At the start of Billy Wilder’s film noir classic Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood screenwriter Joe Gillis – the movie’s male lead and narrator – makes his first appearance floating face-down, dead, in an outdoor swimming pool.

Yet Kevin Pieper, the director and set designer for Quad City Music Guild’s new production of the Sunset Boulevard stage musical (running August 4 through 13), has some bad news. “I’ll let the cat out of the bag with you,” he says during our July 20 interview. “We don’t have a swimming pool. We thought about filling the orchestra pit, but that would kind of defeat the purpose.”

Last week, some friends and I got on the topic of uncomfortable theatre experiences in shows we were in, and I shared one from an opening-night performance in which our lead walked on-stage and uttered the play’s very first line, and an elderly voice in the audience demanded, “Speak up!!!” Regardless of that individual’s age and/or hearing, I considered it a rather rude bit of heckling. But on Sunday, I saw Genesius Guild’s production of Henry V, and ... . Well, let’s just say that I now have more sympathy for that clearly frustrated patron.

Based in Atlanta, The Coathangers collective boasts Meredith Franco on bass, Stephanie Luke on drums, and Julia Kugel on guitar, with their stage noms de guerre Minnie, Rusty, and Crook Kid Coathanger. Like those monikers, much of the musicians’ repertoire is intentionally jokey, ranging from their 2007 debut album’s ode to Tonya Harding to Nosebleed Weekend’s “Squeeki Tiki,” in which one of the instruments employed is a dog’s squeaky toy.

But as fans and reviewers will attest, what isn’t a joke is the group’s ferocious talent, and their insistence that full-throttled punk rock needn’t be nihilistic. As ConsequenceOfSound.net attested, the trio’s latest album “exemplifies what The Coathangers have been doing better than pretty much everyone for the past decade: blowing off the rules in the name of fun, and making damn catchy records almost as an afterthought.”

As stage bummers go, The Trojan Women has always been one of the most glorious – an astoundingly eloquent and affecting anti-war argument that plumbs depths of almost immeasurable sadness. Yet as Genesius Guild’s current presentation of the Greek tragedy reminds us, Euripides’ play can also deliver a fantastic amount of joy, at least if you, too, annually wish that Guild offerings gave their female participants a little more to do.