Calvin Vo in The Bock EyeFriday's world-premiere performance of playwright Tommy Smith's The Bock Eye - a modernized adaptation of Euripides' The Bacchae - seemed much longer than the 60 minutes it runs from beginning to end. That's not, however, because the piece is dull, or because director Saffron Henke's pacing is too slow. It's because the production is so packed with entertainment and clever and hilarious lines that it seems too much to be contained in just one hour. I enjoyed Augustana College's presentation of this new work so greatly that I was a bit exhausted at its end, and gasped when I looked at my phone and saw that it was only 8:30; I was shocked that I could laugh so much in so little time.

Samantha Bestvina and Neil Friberg (foreground) and Robin Quinn (background) in MetamorphosesSitting down, preparing for the start of Augustana College's Friday-night performance of Metamorphoses, I marveled at the pool that took up a majority of the stage space, but worried that it would be a gimmicky, annoying distracting from the show - a series of vignettes based on Ovid's Greek myths.

Jerry O'Connell in Piranha 3DPIRANHA 3D

Alexandre Aja's Piranha 3D puts you in the unexpected position of actively rooting for the piranha, not because the effects are all that great (they're actually pretty awful), but because more flesh for the fish means fewer irritating humans to put up with.