By J. PETER BERGMAN
For the third season in a row, the Berkshire Theatre Festival is presenting its stage edition of the Victorian classic “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens. The story is told in a most straight-forward manner with special effects reduced to an aural minimum, with traditional sets and costumes and a triple-threat endeavor by Eric Hill, who adapted the book into a play, directed the show and stars as Ebenezer Scrooge, the classic meanie who hates Christmas.
Hill has grown with the role.

There are holiday traditions one cherishes and traditions one fears. I dread dry white meat turkey. I adore a fruit-inflected cranberry relish. I avoid “The Wizard of Oz” and I look forward to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. I fear tryptophans if I have to drive home; I cherish the company of dear friends.
I also cherish, dread, adore, look forward to, fear but never avoid the yearly foray into the British, and Ghent Playhouse tradition of the Christmas Panto. Every year I worry about the company: Will the show be funny? Will I want the songs to be longer (or shorter)? Will the cross-dressing characters work? Will the political jokes be Democrat or Republican? This is a presidential election year and a tricky one. Will the show make me cringe or cry out a hearty bravo!? Well, the traditional days are behind me, and I can write, with a smile and a hearty ho-ho heart, of the newest achievement in this grand old genre. The PantoLoons have done it again. Happiness prevails.

In one hour and 21 minutes, a single actor plays out the full 129-minute film, “It’s a Wonderful Life” twice in the holiday offering “This Wonderful Life” currently on stage at Barrington Stage Company’s second space.
Once would have been sufficient.
I must admit that I am not the greatest fan of the Frank Capra/Jimmy Stewart movie. Neither was Capra, who saw it as an interim piece in his career; he never understood its surge to iconic status and I certainly don’t. It’s a nice, agreeable comedy about a man who discovers that for his entire life he has been intent on all the wrong things and has never understood his importance in his tiny, confined world. When he does he becomes a man who smiles more. End of story.

Pulitzer Prize-winning novels should provide ample meat on the bones of their plots for dramatists properly digest while creating Pulitzer prize level plays. Harper Lee’s portrait of a family in the South during the Depression faced with a professional situation that hurts and humiliates all of its participants is just such a book. It doubles the fat content by bringing in the all-too human factor of children witnessing and digesting the situation, like they would a stew fresh from the stove. Adapted into a movie with Gregory Peck many years ago, the material of Lee’s book proved to be not only classic, but dramatically rewarding.
There was no reason, therefore, not to believe that a stage version of the piece would be equally effective, if not more so. In a new production at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, the work on stage makes its points but leaves the heartstrings a bit less tugged at then we might expect.
Perhaps the biggest difference, and the weakest link in this adaptation, is the change in perspective voice. In the book, and in the movie that almost everyone has seen and remembered, the narrative voice is that of the hero’s daughter, Scout. The story is told as she recalls it, as it affected her life. In the play, that voice is gone, and what narration exists comes from a neighbor, Miss Maudie, played beautifully and movingly by Debra Jo Rupp. Rupp, who has never looked lovelier or played a role with a stronger, more controlled emotional base, emerges from this talented company as the incidental star of the piece.
It is not her story, however. It is not her place to draw focus, but inevitably, as the one remembering the incidents of this summer of 1935, her character begins to dominate the proceedings. That is the way this cookie crumbles.

What does it tell you when the book writer for a musical is also the original choreographer? (Miss Scarlett in the ballroom with the lead pipe.)
What do we know about a show that only runs 29 performances off-Broadway and then lasts for more than 11 years in stock, regional, community and college productions? (Colonel Mustard in the study with the wrench.)
What can we glean from discovering that audience members didn’t actually do it, but decided who did what with which? (Mr. Green in the lounge with the rope.)
It’s “Clue: The Musical,” running for three weeks at the Ghent Playhouse that brings up all these questions and answers — and you have your own opportunity to guess the triple answers that have kept board-game players happy for decades. Chances are good that the show will not have the same ending again during the run of this production (see below for that simple clue).
Along the way, you’ll meet some darn fine actors doing their very best to instill life into cardboard and plastic. Those are the base elements of a board game: the board and the player pieces. On stage, however, it takes more than just the theory of the game and those elements you play with, to make your evening fun. This show, constructed by two wordsmiths and four tunesmiths, leaves you gasping for air by its long and overdrawn conclusion.

