Love isn't always the answer. Those with defeated libidos, disaffected hearts, and insensate minds and egos may not find love of any sort to be the saving grace it is cracked up to be. In the 1780s upper-class French world of Christopher Hampton's play "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," too many people find love to be either a game or an indiscretion or an act of defiance. Late in the play, the two edgy protagonists of this high-risk story take their indiscreet games to a new level as they declare in a single word their true intentions toward one another: War!
All is fair in either form of social interaction, apparently, and in the end, everyone does indeed fall into line with this declaration.

"Act Two!" "Gesundheit!"
It's that kind of show.
No one has written as many quotable lines as playwright William Shakespeare and, when presented in the wrong way, none are funnier. What authors Adam Long, Daniel Singer and Jess Winfield did when creating this show -- which reduces the bulk of the author's oeuvre to a two-hour exercise -- was to provide a means of lightening the burden of such works as Titus Andronicus to a visual joke, the girl disguised as boy comedies to single entity, the historical dramas to one individual notion and the dramatic works to a face-off with time.
As originally played by its authors, and later by other groups of three, its manic changes and hysterically short-lived terrors resulted in hilarious confusions of identity and deliciously spouted aphorisms and marvelously inserted familiar quotes. Things look a bit different at the Ghent Playhouse where the company of three has been expanded to a company of five players, a sub-plot has been developed into a main theme (the playing of one actor over her own deep-seated resentments) and an audience involvement issue that brightens things up beyond one's expectations.

One thing we have all learned over the past decade is this: Columbia and Berkshire County audiences love their satire dearly, and the sillier it is, the better they like it. Therein lies a tale in itself and is why the annual appearance at the Ghent (N.Y.) Playhouse of the PantoLoons troupe is now a revered tradition, anticipated for months in advance, often a near sell-out and now and then on a waiting-list-only basis.
This group of gallant players, many in one form of drag or another, fracture the fairy tales beloved by young and old alike, adding everything from vague hints to direct hits on the political and social aspects of our world. The things that have an effect on our way of life, our manner of living, are on the list of possible targets for this group.
"Puss in Boots, or A Tale of Two Kitties" is just that kind of show.

Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones wrote their first major musical for a summer theater at Barnard College in New York. It later opened off-Broadway at the Sullivan Street Theatre in 1960. It almost never has seen the sunset of an eternal long-run. Somewhere someone is always putting it back onto the stage.
It is an engaging piece, complete with hit songs like "Try to Remember," "Soon It's Gonna Rain" and "Plant a Radish." It transforms the traditional boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl concept into just the barest extension of that rudimentary plot by adding two scheming fathers, a bandit-for-hire and two ancient actors who quote Shakespeare and die effectively. There is also a wall, played by a Mute who also becomes a tree and a variety of weather, as needed.
Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield has extended its season into autumn by presenting the tiny musical on its large Main Stage for a short run. This sweet, expressionistic show - the "Urinetown" of its day - is bizarrely not dated. Its conceptual sensibility never has altered, and the reality of young love and the realizations that come to young lovers about themselves and one another have never changed. Neither has the popularity of this musical.
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Comedy can be tragic when very little is amusing. Similarly, drama can be silly when everything is trivial. "Belles," a play by Mark Dunn that opens the 35th season of the Ghent Playhouse, is neither trivial nor tragic even though it is barely amusing and only a minor drama. It is, one might say, a mistake that this company has made, one of the few in my memory after 16 seasons of reviewing them, and that can be forgiven when you weigh the prior years and the bulk of their community opportunity. This company has nurtured actors -- Stephanie Tanaka comes to mind -- who bring little experience but a true conviction that acting is to be pursued. It has folded into its season a British holiday pantomime tradition, completely foreign to this region, and made it a hard-ticket item. It has brought national figures -- Serpico comes to mind -- into their seasons past and showcased them ensemble-style and made audiences nearly beg for more such appearances. This company has even taken technical theatricians under its wing and turned them back into the public eye as remarkable performers.
This opener for the new season provides at least four company debuts, including the director, and does what good community theater should do: bringing new blood onto the local stage and developing new audiences for the product they produce. It is just that this vehicle is inferior, the performances not up to snuff, and the direction sloppy and muddled. That is not a great result from a terrific intention.

