Tanner Bollinger, Jenny Guse, Jacqui Pugh, and Zack Powell in Irving Berlin's White Christmas You might think it odd that, for its penultimate summer production, the Timber Lake Playhouse is staging Irving Berlin's White Christmas, thereby celebrating the holiday season a good two or three months before the malls will. But the actual presentation turns out to be stranger still. Not only are you getting White Christmas here, you're getting three or four different White Christmases; the results aren't bad, necessarily, but the show winds up feeling a bit like the Bing Crosby classic as co-directed by Michael Curtiz, Tommy Tune, and Rip Taylor.

Samantha Joy Dubina, Jay Reynolds Jr., Hillary Elk, and Ben Mason in Bat Boy the Musical The Timber Lake Playhouse's production of Bat Boy the Musical features a cast of 15 playing some two dozen characters, more than a fifth of whom will be dead by the curtain call. Necks are bitten, throats are slashed, overdoses are administered, and through it all, Bat Boy's performers look as though they couldn't possibly be having more fun. En masse, Timber Lake's ensemble just might compose the happiest musical cast I've seen all year, and considering the material they're working with, and the director they're working for, how could they be anything less?