Ross Gardiner is a young man assigned by the court to serve a public service duty toward an elderly man he has nearly run over with his car. Every Thursday, Ross must visit crotchety old Mr. Green, who suffers from a lack of almost everything: memory, kindness, understanding, tolerance, humanity and just plain love.
In nine scenes stretched out over two acts, these two men play out their peculiar, and oddly growing, friendship. They exasperate one another, admire one another, put up with an awful lot of foolishness and meddling, and just plain enjoy the experience of playing with one another. It is an uneasy friendship forged out of mutual dislike and distrust.
The show premiered at the Berkshire Theatre Festival in 1996 before going to play for a year in New York. These two productions, starring Eli Wallach, launched an international history of more than 300 productions in 37 countries in 22 languages and now the play has returned to the region with a two-week stint at the Theater Barn in New Lebanon, N.Y. Without Eli Wallach.
Wallach is not missed.

When I was growing up we had an LP, much cherished by my mother, titled “Eleanor Roosevelt: Impressions of Great Men.” It always disappointed me, each time I played that record, that Mrs. Roosevelt wasn’t doing impressions of Churchill and Stalin and others. She was only talking about them. She clearly knew the people she was talking about and of whom she was drawing endearing word pictures. She just made no attempt to sound like them.
So much for impressions.
On the Unicorn stage at the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, actress Elizabeth Norment is playing Mrs. Roosevelt (1884-1962) in a new, one-woman one-act play that claims to be about “her secret journey.” While recent years past have proclaimed the former first lady’s longtime flirtation with lesbianism, this is not the obvious topic at hand. There are hints of this in the latter half of the play, but nothing is made clear, nor should it be — that is not this particular journey. (Norment, by the way, is not doing her “impression” of the lady, but is playing her as a living and breathing person, one who actually does do impressions. Imagine that! Full circle.)

Playwright, composer and actor Sir Noel Coward undertook the journey of completion late in his life by writing three plays to facilitate his return to the London stage. The year was 1966, and his brand of sophistication was already outdated.
The young middle-aged man who wrote and performed in “Private Lives” 36 years earlier was now an old man, and he required a vehicle that would show him off, present his best side. He began with a long two-scene play that could easily be played as a two act vehicle, calling it “A Song at Twilight.” Not completely satisfied with it, he wrote a lighter, airier curtain raiser entitled “Come Into the Garden, Maude.” Still not where he wanted to be he composed a third play, “Shadows of the Evening.”
Now the show was too long, so he split it into consecutive evenings, appearing with Lilli Palmer and Irene Worth. Directed by Vivian Matalon, the shows played under the title “Suite in Three Keys,” and were well received, bringing about the revival of interest in Coward’s works after long years of neglect and a lot of sniggering by the young bucks of the British theater.
Coward died in 1973. The following year, his “Suite” plays were finally brought to Broadway, again directed by Matalon, but reduced to a single evening of two plays (“Shadows of the Evening” bit the dust). The shows in that 1974 New York production starred Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy and Ann Baxter. Flash forward to 2008 and here we are again, with Matalon bringing the “Two Keys” version to the Berkshire Theatre Festival to end the company’s 80th anniversary season.

There is usually a simple answer to any question, a solution to any problem. For the Von Trapp family, the answer comes in the spritely package of novice nun Maria. Without batting an eyelash she gets the seven kids singing, the servants looking away and the father, a semi-retired captain in the Austrian navy, a widower with a bitter streak, strumming a guitar and developing his soft side. When the Nazis threaten their future Maria answers that challenge by taking her new family to the nuns who hide them and inspire them to "climb every mountain, ‘till they find their dream."
That dream, in case anyone didn’t know it, was to lead them to America where they opened a camp for music and became a successful, if quirky, folk-song-singing musical troupe. It would seem that the solution to the problem of how to focus on your future in show business is find a bunch of Nazis and a whole lot of nuns.
It’s really not that simple, although the musicalization of this story tends to put it that way. On stage at the Mac Haydn Theatre in Chatham, N.Y., a talented company makes it seem all that easy but you can tell from the hyperactivity in the blackouts that there’s a whole lot more going on.

