffy and righteously indignant and say, “How dare you make fun of our religion,” and “That’s just not funny.” (Of course, in an ideal world, everyone would just take the joke and be fine with it.) I’d be curious to see a Catholic’s reaction to “Nunsense,” as performed by LDS people in an LDS community.

The show is double-cast, and two of the Friday performers were filling in when I saw it on a Thursday. This makes reviewing individual performers difficult, because while some of the onstage chemistry was a bit off, it’s probably because members of both casts, not used to working together, had to work together (which is Reason No. 1 not to double-cast your show — or if you do, to keep the casts separate.)

Ignoring any notions of religious implications or political correctness, the show is audaciously funny, deftly staged and directed by Sister Mary Syd Riggs (as the program calls her), and energetically performed by five women in costumes that are probably nun-too-cool to be hopping around in.

Certainly one of the greatest musicals of the last 20 years, “Into the Woods” puts characters from several fairy tales into one story, letting their paths cross and causing each person’s actions to influence the others’ lives.

Then, in Act II, with great depth and insight into human nature, we see what happens after “they all lived happily ever after.” We see that getting what you wish for — marrying a prince, having a child, killing a giant — isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be. We see that our actions have consequences, but that action MUST be taken: You can’t choose not to decide. We all have to go “into the woods” and face our fears every now and then.

Written by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, this is a marvelously complex show, and a hard one to do. (Despite the presence of fairy-tale characters, the show is not for kids.) The music is challenging, and the performers must be able to act as well as they can sing (a rarity in musical theater, where the focus is usually on the songs, not the depth of the characters). We’re pleased to report that the Villa Playhouse Theatre in Springville measures up to the task admirably, with nearly every performer filling his or her role with confidence and ability.

At the center are the Baker (Brian McFadyen) and his wife (Esther Covington), rendered childless by a curse-dispensing witch (Kristina Holley) who lives next door. (In a hilarious and impressive bit of pyrotechnics, the witch shoots a ball of flame right at the Baker’s crotch.) To lift the curse, the couple must obtain several items to be used in a spell. These include a cow belonging to beanstalk-climbing Jack (a soulful and subtle Claybourne L. Elder), the hood of sassy, attitude-heavy Little Red Ridinghood (Lesa Sutton, playing the role with marvelous comic ability), and a slipper from Cinderella (Brianna Gray).

Rapunzel (Jessica Perry) is involved, too, as are a couple of un-gentlemanly princes (Craig Nielson and Spencer Barnes).

McFadyen and Covington are superb as the Baker and his wife. While the entire cast sings the intricately rhymed lyrics with agility and clarity, not to mention fine singing voices, these two stand out as professionals. They have chemistry as a couple and carry the show well.

Covington, in particular, lends heartbreaking realism to her character in the second act, when her poor decisions and subsequent realizations lead to one of the play’s saddest moments.

Directed by Kathleen Nutt, this production suffers from poor lighting in quite a few scenes. The idea is apparently for the lighting to reflect the dark turn of events in the story, but it’s often hard to see the performers. Also, a potentially wonderful scene between Jack and the Baker is ruined by having the actors sit on the balcony — above and behind the audience, forcing them to either turn all the way around in their seats, or to be content just hearing them. We should really be able to see their faces in this important scene.

Aside from the small glitches and a few performances that remind us of it, this doesn’t feel like community theater. The Villa has taken upon itself the chore of doing a challenging show, and the production as a whole rises to the occasion.

Is it too early to call “Cash on Delivery” at Hale Centre Theatre West Valley “the funniest play of the year”? I guess we still have 51 weeks for something to top it, but whatever show tries to be more frantic, witty, absurd and hysterically funny than “Cash on Delivery” has its work cut out for it.

The show is a full-on farce, complete with slamming doors, dead bodies, bald-faced lies, mistaken identities and men dressing as women. Eric Swan (Cody K. Carlson) lost his job a couple years ago and, unable to find new work, was delighted when a Social Security check for Rupert Thompson, a former tenant, came in the mail. The tenant had moved away, so Eric cashed the check himself and assumed his identity, at least as far as the government was concerned.

Unfortunately, the British government is not content to just give out Social Security. When they learned Rupert Thompson had the gout, they began providing him with disability money. Soon Eric had other alter egos, too, each of them unemployed, disabled, or in some other way eligible for government assistance. His wife (Rashell P. Ainsworth), of course, had no idea anything was going on.

The trouble begins when a welfare agent (Ray Jensen) shows up to have Rupert Thompson and his landlord, Eric Swan, sign a form. They two men are one and the same, of course, which means Eric has to find someone to pretend to be him, since he’s already pretending to be Rupert Thompson. His slightly dim real-life tenant, Norman McDonald (Justin Bruse), whom the government believes to be dead (Eric told them that in an effort to stop the flow of dirty money), is wrangled into the ruse, as is Eric’s Uncle George (Russ Peacock).

At one point in the show, Uncle George is believed by other characters to be three different people — all while he’s lying unconscious, presumably dead (people in farces never take anyone’s pulse). Naturally, things begin to unravel and explode, and the lies have to keep getting more well-timed and creative. (Eric’s wife says to Norman, “Why are you wearing women’s clothing and dancing with my husband?” Eric answers for him, “No trick questions, please.”)

Despite the absurdity, the situations come across as almost completely believable, thanks to a very committed cast. Carlson and Bruse are the leads, but their supporting cast members are just as dedicated to the emphatically silly script, which abounds in popping one-liners and jaw-dropping sight gags (the best one involving a “corpse” on a stretcher).

The whole thing makes so much sense, in fact, that when an astoundingly impossible coincidence involving a dress and a wig occurs near the end, we have no trouble accepting it. We’ve been so competely taken for a ride that we’ll swallow anything.

Two Stephen Sondheim musicals opened in Utah County last weekend, and the shows couldn’t be more different.

“Into the Woods,” playing at the SCERA Showhouse II in Orem, uses the normally just-for-fun medium of fairy tales to examine serious issues of ethics, fate and the vicissitudes of life. It adds depth to characters who have never been deep before.

Meanwhile, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” now at the Little London Dinner Theater in Pleasant Grove, is by its own admission completely devoid of anything weighty, meaningful or important. It is a comedy, and nothing more.

What the productions have in common is that they are well-cast, well-sung and thoroughly enjoyable.

“Into the Woods” is a brilliantly structured show in which the first act is more or less a straight-ahead amalgamation of familiar fairy tales. At the center are the Baker (Brian McFadyen) and his wife (Esther Covington), rendered childless by a curse from the witch (Reyna Ricks) who lives next door. To lift the curse, they have to locate four disparate objects that the witch can use in a potion to restore her youth and beauty.

They head into the woods to find the items, and there they encounter Jack (Steven Ladd), who will soon climb a beanstalk; Little Red Riding Hood (Laura Money), on her way to grandmother’s house; and Cinderella (Natalie Haddock), fleeing the prince after the ball.

