Andrew Beck

Although “Angry, Raucous & Shamelessly Gorgeous” is the title of Atlanta playwright Pearl Cleage’s new play, it quite amply describes the two women at the center of this literary comedy.

Manahatta,' the impressive world premiere from Mary Kathryn Nagle at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, CT, history repeats itself with devastating consequences in lower Manhattan as the violent removal of the indigenous Delaware Lenape people in colonial times is echoed by the heartless destruction of the nation's economy by Wall Street four centuries later.

There is indeed a lot of plot in the world premiere of 'The Plot' at the Yale Repertory Theatre now through December 21, especially for a play by Will Eno. The author of 'Thom Pain (based on nothing),' 'Wakey, Wakey,' and 'Title and Deed' confused and confounded audiences with those plays, while impressing them with a precision of language that earned him the title of 'a Samuel Beckett of the Jon Stewart generation.'

A history lesson with music is the perfect way to describe 'Woody Sez: The Life and Music of Woody Guthrie,' that is now playing at the Ivoryton Playhouse through November 10. There's no need for sepia toned distance as this work covers the ups and downs of Guthrie's journeys and songs. With a marvelous cast of four, led by co-creator David M. Lutken, Guthrie's legacy is given an immediacy and excitement that brings an audience into the heyday of protest music that grew out of what Ken Burns described as 'hillbilly music' in his recent documentary on the country genre.

Don't expect Lena Dunham or any of her posse of Brooklynites to show up on the stage of the Yale Rep's University Theatre at any point during the world premiere of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins mad dream of a new play just because it's called 'Girls.'

But 'Shear Madness,' the madcap murder mystery comedy that lets its audience vote each night on the identity of the perpetrator, owes a lot of its popularity to the show's willingness to update itself on essentially a daily basis, so that the jokes and setting feel as fresh and exhilarating as possible. After all, the show started nearly 40 years ago in Boston, where you can still find it running at the venerable Charles Playhouse today.

The Ivoryton Playhouse's current production of Kander and Ebb's 'Cabaret' does justice to the musical in its own unique way. It is by no means a slavish replica of Sam Mendes's 1998 revision that stressed the decadence to a significantly risqué degree. Nor does it reflect the more conventionality of the 1968 original that still managed to shock audiences with its more subtle but piquant references to the rise of the Nazi party in 1930's Berlin and a huge on-stage mirror that placed the audience as observers and participants in the fall of the German culture.

From George Gershwin through such musical luminaries as Franz Lizst, Frederick Chopin, and Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the actor, playwright and composer Hershey Felder has brought the life and music of any number of musical luminaries to audiences across the United States, Canada and the world, winning himself in the process his own category on the quiz show "Jeopardy" earlier this year.

What starts off as a "he said, she said" recounting of what appears to be a simple hookup between two Princeton freshmen turns into something more penetrating and harrowing in playwright Anna Ziegler's powerful and jarring "Actually," which is now running at Hartford's Theaterworks through June 22.

What starts off as a 'he said, she said' recounting of what appears to be a simple hookup between two Princeton freshmen turns into something more penetrating and harrowing in playwright Anna Ziegler's powerful and jarring 'Actually,' which is now running at Hartford's Theaterworks through June 22.