The influence of one state over all others. That's the topic of Wendy Wasserstein's final play, now ending the main stage season of the Oldcastle Theatre Company's 2009 season in Bennington, Vt. A bright and illuminating play, given a sterling and moving production, it is only on hand for a little bit more than a week. That's too short a time for this production.
Wasserstein died in 2005, just at the time this play opened at Lincoln Center for an all-too brief run. It seems that Oldcastle must cut short the life of this play in our region just as Wasserstein's life was cut short four years ago. The original production starred Dianne Wiesst, Charles Durning, Amy Aquino and Jason Ritter. Who would have thought a cast like that could be bettered, but Oldcastle may well have them beat. The quintet on stage at the Bennington Center for the Arts delivers every bit of influence that the script gives them with just a bit more in the visual department to help them deliver the playwright's message.

I have argued with everyone for much too long, far too many years. In spite of almost every movie or play I've seen about Sherlock Holmes -- and this is true of all of them -- Dr. Watson is practically never given his due. He is neither stupid, foolish or inane. He is a smart man. He is an honest chronicler of Holmes exploits and adventures. He is a true companion. He is a brilliant doctor with a long history of medical triumphs under difficult circumstances and, through his association with the detective, he is an observant aide to Holmes' criminal investigations. He is not the "foil."
In "The Hound of the Baskervilles" Watson has always been placed at the center of the action. It is Holmes intention that the villains of the piece believe that Watson is the mastermind. Watson is actually the one who uncovers plot points and identifies probabilities -- the role usually associated with Holmes.
Now, for the first time, Watson is the star of his own show.

Broadway actress Ethel Barrymore, a star from the turn of the last century until her death in 1959, was a huge baseball fan, principally of the New York Giants. Though best remembered for her film roles, including the Empress of Russia in "Rasputin and the Empress," the art gallery owner in "Portrait of Jennie," and Doris Day's grandmother in "Young at Heart, she was an acknowledged attendee of the game. She also had the scores of the Giants' games whispered to her during performances on stage so she could keep abreast of the game. She knew Red Barber who had been the radio voice of the Brooklyn Dodgers (1939-1953) and then, in an unexpected switch, for their rivals the New York Yankees (1954-1966). Both were fans of Jackie Robinson who, in his last season of professional baseball was traded by Barber's former team, the Dodgers, to Barrymore's favorite team, the Giants.
This, however, has little to do with the story being told on stage at the Unicorn Theatre at the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, where a new one-man play about Barber is currently being played by the actor David Garrison.

According to playwright Ron Hutchinson, for five days in 1939 writer Ben Hecht was locked in David O. Selznick's office with Selznick himself and movie director Victor Fleming. They had paper, pencils, an endless supply of bananas and peanuts, and they were hard at the task of rewriting the script for the movie "Gone With the Wind." It was the week after Selznick had fired director George Cukor. It was three weeks after Vivien Leigh had been hired to play Scarlet O'Hara. It was after scripts by Charles MacArthur, F. Scott Fitzgerald and a dozen other writers had been completed for that motion picture.
This is the premise of one of the funniest plays I've ever seen, now in a wonderful production at the Theater Barn in New Lebanon, N.Y.

When this show opened on Broadway in 2005, starring John Lithgow and Norbert Leo Butz, it came with credentials. Based on a very successful 1988 movie starring Michael Caine and Steve Martin, itself based on a reasonably successful movie made in 1964 starring David Niven and Marlon Brando (Bedtime Story), the show also boasted a score by the hottest new songwriter in town, whose previous show, "The Full Monty" which opened in 2000, had been a big hit. "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" followed by four years and played 650 performances.
In brief the story is this: Con-Man Lawrence Jamieson, tries to prevent younger Con-Man Freddy Benson from poaching on his territory in the south of France but, unsuccessful, agrees to coach his rival instead. When Freddy helps him out of a difficult, near-marital situation, they agree to work as partners -- again reluctantly -- to fleece a young heiress. What follows is foolish rivalry, shanghaiing, misconceptions and general hilarity.
At the Theater Barn in New Lebanon all of this is now firmly on their stage under the deliciously magical direction and musical staging of artistic director Michael Marotta.

There's a recessive gene somewhere, a chromosome perhaps, that informs a certain state of instability in the emotional makeup of some mothers and daughters. When control is the prime issue, as it is in Martin McDonagh's play "The Beauty Queen of Leenane," that recessive sense comes to the fore in a big way.
Mag and Maureen live alone together in a creaky old farm house on a hillside in Connemara, County Galway, Ireland. Their relationship is not good; at best it is testy at its worst it is dangerous. Mag tells lies about her daughter to everyone, especially to men, and Maureen rebels by making up a history that may or may not be her own. They pull at one another emotionally and sometimes physically, and no torture is too great for either one when it comes to controlling the actions of the other. Mag has seemingly destroyed her daughter's life and her chances at a life outside this small town and tiny home. Maureen is her servant and only Mag's death will bring about her chance to escape. When she finally gets a man to want her, the situation only gets worse for everyone.
Not a snappy comedy, as you can tell.