These characters, in turn, have their own stories, all of which intersect constantly.

The second act shows what happens after they all lived “happily ever after.” Cinderella has her prince (Tasi Young), but realizes he’s more interested in pursuing young maidens than in actually catching them. Jack and his mother (Tracy Whitlock) are wealthy due to his stealing the giant’s gold-producing goose, but now the giant’s widow is enraged. And the Baker and his wife have a baby, but we all know those come with their own set of problems.

“The woods” represent the trials of life. In real life, things often are not as black-and-white as fairy tales make them seem: Here the witch turns out to be a sympathetic figure, while the “good” characters make some morally questionable choices.

Brian McFadyen and Esther Covington, who have played these roles before (also under the direction of Kathleen Nutt), make for an endearing couple, first humorous then tragic. Laura Money is a sassy Little Red Riding Hood with great facial expressions, and Steven Ladd is an appropriately dumb-headed Jack.

More great casting? David Haenlein’s Mysterious Man (who offers the Baker and his wife enigmatic advice) is delightfully loony. Tracy Whitlock, playing Jack’s mother, berates her boy with great comic agility. And you’ll wonder why a man (Andrew Hunsaker) has been cast as Little Red’s grandmother — until you actually see granny, at which point you’ll be delighted.

Reyna Ricks is dazzling as the witch, who after her transformation into a pretty young thing becomes a vampy, attitude-heavy powerhouse.

“Forum,” directed by Bob Manning, is an all-out, vaudeville-style farce set in ancient Rome. Pseudolis (Aaron Dejesus) is a crafty, shiftless slave who desires his freedom. His master, post-adolescent Hero (Seth Child), promises to set him free if he will help him win the love of Philia (Marilee Spencer).

Philia, alas, is a courtesan (i.e., wife-for-hire) in the house of the rising sun … I mean, the house of Marcus Lycus (Brett Merritt). What’s more, she has just been sold to famed warrior Miles Gloriosus (Adam Daveline).

Meanwhile, Pseudolis is under the watchful eye of the aptly named Hysterium (Patrick Livingston), the head slave who’s a nervous wreck while Hero’s parents (Ryan Wooden and Traci Brewster) are out of town.

From the opening number to the very end, the production is full of non-stop laughs and contagious energy. A broad comedy like this easily lends itself to over-acting — which is the surest way to kill the laughs — but only the omnipresent Proteans (Aaron Spjute and Sam Davis) succumb to the temptation.

Aaron Dejesus forgets he’s the lead and plays Pseudolis as just another cog in the comedy wheel — which is a brilliant thing to do. Seth Child is understated as Hero, earning his laughs in his somewhat limited stage time, and while Traci Brewster gets only one big number as Domina (Hero’s mother), she makes an indelible impression.

Patrick Livingston’s Hysterium is frantic enough to be funny, but not so much that it gets annoying. (His incognito number, “I’m Lovely,” is a scream.) Similarly, Adam Daveline struts and preens as Miles Gloriosus, but restrains himself from going over the top.

It’s hard to choose, but Brett Merritt just might be the funniest of the bunch, playing Lycus as a pouty, flamboyant fop.

Basically, this is a cast full of people with great chemistry together who know the best way to get laughs is to act like getting laughs is the furthest thing from your mind. One hilarious scene blends into another; for what it’s worth, I haven’t laughed this hard at a show in a long time. It’s easily the best production Little London has ever done.

James Arrington’s one-man show “Farly Family Xmas” is a gentle skewering of the sort of people who live in Utah in particular, but who really can be found everywhere.

I have no family ties to Utah; the members of my family who are LDS joined the church in California. Yet the MC of the Farley family gathering, Heber J. Farley, is exactly like my grandfather, who has only visited Utah a couple times and didn’t become a Mormon until the 1950s.

That’s what the show has going for it: It’s universal and specific at the same time. The peculiarities of the Utah dialect (plenty of “for heck’s sake” in this show) and the very idea of having a family reunion attended by 500 people, all of them Farleys, definitely smacks of Utahism. But the characters themselves — from artsy-craftsy old Beatrice Farley to Eagle Scout candidate Eugene — can be found throughout Mormondom.

Arrington plays all the characters, with Heber introducing each one as he or she comes up to make his or her contribution to the family gathering. (Heber usually keeps a running commentary, too, to fill the seconds needed for Arrington to put on the wigs and other articles necessary to make the transformations.) Heber is by far Arrington’s best character, a man who has no MCing capabilities, but who must lead the reunion simply because he’s acting-patriarch of the family. He mixes words around, introducing Aunt Pearl the genealogist as the family’s “gynecologist” instead (“She knows this family inside and out”), he speaks too loudly into the microphone, and he gets teary-eyed when he speaks of old Grandpa Farley, who is pert-near 100 and “still full of vim and Viagra.”

Heber is Every Mormon Grandfather, and Arrington plays him with deliberate anti-charisma — the guy’s so un-charming, he’s charming.

Arrington is less adept at certain other characters, like the young Delbert Farley whose musical number is a disaster, and the lounge singer Vonelle Farley (frankly, singing Christmas carols in lounge-singer style simply isn’t very funny).

But he strikes gold with the aforementioned Grandpa Farley, a toothless, stumbling, lizard-tongued old dodderer who wakes up long enough to come up on stage and say pretty much nothing.

Aunt Pearl the genealogist calls up members of the audience — everyone there is considered to be a Farley — to give out prizes for various things. Here Arrington’s improvisation skills shine, interacting with audience members while staying flawlessly in character. (“They look so much like we do here,” he said of a young Belgian “Farley” last Friday night.)

Parts of the show — like the absurdly bad organ duet between Veta and Theta Farley — go on for too long, and not all of it is as dead-on accurate as it could be. But there’s a whimsical sweetness about this show, with just enough satire to call it that, but not enough to offend anyone. Arrington and his Farleys are an asset to the community.

Borrowing a fairly bad script from Bob Bedore at Off Broadway Theatre, the Desert Star Playhouse has turned “A Christmas Carol Part II” into “Christmas Carol Conspiracy: A Dickens of a Christmas.”

The Off Broadway Theatre version, which was performed last year, is short on jokes and long on sentiment as it tells about what happened to Scrooge after his turn-around. Seems he became TOO soft, falling prey to any swindler who wants money, and especially to a vengeful Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim, seeking retribution for all those years of abuse.

Jansen Davis and Scott Holman have adapted the script for Desert Star, shortening it considerably and taking out the message (which is fine: You don’t want messages at Desert Star). Unfortunately, they forgot to put any more jokes in it. At Desert Star, we’re used to lots of pop culture references, bad puns, elaborate sight gags and general lunacy. “Christmas Caorl Conspiracy” is gentle on all those points.