It seems that the most famous words ever to emerge from a Broadway musical, other than “Some Enchanted Evening you may meet a stranger” and perhaps “Oh, what a beautiful morning...” are “Rama lama lama, ka-dinga, ka ding-dong” and “Shoo-bop sha wadda-wadda, Yippity boom-de-boom.” Those last two phrases come from the musical now playing at the Theater Barn in New Lebanon, N.Y.: “Grease.”
Trying vainly to remember the original cast and the replacements in that remarkable long run the show had in 1972, long enough to replace all the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows as long-run winner, I went and looked them up. During that first New York run, not counting the revivals, the cast of the show included all of the following folks: Barry Bostwick, Jeff Conaway, Peter Gallagher, Patrick Swayze, Treat Williams, Adrian Zmed, and as their understudy Richard Gere, all in the pivotal male lead role of Danny Zuko. Betty Rizzo was played by Adrienne Barbeau and Judy Kaye, Kenickie by future director Jerry Zaks, Sandy, the heroine, by Carole Demas and Ilene Graff and others in the company included Tony winner Walter Bobbi, Kathi Moss, John Travolta (who later played Danny in the movie but in the play he was Doody), Walter Charles, Jamie Donnelly (who repeated her Jan in the film), Marilu Henner, David Paymer, Nicholas Wyman, and local “singing realtor” Alaina Warren.
It’s an impressive group of folks. Each in his or her way brought an electricity to their roles that helped to keep the show alive and well — and none of them were stars when they went into the show, unlike the major revivals of “Grease” in New York which have kept their efforts going only by bringing in large name stars who will draw an audience to anything they do, including reading a phone book.
At the Barn there are no stars, but there are a few young actors who might just make it up that wobbly ladder to fame and success.

"New" doesn’t come to mind. Sweet, fun, nicely done — those words apply when describing "See Rock City..." but not "new." Six musical sketches comprise this 93 minute review of quirky people in quirky places and a cast of seven talented players are performing it frequently on Barrington Stage Company’s second stage at the old VFW hall in Pittsfield.
The final entry in this year’s musical theater lab exposes some talented writers who seem to be caught in a rut left by the squealing tires of other, older musicals that often dealt with the same sorts of stories.

Innocence isn’t what it used to be, at least, I don’t think it is. In 1929, when George S. Kaufman worked with Ring Lardner to adapt his short story "Some Like ‘Em Cold" into a play, there were definitely innocent men and women, people who had no true comprehension of the world and what it contained. This play, one of the big hits of the 1929-1930 season with 273 performances, featured some very innocent types caught in a typical New York City trap from which it would seem there was no way out.
Of course, with true innocents, there is always a last minute realization and a loud questioning of morals. At least in a comedy — and that is what the Dorset Theatre Festival is presenting for its final entry of the season.

What do you expect the elderly, confined to a home, to talk about? That’s the crux of the issue here in David Storey’s 38-year-old play.
Two elderly gentlemen, Harry and Jack, meet in the garden of the complex in which they dwell, sit and talk incessantly, for more than half an hour, about almost nothing as they seemingly only half listen to each other. Non sequiturs fly, topics change and alter, disconnection seems to be the only thing they have in common. Ultimately they get up and leave, old friends, it would seem, out for a morning stroll. They are well-dressed — dapper actually — in that particular way that Englishmen seem to be able to pull off at age 75.
They are followed by two women named Marjorie and Kathleen, one with a noticeable limp, who take their place at the lawn furniture table and begin their conversation. Almost as disjointed as that of the men, but not quite, not ever quite, they discuss sexual libido and other subjects not usually on the table for women of a certain age. When the men join them, the conversation becomes both stilted and flirtatious. They go off for lunch. End of Act One.
Williamstown Theatre Festival is ending its very interesting summer season under Nicholas Martin’s new regime with this absurd piece of British theater. They have hired four brilliant actors to portray these somewhat peculiar, somewhat boring people, and brilliance combined with boring produces some brilliantly dull moments. Even so, you cannot help pay attention to what’s being said in this almost exclusively "talk" play because you are sure there’s something important about to be revealed. Ultimately, there it is.

When a play throws around grandiose imagery in the mouths of folks who should know better, you know you’re in trouble. Clay, a youngish author, a Scots novelist with a sexy hankering for another man’s wife, tells her that when he sees her he becomes "composed entirely of yearnings." That happens in scene one after he enters her bedroom, barefoot, through her window, drink in hand.What follows is the usual seduction scene in which she shows little interest in him and then they are discovered by her husband, a man who hopes to become Clay’s editor.
Clearly there are a lot of "yearnings" at work here, especially when we can see that the wife isn’t particularly interested in the husband. What follows for two acts is a lot of literary, and literate, chatter.
Even when passions rear their ugly heads, they are referred to by the participants in passion’s play in the following manner: "Your body feels like an alternative universe," she says after sex. Later in the second act, she tells him that he has an "inability to adapt to the new." After two acts of this play, so do I, I fear.