If your heart breaks when a little child buries her dead doll or when she smashes her snowman because she has to leave him behind when she moves away, this would be the show for you. Except. This is a case of "except" and there is good reason for that -- except there shouldn't be.
Too many people think of the movie starring Judy Garland and Mary Astor and Margaret O'Brien when they even hear the title of this show, which is a popular song from the turn of the previous century. In 1943, the 22-year-old Garland played the 16-year-old Esther, a high school junior, and broke everyone's heart except for those already broken by O'Brien as her baby sister Tootie. Holding that sobbing, hysterical child in her arms, Garland crooned "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" and a nation at war released its tears and cried for its losses, mostly the loss of its united innocence. It would be great if we could do that now. Except.
This isn't 1944. The beautiful production at the Mac-Haydn Theatre in Chatham, N.Y., isn't the big screen at a Loewe's or even the small screen in the dark in our living rooms. There are real live people breathing new life into this piece and they make us feel differently about their silly goings-on in St. Louis in 1903. Except, they really don't, but they don't have the same intensity in their impact.

It was 1975. I went to see Robert Patrick's new play, "Kennedy's Children," with Shirley Knight, Michael Sacks and Kaiulani Lee at the John Golden Theatre. I absolutely hated it. It was a bunch of people in a room saying monologues, never addressing one another. This was 34 years ago.
Flash forward to Shakespeare & Company, August 2009. I am there to see J.T. Rogers' new play, "White People," with Dana Harrison, Michael Hammond and Jason Asprey. It is three people sitting and saying monologues, never addressing one another. This time I tolerated it, but I still wasn't a happy camper. I like plays where people say things to one another, not to me. I don't mind a good monodrama, like "Shirley Valentine." That can be fun. But when there are two or more people on stage, I want to see how their stories interweave, how they interact and react. I don't want to be part of their show. I don't mind reactions from the audience -- laughter, tears, pangs of jealousy, remorse or any other human reaction. That's what a play does, after all.
I just don't want to be the stand-in for the character the author neglected to write into his nonplay and not be allowed to speak, to talk back on the spot, to elicit a response of my own from the characters who address me directly.

Sometimes you just know a play too well. Then you meet a new play, and it makes you think of that old play, the one you know so well. After a while, you find you miss the old play and you notice that it keeps coming to mind. You try to block it out so you can come fresh and unprejudiced to the new one, but it just won't let go of your imagination.
That was one half of the experience that I had at the Unicorn Theatre's production of a relatively new play, "Sick," by Zayd Dohrn. The other half was the actual appreciation of the new work, "Sick," in spite of the commonalities and coincidences with "The Glass Menagerie," last seen in this same theater, and even with some of the same cast.
Sidney, or Dad, brings home a gentleman caller, Jim (the same name as the Gentleman Caller, by the way, in the Tennessee Williams play), a young poet, to meet his family. Maxine, Sidney's wife, is clad in white, moves mysteriously through the apartment and only speaks in mini-monologues (sometimes only a line, but they make their point). She is the principal caregiver and home-school teacher (like Amanda Wingfield -- oh, my) to her sickly daughter Sarah (shades of Laura) and her even sicklier son (Tom in the Williams play, too sick to do much but go to movies, smoke and ignore the realities of life) Davey. The presence of the unexpected visitor causes havoc, or allows it anyway, and what is fragile (like a glass unicorn) breaks. Jim cannot put right what has gone wrong, even though he tries to help, and the girl, daughter, Laura figure is unable to break out of her mother's tightly wrapped shell.

When you are working with second-rate Stephen Sondheim, you are still working with some of the best material to be had in the theater. But you still don't necessarily have the best show of your own. This is the dilemma of "Marry Me a Little," which contains material cut from "A Little Night Music," "Follies," "Company," "Anyone Can Whistle" and the scores of "Saturday Night" and "The Girls of Summer."
On stage at the Dorset Playhouse, the summer draws to a close with a production of this plotted review in which two people, a man and a woman, who live in two separate apartments in the same building (2C and 3C) that so closely resemble one another it is hard to tell them apart, spend a Saturday evening alone at home dreaming about love, past lovers and their hapless lives. In 18 songs, they move from their arrival home to an early bedtime (the show takes an hour) and the semisweet stain they leave on their environment will be clearly washed away by the morning sunrise.