There are bright spots, of course. The tradition of having a Dickens-like character narrate “A Christmas Carol” is satirized, as the narrator becomes too intrusive and must be told to shut up. As Scrooge (Steven Fehr) undresses for the evening, he takes off his balding wig, too, revealing a full head of hair, which he then re-covers with a balding wig/nightcap combo.

The between-scenes parodies of Christmas carols, which also serve as narration after the Dickens guy is ditched, are sparkling and witty.

And there’s Scott Holman. He is often the best thing to watch at the Desert Star Playhouse, and his turn as a surly Ghost of Christmas Present is highly amusing. (He also has a brief but hilarious appearance as an out-of-place George Bailey when Christmas Past accidentally shows Scrooge the wrong Christmas.)

In short, there are laughs here, but few and far between. Desert Star shouldn’t have tied itself down to this lackluster script, even if they did intend to adapt it to their needs. It needed more than just an adaptation; it needed a complete turn-around, just like Scrooge, and it didn’t get it.

It’s too bad, because the idea of Bob Cratchit seeking revenge on a meek Scrooge is very funny. It’s an opportunity lost; hopefully Desert Star will redeem itself in the new millennium.

Salt Lake City’s Off Broadway Theatre is at its best when doing its own material. You can’t blame them for trying things like “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” but the fact is, their own blend of satire and improvisation works better for them than even Shakespeare does.

“The X-Mas Files” is OBT at its finest. It has clever parody, fantastic sight gags and stage tricks, and actors who aren’t afraid to screw up their lines and improvise something better (or worse, which is often funnier).

Written by Bob Bedore, “X-Mas Files” is a parody of “The X-Files,” first and foremost, and a highly accurate one, at that. Non-fans of the show will miss a lot of jokes here, especially a delicious one where the two heroes almost kiss but are stopped in a manner similar to what happened in last year’s movie.

The plot has Smolder (Bob Bedore) in search of his long-lost sister, who was abducted by Santa Claus as a child. The problem, of course, is that most people don’t believe in Santa — especially his no-nonsense partner, Scullery (Laura Bedore; played by understudy Alexis Owen the night of this review).

Santa exists, of course; it was his sleigh, not a UFO, that crashed at Roswell in the 1940s, and the government’s been hiding it, led by Cancer Man (Zac Zumbrunnen), who now wants to use his Santa/android hybrids to make Christmas last all year long, thus ruining its magic.

“X-Files” fans are already laughing at the parallels here, but the parody doesn’t stop at “X-Files.” There are also some excellent spoofs of “Star Wars” (including a Darth Maul-like character played admirably by Robert Bogue), “Soylent Green,” “Miracle on 34th Street,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and of course “A Christmas Carol” (note the already-obvious comparisons between Cancer Man and Scrooge).

Eric Jensen, easily OBT’s funniest actor, plays four parts here, each of which is hysterical. He’s Mr. Kruger (who’s really a mix of several Jimmy Stewart roles), a fey mannequin who gives Smolder and Scullery a hand, a department store Santa who turns out to be a robot (which leads to a GREAT scene in which Santa’s decapitated head speaks to Scullery), and Elfis — an elf who resembles the King in yet another wonderful sight gag.

But OBT regulars Bob Bedore, Robert Bogue, Mark Harris and Zac Zumbrunnen also add quite a bit, particularly when they ad-lib. This is sometimes because they can’t remember the right line, but they also seem to enjoy doing it just for fun. Seeing actors break each other up on stage is always a treat.

To top it off, at least two song parodies — “The Cancer Man” (to the tune of “The Candy Man”) and “Take a Walk on the Dark Side” (Lou Reed’s “Take a Walk on the Wild Side”) — are absurdly funny.

Problems? Yeah, sure, there are some. The show feels a little long, due partly to the cast’s screwing around, but mostly due to a script that isn’t sure when to quit. And those two good song parodies are the exceptions: The rest are kinda lame.

But this is a solid show nonetheless, especially for “X-Files” fans. Even non-fans, though, will appreciate the show’s sense of lunacy and sheer goofiness. These folks know comedy, especially when they wrote it themselves.

In 1904, Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso — both destined to be the biggest names in their fields in the 20th century — were on the verge of their greatest work.

What if they had met, and somehow sensed they were about to change the world through their science and art?

That’s the premise of “Picasso at the Lapin Agile,” a wiggy comedy by Steve Martin that is every bit as cerebral and inventively odd as the comedian who wrote it.

The setting is a Paris bar owned by Freddy (Max Robinson). Picasso (Jonathan Hammond) is apparently a regular customer. On this particular night, Einstein (Sean Arbuckle) comes in, planning to meet someone. The thing is, he told her to meet him at a different bar. But according to his line of thinking, the probability of her coming to this bar on accident is just as great as the probability of her going to the right bar on purpose — so it doesn’t matter where he waits for her.

That gives you a pretty good sense of the type of ridiculously silly, yet often marvelously layered and intelligent humor used in the play.

Another example: Germaine (Joyce Cohen), Freddy’s waitress and girlfriend, makes predictions about the 20th century, every one of which is dead-on accurate. Tossed in on her list, just for the sake of oddness, is that “cruelty will be perfected.”

Hammond plays Picasso as as swaggering self-parody, a man so sexy he can hardly stand himself. He’s a womanizer, but he gets away with it because he can draw. His strutting and preening are hilarious.

As Einstein, Arbuckle is a good-natured, slightly scatterbrained physicist. He and Picasso are at odds at first, until they realize that what they each do is beautiful in its own way.

The question becomes, If these will be the two big names in the 20th century, who will be the third? These things always come in threes, after all. A loud, clownish inventor named Schmendiman (Frank Gerrish) says it’s him, but his main project is an “inflexible and brittle building material made of equal parts asbestos, kitten paws and radium.”

The third corner of the triangle is revealed later, at a moment when both the play and the great-looking set (designed by George Maxwell) suddenly become more detailed and meaningful than you’d previously thought.

The play comments on talent, genius and celebrity, and hints at which one is most important in the 20th century. It’s a fitting end to a century that had much fun and frivolity, but which, upon closer inspection, had quite a bit to chew on, too — just like the play.

Seeing “A Christmas Carol” is a tradition for many people, and Hale Center Theater Orem’s 10th annual production of it does not vary much from the traditional.

In fact, I can think of virtually no differences between the show this year and the show last year, except for the cast members.

Which is perfectly fine. Even though we know the story, and even though parts of it drag on — like the entire fourth act, when Scrooge doesn’t realize that Christmas Future is showing him HIS death, even though someone who knew nothing about the story could have figured it out in three seconds — it still has power to touch hearts in the end.

Scrooge’s redemption and the jubilant attitudes of the townspeople of old London (gorgeously attired in costumes by Mary Ann Hill) are a great mix, and Hale Center’s intimate setting draws the audience right into it.

