As the first act of Arthur Miller's All My Sons nears its climax, the atmosphere is thick with tension and discomfort. A young man has proposed to the former girlfriend of his older brother, presumed dead three years after World War II. The boys' mother, convinced that her child is still alive, is on the edge of a nervous breakdown. The boys' father, obviously hiding some dark secret, appears deeply nervous about an incoming phone call. And in St. Ambrose University's Saturday-night production of this American tragedy, you could tell that its Act I closer was really working, because for a few brief minutes, the audience collectively stopped coughing.

On Sunday morning, I started writing my piece on the musical revue I'd seen the night before, and here's how I began my first draft:

Watching Arcadia, the Tom Stoppard jigsaw puzzle currently playing at the Richmond Hill Barn Theatre, is like watching a really engrossing foreign-language film without subtitles. You may not understand what's going on, but the actors and director seem to, so you strive to make sense of the proceedings through the performers' inflections, reactions, and occasional lines of dialogue where the meaning is evident. You find yourself desperately wanting to get it.

The difficulty in reviewing Smokey's Joe's Café, the Timber Lake Playhouse's season-closing musical, doesn't lie in knowing how to start, but when to stop. A plotless assemblage of '50s and '60s rock & roll hits, bluesy love songs, and novelty tunes by composers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, this jukebox revue finds its nine-person cast performing nearly three dozen numbers, and based on their presentation here, I could make a fair case for devoting 500 words to each of them.