Melancholy Play’/ WAM Theatre, Pittsfield

“MELANCHOLY”? UH-UH. Whatever this play is about (and my view of that will be addressed later), director Kristen van Ginhoven has grabbed Sarah Ruhl’s play by the neck, cherished, prodded and mocked the characters, and, in the process, dumped the audience down some Ruhl/van Ginhoven rabbit’s hole with a resounding, “Hah! Take that!”

Down there we meet Tilly (played passionately by Betsy Holt), the child/woman whose “melancholy” way of taking in the world and spitting it out to others releases something buried in each of them. It results in their passionate attachment to her. Tilly/Holt is an irresistible Holly Golightly — Shirley Temple — Judy Garland, spouting words that are always reaching.

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The Real Inspector Hound/ Shakespeare & Company/Elayne P. Bernstein Theater/ Lenox, Mass.

LONG BEFORE the leading lady in her wine-colored satin gown has back-somersaulted to center stage, and before an overwrought lover has emerged from behind the chaise, kissing a corpse, we in the audience know who’s boss. It’s director Jonathan Croy.

Physical comedy can be great; but writers are supposed to tell us what it all means! You know, “life,” “the human condition” and all that. Playwrights have an additional obligation: keeping us awake after a good meal and two glasses of wine. In this case, director Croy grabs the latter obligation in two fists, leaving Stoppard to provide some witty lines, a neat, if unsubtle, mystery-play structure, and mere “life” and “the human condition.”

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“The Full Monty”/ By David Yazbek and Terrance McNally/ Directed by Michael C. Mensching/ Theater Barn

FEMALE EAGERNESS to look at a line of naked penises seems like a risky premise on which to hang a musical. (We women can’t seem to summon the proper lust for it.) But authors Yazbek and McNally have pretty much made it work, in part from the sheer novelty of the idea.

Fortunately, there is more here than penis humor. Audiences can’t resist a bunch of desperate unemployed, working-class guys whose masculine identities and family ties have frayed or disappeared along with their paychecks. Read more…