William Bisson is a fine Scrooge: not particularly mean, just difficult and grouchy. Ted Lehman’s adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel is written such that Scrooge begins feeling penitent almost immediately, so his “change of heart” is not really the focus. That’s a structural problem of the script, but Bisson does as well as he can to make Scrooge a three-dimensional character.

In fact, the script has a number of problems. The voice-over narration in the beginning goes on too long, as does the aforementioned fourth act. So does the scene in which Scrooge’s nephew Fred (Vic Groves) plays a guessing game in which the answer is obviously “Scrooge,” but his dim-headed party guests take forever to figure it out.

But this is irrelevant. “A Christmas Carol” isn’t a play anymore so much as it is a pageant. We go because of the warm Christmas feelings it gives us, not because we want thought-provoking, carefully plotted theater.

And like I said: That’s perfectly fine. The Christmas caroling between scenes is beautiful, as is the pre-recorded accompaniment by Cody Hale (who also plays Bob Cratchit and sings a beautiful rendition of “What Child is This?” just after Tiny Tim’s death). As a production, it’s pretty good. As a yuletide tradition, it’s fantastic.

In “The Last Night of Ballyhoo,” the non-practicing Jews of 1939 Atlanta don’t care much for the Jews who actually live their religion. They’re known contemptuously as “the other kind” of Jews, the ones foolish enough to be orthodox when the hip thing to do is act like a Christian.

The Freitag household is a prime example of this, what with a Christmas tree in the front window and all. They consider themselves Jews, but only by tradition.

Adolph Freitag (David Phillips), a never-married middle-aged fellow, lives in this house with his widowed sister, the loud and crotchety Boo (Karen Baird), and with his widowed sister-in-law, the sincere but bubble-headed Reba (Michelle Evans).

Boo’s daughter Lala (Carolyn Stone) lives there, too, frittering her life away because college was too hard. Not so for Reba’s daughter Sunny (Colleen Hansen). She’s smart, sensible and doing fine at Wellesley, making her narrow-minded cousin and aunt extremely jealous.

Life for the family turns upside-down when Adolph brings home a new employee, Brooklyn-born Joe Farkas (Christopher Clark). Joe is a practicing Jew who even knows Yiddish slang, and while he’s not exactly appalled at the Jack-Jews he encounters, he doesn’t understand them, either. (“Are you people really Jewish?” he asks Sunny.)

The big event is Ballyhoo, a week-long festival where all the Jews in the South get together for fun and games, culminating in a big dance at an exclusive country club — the kind of club where “the other kind” aren’t allowed. Not realizing this, Joe invites Sunny to the dance, while Lala goes with the obnoxious and bleating Peachy Weil (Matt Biedel).

There’s social commentary here, about how people within a specific demographic group can even discriminate amongst each other. But the commentary is toned down by a light-hearted, even fluffy script, and a production that comes off as light-weight. Christopher Clark as Joe is the only one who gets any emotions; everyone else is there either to fill out the ensemble (which they do nicely, particularly the sweet Michelle Evans as Aunt Reba), or to provide contrasts.

It’s those contrasts that drive home the point of the show; the attitude is unmistakable. The characters who are most vocal in their contempt for “the other kind” — Aunt Boo, Lala and Peachy — are the ones who are the most grossly absurd, personified by the buffoonish jackassery of Peachy. (Even their names prevent us from taking them seriously.)

The show is well-acted and moves along briskly. Clark and Hansen have some degree of chemistry together, though Sunny’s “this is just how I grew up” explanation seems too simple a resolution for a show that could have a lot more to say.

Saying something doesn’t seem to be director Laurie Harrop-Purser’s point, though. Providing a warm, easy-going comedy for the holidays is what’s on the agenda, and to that end, the play succeeds.

Christmas, 1939, in Atlanta is the setting of “The Last Night of Ballyhoo,” being performed at Pioneer Theatre Company through Dec. 19. But “Ballyhoo” is no ordinary Christmas play. For one thing, all the characters are Jewish. Well, they’re all mostly Jewish. Their degree of Jewishness is in fact the central issue of the play.

Alfred Uhry’s gentle comedy, directed by Susan Gregg, takes place in the home of wealthy businessman Adolph Freitag (Robert Elliott). Living with him are his prim sister Boo (Darrie Lawrence) and his sister-in-law Reba (Sherry Skinker), as well as Boo’s daughter Lala (Mandy Fox) and Reba’s daughter Sunny (Michelle Six). Sunny is a smart, pretty college student home for the holidays; Lala is a little ding-headed and goofy, and rather jealous of her cousin.

The whole family is Jewish by heritage, but keeping one foot in the mainstream of Atlanta society. They have a huge Christmas tree — but no star on the top, because that symbolizes Jesus’ birth too strongly. (“Nice Hanakkah bush,” notes one character wryly.) One would never know they were Jewish at all — in fact, one of the things Lala is jealous of Sunny for is that Sunny is blessed not to LOOK Jewish.

None of this fence-sitting is a problem until Adolph brings home his new employee Joe (Harry Bouvy), a Jewish fellow from a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. He has lived his whole life being openly Jewish and is somewhat surprised to see people hiding it. Lala likes Joe, but Joe goes for Sunny instead, and the ensuing conflicts all come to a head on the last night of Ballyhoo.

Oh, right. Ballyhoo. It was a series of annual Southern Jewish society affairs held during the first half of this century. Single Jewish people would go there to meet other eligible bachelors and bachelorettes and hopefully find someone to marry. It would last several days, culminating in a big ball, at which everyone was always impeccably dressed.

These Ballyhoos were sponsored by the ritzy Jewish social clubs, some of which were rather exclusive, prohibiting even other types of Jews. (Reform-owned clubs wouldn’t allow orthodox Jews, for example.) With Joe being more orthodox than Sunny and her family, there’s trouble, and everyone has to take a long, hard look at their values.

The theme of “Ballyhoo” — embrace your heritage and don’t be afraid to be who you are — is conveyed well enough, and the acting is all superb, with some very endearing characters being established. Elliott stands out as Adolph, and the matronly Lawrence, with her well-moneyed old lady Southern accent, is splendid as Boo. Jordan Matter, appearing as Lala’s Ballyhoo date Peachy Weil, plays the character as an obnoxious moron. His and Lala’s scenes turn into a surreal “Saturday Night Live” sketch, with Matter braying like an idiot and annoying the crud out of everyone. This is intentional, I think, as his character is meant to be a small-minded bigot that the audience is supposed to dislike.

The play is a comedy, though never knee-slappingly funny. Its humor is gentle and playful. The show is amusing and light-hearted, with enough reality near the end to give it the depth it needs.

Combining singing, dancing and acting in a way BYU has not done in years, “Children of Eden” is an emotional, exuberant piece that leaves its audience in high spirits — a truly uplifting work that entertains as well as it enlightens.

With music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz (“Pippin,” “Godspell,” Disney’s “Pocahontas” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”) and book by John Caird, “Children of Eden” uses biblical stories — mixed with clever humor and joyful light-heartedness — to present universal truths about family and children.

The first act deals with Father (Dallyn Bayles) — he’s not called “God” until the second act — creating the Earth and Adam (Matthew Herrick) and Eve (Joy Rodgers Gardner) with it. His reason for wanting kids? “They will keep me company, they will keep me young,” Bayles sings as the Father, his rich, powerful voice booming with authority and love.

There’s a reason they avoid calling him “God”: He’s not quite perfect. He’s more a parental prototype, the First Dad: Adam and Eve are later heard to tell Cain (Jason Celaya) and Abel (Paul Canaan) the exact things that Father once said to them, and to make some of the same mistakes.

Herrick and Gardner have stunning voices, and their fumbling to be good parents is achingly poignant. This is the only show in recent memory that had audience members already crying by intermission, instead of just at the very end.

The second act begins with a decidedly lighter tone, and while it gets more serious as time goes on, it never reaches the heights (or depths, if you will) of emotional heartache that Act One had. This is not a flaw, however; in fact, it’s better that way, what with Act One being so overwhelming.

Act Two has Noah (Norris Chappell, Jr.) dealing with a rebellious son: Japheth (Carlos L. Encinias) insists on marrying outside the faith. (In the Bible, it was Ham who did this, and while all the other liberties taken with the Genesis account are fine in the context of story-telling and artistic license, this one seems strangely arbitrary.)

It is Noah who learns what the parents all along have been reaching toward: that while they want their children to be happy, they have to let go and let them make their own mistakes. The Father character learns this, too, and the show’s finale is transcendently powerful, as is the whole show.

A talented cast of dancers and singers perform as supporting characters, animals and pieces of scenery, and they do it with fantastic grace and fluidity. From the show’s first moment until the last, there is movement and beauty all over the stage. For once it is difficult to say which element of the show is most accomplished: the acting (directed by Tim Threlfall), the singing (music director Randy Boothe) or the choreography (by Rebecca Wright Phillips). All are breath-takingly magnificent, and blend together in a manner rarely seen in this valley.

“Children of Eden” is easily among the top five shows produced anywhere in Utah this year. See it, and prepare to be blown away.

The regional premiere of Arthur Miller’s “The Ride Down Mount Morgan” at Salt Lake Acting Company is a polished, professional affair — and I do mean “affair.”

Nine years ago, wealthy businessman Lyman Felt (Tony Larimer) got bored with his wife, “good ol’ Episcopal” Theodora (Joan Mullaney) and had an affair with a much younger woman, Leah (Jeanette Puhich). He told Leah he had divorced Theo, thus freeing him to marry her. In reality, the divorce didn’t happen, and he’s been married to both of them for nine years, successfully leading a double life.

All of this we learn in flashbacks, as the play unfolds in Lyman’s hospital room following a car accident. Both wives, along with Theo’s daughter Bessie (Emily Sandack), have come to see him, thus bringing all of Lyman’s lies (Miller was not very subtle in naming the character; his last name, “Felt,” is appropriate for the old lech, too) to light.

“Please just let me die!” Lyman half-prays as he realizes his two wives are in the waiting room, discovering his dishonesty. It’s a humorous moment, and one of many in this tragic comedy directed by Meg Gibson.

The situation is played for laughs for a while — almost inevitably, since the predicament is classic farce material — but then settles into a fascinatingly staged back-and-forth between the present, as each of the wives decide what they want to do with Lyman, and the past, as we see what led him to do such a thing. (In one hysterical scene, we see Lyman’s absurd, amoral fantasy about keeping BOTH wives, as the women, dressed in tight leotards, dance around his hospital bed and giggle about the delights of sharing a husband.)

Larimer is fantastic as Lyman, a man who has supressed his conscience almost out of existence. He’s a thoroughly despicable man, yet we don’t hate him. We pity him, and even relate to him. After all, who among us hasn’t tried to evade responsibility? Who among us, if we did something so colossally wrong, wouldn’t at first try to deny the reality of it as a defense mechanism?

Mullaney’s Theo tends to be a bit flat and melodramatic, and not quite believable. Puhich, too, as Leah, has moments of hollowness (“I’m still in mid-air,” she says early on of the recent developments, but it doesn’t sound like she means it), but she grows into the part as time goes on.

But despite minor weaknesses, the play astounds with its moral questions and fascinating storytelling, holding the audience’s attention without ever letting go. Jim Craig’s light design adds considerably, too, as does Rick Margitza’s music.

When the national touring company of “Les Miserables” comes to town, it’s not a question of whether it’s good or not. It’s just a matter of naming which performers stand out the most.

The touring production is designed to be exactly the same as the Broadway version. (Interesting side note: I saw it on Broadway in April and it was, inexplicably, exactly 10 minutes shorter than when I saw it at the Capitol Theatre on Tuesday. I honestly cannot figure out how that happened, unless the song tempos were faster in New York. Capitol’s intermission may have been a bit longer, too.)

The production is flawless from a technical standpoint; whether all the actors really have their heart in it is something else. Ivan Rutherford plays Jean Valjean, and his vocal performance is outstanding. (“Bring Him Home” got the longest sustained applause of opening night.) However, he lacks a certain stage presence. Instead of presiding over the show, commanding any scene he’s the focus of, he seems a mere participant.

He is overshadowed by the great Stephen Bishop, who plays Valjean’s pursuer Javert with personality and gusto. From the first moment he comes onstage, one is immediately forced to pay attention to him.

Likewise, Tim Howar’s Marius is handsome and effective in his role as rabble-rouser and lover. Cosette (Regan Thiel) seems more a minor character than ever, as her scenes with Marius are passable, but without any great emotion.

The emotion is with Eponine, played by Sutton Foster. Perhaps more than any other performer, Foster completely immerses herself in the role, singing “On My Own” with amazing fervor and passion.

Aymee Garcia and J.P. Dougherty earn their laughs as the comically ugly Thenardiers.

Minor squabbles with performances aside, the sweeping grandeur of this beautiful show comes through loud and clear. It’s a story about forgiveness, redemption and, most of all, love: “To love another person is to see the face of God,” the cast sings at the end, and having just seen three hours of material leading up to that, you can’t help but agree. Unlike “Phantom of the Opera” — the other big-time musical often spoke of in the same breath as this one — “Les Miserables” is short on spectacle and long on depth and meaning. It’s a brilliant, beautiful show. Don’t miss a chance to see it.

The Grand Theatre’s production of “Little Women” — the theater’s first non-musical show in quite a while — is as quaint and charming as the classic novel upon which it is based, and almost entirely devoid of conflict.

Taking place over five years in 1860s Massachusetts, we see the four March girls grow up and find husbands (except for Beth, who dies instead). There’s tomboy Jo (Amy Caudill), artistic Amy (Elizabeth Edmiston), motherly Meg (Nancy Peterson) and sickly Beth (Marilyn Alldredge), though it’s difficult to tell any of their personalities apart, since they — along with everyone else in the play — speak so politely and perfectly as to almost seem unreal.

Indeed, the cast has trouble with the proper, formal language at first, though they grow into it (and the audience gets used to it) by Act II. By the end of the play, the constant use of “shall,” and the way everyone simply bursts with thoughtfulnes, kindness and pleasantness, seems normal. (I found myself holding open doors and nodding politely to passersby on my way out of the theater, and others were doing the same.)

The play works carefully to avoid any conflict, presenting this family like a Civil War-era version of “Leave it to Beaver.” Even when Jo’s mentor Professor Bhaer (Bryan P. Jacobs) rails against the newspaper she has secretly been writing for — a perfect opportunity for at least some inner turmoil, as Jo cares deeply for this man and his opinions — the issue passes without further mention.

Family friend Laurie “Teddy” Laurence (Justin Utley) declares his love for Jo, and she rebuffs him. That scene is emotionally gripping, thanks especially to all-around great performances from Caudill and Utley, but it doesn’t wind up changing their friendship, and he finds happiness elsewhere anyway.

Even when Beth dies, she has the courtesy to do it offstage.

Despite there being very little dramatic tension and a plot that is as gently moving as a mountain brook, the play charms and moves its audience.

“Little Women” has nothing to prove, no stunts to pull, no gimmicks. It’s just an enjoyable, sweet-natured show sure to soothe the souls of all who see it.

BYU’s production of Anton Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” is as dismally comic and comically dismal as one expects from the Russian playwright.

Directed by Barta Lee Heiner, the cast is practically a Who’s Who of BYU theater. Their collective talent and experience are brought to bear as they manage to make their frustratingly indecisive characters come across as sympathetic and likable.

Liubov Ranyevskaya (Emmelyn Thayer) has returned from France to find her cherished estate on the verge of foreclosure. Practical businessman Lopakhin (Javen Ronald Tanner) suggests leveling the orchard and selling off plots of land for summer homes, but Liubov and her brother, Leonid (James C. Bybee), are too sentimental to allow that.

Instead, they do nothing. In fact, no one does anything during the whole play, except for Lopakhin, who buys the estate at auction and triumphs in rising above his family’s heritage of serfdom. (Tanner’s performance as he revels in his success is nothing short of electrifying.) But Lopakhin fails to propose marriage to Liubov’s daughter Varya (Melissa Yacktman) when he has the chance, ultimately putting him in the same category as all the other family friends and hangers-on who populate the play: full of dreams but devoid of ambition.

These are people who would be profoundly unhappy if they cared enough about life to be unhappy about it. As it is, they engage in trivial conversations and ignore reality until the axes are actually chopping down the cherry trees, both literally and figuratively.

Thayer is convincing and tragic as Liubov, particularly in her Act II revelations about her past. One feels her pain and sympathizes with it, even while silently chewing her out for not acting to prevent it. Ary Farahnakian is characteristically loopy as comic-relief Yepikhodov, and Jjana Valentiner Morrill’s portrayal of Carlotta is mysteriously affecting. Her sleight-of-hand magic tricks make her the personification of all the other facade-laden characters.

The entire cast is strong, with Dax Craven’s poetic-but-cynical college student Petya and Bob Nelson’s stuck-in-the-past butler Firs adding more depth and emotional charge.

There is humor in the show, though the tone is overall dreary. Chekhov meant the ending to be anti-climactic and for the play as a whole to go nowhere. This production succeeds in both regards — an odd achievement, perhaps, but a difficult one to pull off while still making the play watchable. Kudos to a talented cast and director.

Hale Centre Theatre West Valley’s production of “Forever Plaid” asks the musical question: How many times have you seen this show already?

If your answer is “once” or “not at all,” then this show is for you. The Hale Centre’s in-the-round stage has been turned into a straight-forward nightclub environment as we listen to The Plaids — a deceased male harmony group from 1964 who get to come back long enough to do one big concert — sing great songs from the ’50s and early ’60s.

Songs like “Three Coins in the Fountain,” “Cry” and “Catch a Falling Star” are among the numbers on the agenda, and all four men sing exceptionally well.

If your answer is “I’ve seen it a bunch o’ times,” like many Utahns — only “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” beats it in terms of ubiquitousness — then this production may not do much for you.

While the performers are all great singers, none of them are really actors, and we see very little in the way of personality, which is usually what drives this show. Without ways of telling the characters apart, and sort of getting a feel for who they are, “Forever Plaid” becomes just a nostalgic concert.

Sparky (Bryon Finch) is the only one who stands out, with his goofy, expressive face and general silliness. He’s sometimes too over-the-top — but at least he’s doing something. Frankie (Dan Morgan), ostensibly the leader of the group, blends in somewhat weakly with the other three.

Even Jinx’s (David Weekes; double-cast with Todd C. Russell) break-out-of-his-shell solo in “Cry” fails to do anything more than amaze us with his vocal ability, though he does get a very funny moment later on with his step-brother Sparky as they reminisce about Sunday nights at home.

This is a glittery, slick-looking production, and well worth seeing if it’s your first time. But repeat visitors will realize that all four men are too old to pass for a late-teens/early-20s vocal group, and they’ll be sorry to see so much potential humor lost because too much attention is paid to getting the songs right, leaving characterization undeveloped.

UVSC’s production of “Grease” is schizophrenic: energetic and enthusiastic during the musical numbers, slow and almost lethargic in between. Unfortunately, that lethargy brings the whole show down, giving an overall feeling of tedium.

But when the music starts, the cast kicks it into high gear, doing some fabulous choreography designed by Kathie Debenham (watch Nathaniel C. Shaw in his many non-speaking but well-danced parts). Great singing voices are the norm here, too, with nary a weak link in the whole cast, vocally speaking.

Seth Child is earnest and likable as rebellious greaser Danny Zuko. His attempts to appear tough in front of Sandy (Andrea Walker) are transparent, as he’s simply too sweet in his unguarded moments. (That’s not a criticism, either. I like Danny as a nice guy who tries unsuccessfully to seem tough, rather than as a tough guy with a soft side.)

Brittany Thompson is a standout among the Pink Ladies, playing Marty — the one with the boyfriend in the military — with uncommon flair. She doesn’t just have attitude or a one-joke persona: She has a personality.

Also worthy of mention are Aaron DeJesus as Danny’s greaser buddy Sonny and Heidi Boyd as Patty. Both actors, like Thompson, display a knack for performing and a real confidence onstage.

Direction (by James Arrington) is a problem here, as one feels unsure how to take the whole thing. Overall, the energy is low as one scene just sort of dribbles into the next. Also, the big school dance scene is a mess, as focus is supposed to keep shifting from one of the several couples to the next. In order to do this, the actors need to take command of the stage to let the audience know they’re the center of attention now. This rarely happens, though, and we wind up continuing to watch one couple that has stopped doing anything simply because we don’t realize that someone else has started. The effect is the feeling that a million things are going on at once, none of them strong enough to grab your attention.

Furthermore, “Grease” was intended as a parody of the ’50s, meant to show that the white-washed decade was not as pure and wholesome as it’s been made out to be. In order to accept the appalling ending — bland Sandy decides to become trashy in order to win her man — we have to realize that it’s meant as a satire. But no feeling of satire comes through in this production.

In fact, despite earnestness on the part of everyone, and highly praiseworthy performances from a few, it’s not just the satire that doesn’t come through: Nothing comes through. We don’t know if we’ve just watched an homage to the ’50s, a slice of life from the ’50s, or a parody of the ’50s. We just know we’ve seen some fun musical numbers and a lot of talking in between.

Blaine Yorgason’s short novel about a man’s triumph over adversity and the effect of his love for a small town has been adapted into a musical play whose intentions are absolutely pure, but which stumbles slightly in its attempt to convey meaning.

“Charlie’s Monument” (at the Little London Dinner Theatre), with book and lyrics by Susan Evans McCloud and Marvin Payne and music by K. Newell Dayley, focuses more on the love story between Charlie (Davison Cheney) and Nellie (Kathryn Laycock Little).

Charlie, a Forrest Gump-y fellow with a limp and a missing arm, is orphaned and ostracized by a town that doesn’t want to be burdened by him. They give him a job sitting on top of the local mountain, allegedly watching for fires, Indian attacks or whatever, but really just to keep him out of sight.

He starts stacking rocks, monument-style, each rock representing his mood at the moment. Soon he is visited by the lovely Nellie Reeves, whose father naturally disapproves of her love for the deformed man, but whom she marries anyway.

Their courtship is really quite sweet. The fact that there are no other actors around, leaving them entirely alone at the top of that mountain, gives the love story a fairy-tale, other-worldly feel, as if the couple are the only two people on Earth.

Tragedy and sadness await them following their marriage, though, with Charlie left to triumph over it all, just as he has triumphed over adversity his entire life.

Cheney and Little play their parts exceptionally, and both have fine singing voices. Unfortunately, the songs tend to be of the highly forgettable “you’re gonna make it someday” faux-inspirational Neil Diamond variety, and the few minor characters played by the same actors serve little purpose other than narrative function. In most cases, just using a narrator would have been better.

Alas, this stage production glosses over what was originally the point of the story — Charlie’s monument, the huge stack of rocks that represents his love for the town, and the positive effect he had on its residents. We are TOLD, briefly, that he brightened the lives of others, but the only person we ever see him talk to is Nellie. It makes for a fine love story, but the idea of the rocks standing as a monument to his humble servitude for the town doesn’t come across.

The Villa Playhouse’s Halloween production of “Arsenic and Old Lace” plays up the show’s spooky elements more than its humor, making it an enjoyable show for anyone who’s never seen it, but a little disappointing to fans of the classic dark comedy.

The story is of two quaint little old ladies, Abby (Maureen Eastwood) and Martha (Esther Rae Barney), beloved by the town and known all over for their acts of charity.

Among their charitable acts is to find people who are lonely, without friends or family, poison them, and bury them in the basement. The town is not aware of this, obviously.

Such delightful comedy can come of such an absurd situation, especially when the old ladies are played with such cute grandmotherliness by Eastwood (reprising the role she played in last year’s Springville Playhouse production) and Barney. They both play their parts to the fullest, creating most of what humor exists in this staging.

Their nephew Mortimer (Kerry Murdock), a theater critic, spends most of his time being flustered after discovering his aunts’ dark deeds, and he tries to pin it on his insane brother Teddy (Dane Allred), a harmless dim-wit who thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt. Mortimer is a difficult role, as he has pretty much just one emotion: flustered. Murdock gives it the ol’ college try, but he is far out-acted in his scenes with MinD Jensen, who plays his fiancee with flair, controlled energy and confidence.

The set, designed by W. Bill Brown Jr. (who also directed), is authentic-looking and beautiful. The mood music that plays almost constantly through the show effectively sets the tone when Mortimer’s murderous brother, Jonathan (Malcolm Phipps), arrives – but then it keep playing whenever he’s onstage, and it gets old (especially since it’s the same two minutes of music, repeated over and over).

Again, this production plays up the creepiness over the humor. This is unfortunate, as the humor, when played right, is abundant and outrageously funny. But for a Halloween show meant to deliver entertaining chills for the whole family, the show does OK.

SCERA’s production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s grand classic “South Pacific” suffers from poor casting and some weak performances, but overall serves its purpose in entertaining the audience.

Consummate singer/dancer/actress Jayne Luke, marvelous in everything she does, is miscast as Ensign Nellie Forbush. The nurse is said in the script to be young and naive; in fact, one reason it’s assumed she wouldn’t fall for Frenchman Emile de Becque (Marvin Payne) is that “he’s a middle-aged man.” (Mitzi Gaynor was 28 when she played the role in the film version.)

In this production, though, they’re both middle-aged, and Luke is far older than her fellow nurses. And never mind that she’s also supposed to be “a hick from the sticks” but doesn’t even TRY a Southern accent; Payne’s French accent comes and goes, too.

Still, the two of them are strong performers, almost overcoming the problems inherent in the casting and in fact carrying the show on their shoulders for much of the way. The show’s message about blind racism, now a little dated (honestly, in 1999, who cares if an American marries a Polynesian?), manages to come across in the end.

The other standout is Shawn Lynn as the scheming Luther Billis. Lynn is an amateur actor, but his performance is professional. His “Honey Bun” number with Luke is a high point of the show, and he carries himself with confidence and talent throughout.

Dan Jarvis’s Lt. Joseph Cable is overly dramatic, delivering every line with too much passion. That said, he and Kris Wing as the native girl Liat make an extremely cute couple, and one gets a sense of the true love that develops between them.

The rest of the supporting cast is hit-or-miss, and mostly miss, unfortunately. All have good singing voices, but few can really act. Some scenes, like the “Bloody Mary” number, are energy-drainingly slow and unenthusiastic, as if everyone’s just going through the motions.

If you haven’t seen “South Pacific” in a while, this production may serve as nostalgia. A first-timer, though, is unlikely to fall in love with what really is, and should be, a true classic.

Shakespeare probably didn’t have the WWF in mind when he concocted the wrestling scene in “As You Like It,” but Pioneer Theatre Company’s version strongly resembles something you’d see in modern-day professional wrestling.

And it just goes toward proving what is essentially the main point when doing a Shakespearean comedy: If it’s funny, it works.

This production of the cheery farce, directed by Utah Shakespearean Festival regular Paul Barnes and populated by many of his fellow ShakesFest cohorts, IS funny, thanks largely to some great source material (naturally) and strong performances by people who know how to do comedy.

Sometimes Shakespeare’s funny plays wind up not-so-funny because snooty Shakespearean actors get cast in the lead roles, speaking the lines eloquently and with the proper American Standard dialect, but without any sense of comic timing.

Not so here. Carol Linnea Johnson is positively hilarious as Rosalind, the woman who poses as a man, befriends the guy she’s in love with, then lets him practice on him/her the way he would woo Rosalind if she were really there — of course not realizing that Rosalind IS there, and that his practice dummy is actually the real deal.

Johnson is the standout performer in the show, displaying tremendous comic agility in a role that requires energy, timing and control. She doesn’t go overboard, but she doesn’t let any opportunities pass, either.

Ty Burrell plays Orlando, the man who loves Rosalind. Burrell’s a fine actor, too, with an expressive voice and a flair for subtle comedy.

There are a total of four couples in this show, all of them courting each other out in the forest, where the Duke (Robert Peterson) is living merrily in exile, his brother (Anthony De Fonte) having usurped the throne. Priceless scenes abound: Pompous courtier Touchstone (Anderson Matthews) discusses etiquette with Corin (Thomas Carson), a simple shepherd. Orlando’s brother Oliver (R. Ward Duffy) meets Rosalind (in disguise) and her cousin Celia (Deanne Lorette), falls in love with Celia, and figures out Rosalind’s secret.

And of course every scene between Orlando and the disguised Rosalind is a gem of comedy, real battle-of-the-sexes stuff. As we see her trying to be both masculine and feminine at once, we see how silly both genders can really be.

It’s hard to imagine a play about two sweet old ladies who poison people and bury them in the basement being anything other than delightful. And the production of “Arsenic and Old Lace” going on at the Springville Playhouse is just that.

Abby (Maureen Eastwood) and Martha (Arlene McGregor) are two old sisters who live together in Brooklyn in the 1940s. They are known all over for being sweet, kind and charitable. (Abby remarks to someone early in the play, “This may not be very nice of me, but I’m beginning to think that Mr. Hitler is not a Christian!”) No one can imagine they would ever do anything sinister and evil.

But sinister and evil is exactly what they do — though, like everything else in this show, it’s played for laughs. Seems whenever they have a visitor who is all alone in the world, they put the person out of his or her supposed misery by slipping some poison into the elderberry wine. Once that’s taken care of, they have their nephew Teddy (George King), who thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt, bury the body in the basement (or Panama, as the canal-obsessed Teddy thinks it is).

The twist here is NOT that the two sweet old ladies are actually murderers. No, the twist is that they’re murderers but don’t realize it. They see nothing wrong with what they do, and they make no attempt to hide it from anyone. This results in some very funny moments when Teddy’s brother Mortimer (Matthieu Kohl) finds out about the bodies and is quite flustered to discover that his aunts treat it with such nonchalance.

Complications arise when Mort and Teddy’s black sheep of a brother Jonathan (George Wallace) — a REAL murderer — shows up and commands control of the house. There are several cops, including a long-winded one who wants to be a playwright, and some potential zaniness as the aunts and Jonathan all try to hide various bodies various places.

The farcical elements are never played up quite as much as they could be, but there are plenty of laughs in the show. Most of them center around the two old aunts. Eastwood is a small, plump grandma with a voice like Granny on the Tweety-Bird cartoons (she even looks a bit like her). She rolls around the stage like a marble, cheerful and polite all the time. McGregor’s Martha is tall and wobbly, always looking like she’s about to fall over. The two make an excellent duo, complementing each other perfectly and making for a delightfully wacky couple of old ladies.

Kohl is exasperated and nervous as Mortimer — exactly the way most theater critics are, which is what Mortimer does for a living (though Mort seems more financially successful than the critics I know). King is also sublime as the loony Teddy. His character is purposely one-dimensional, but King plays it to the hilt.

Wallace is creepy as the rather monstrous Jonathan, but he is also stuck on one note and one emotion the entire time. It is ironic that Jonathan mentions being in the “diamond business” at one point, and Wallace sounds just like the droning Tom Shane in his Shane Diamond Company radio commercials — only LESS charismatic, if you can imagine. The third act, where he has a lot to do, moves very slowly and seems to drag quite a bit.

In fact, the whole play moves rather slowly. But it’s all worth it just for the two murderous sisters. Eastwood and McGregor play the roles with such energy, enthusiasm and commitment that you can’t help giggling at them all the time they’re onstage. Their talent keeps the show interesting and funny and well worth the few dollars it will cost you to see it.

Comedy 101: Men dressed as women = funny.

Brandon Thomas’s classic play “Charley’s Aunt” makes abundant use of that fact, and the Hale Center Theater Orem production of it takes an already-solid script and uses some talented actors to make it even better — the funniest show this theater has done in two years.

(The show is double-cast. This review refers to the Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday cast.)

It’s 1892 and we’re at Oxford University. This is a time when young ladies do not associate with young gentlemen unless there’s a chaperone present.

Jack (Nathan Keith), wishing to woo Kitty (Clair Wilkins), is delighted to learn that his friend Charley (Ryan Radebaugh) has a long-lost wealthy aunt coming to visit. Since Charley wants to see a girl, too (Amy, played by Bonnie Beus), they invite both girls over, using Charley’s soon-to-arrive Aunt Donna Lucia as an excuse.

The aunt fails to show, though, and the girls are in danger of leaving. The solution? A third friend, Lord Fancourt Babs (Curt Doussett) is an actor and about to play a woman in a local production. Dress him up like an old lady, and there’s your chaperone!

Complications arise when the REAL Donna Lucia (Nancy Douglas) shows up, and when both Amy and Kitty’s guardian (Karl Young) AND Jack’s father (Spencer Anderson) start to woo the fake Donna Lucia.

This is a silly play full of silly premises, but these performers make it work. There’s hardly a slow moment in the show. In particular, Doussett is hysterical as Charley’s fake aunt. Looking much like Whistler’s mother, his character, Babs, alternates between playing the part with great enthusiasm (especially when the pretty young ladies take him into their confidence), and being thoroughly fed up with it.

The scene in which he has taken off his woman clothes and Jack and Charley must re-dress him is priceless. Doussett seems fond of ad-libbing, and his performance throughout the play is breathlessly energetic and convincing, without getting over-the-top.

Keith and Radebaugh as Jack and Charley make a good duo, too, acting their parts well but adding just a little 1990s-style comaraderie that makes their college antics seem relatable to a modern audience.