Maybe you'll need to have seen a lot of stage farces, or feel like you've seen every stage farce, to appreciate what writer/director Jim Hessleman is doing in the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse's world-premiere presentation Love, Lies, & the Lottery. Because this isn't just, as its title implies, a traditional, door-slamming slapstick, despite the numerous doors to be slammed. (Or rather, here, gently closed.) This energetic, sometimes hilarious, incredibly busy production is more accurately a comedic greatest-hits package, and one boasting a larger number of familiar genre conceits than you would've thought squeezable into two hours of stage time. You could teach a semester on Intro to Modern Farce using Hesselman's play as your textbook and still not cover everything in time for the final.

Wonderful Town is one of the few musicals whose soundtracks I love without ever having seen the stage version. That is, until Thursday night's performance at the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre, and what I saw lived up to the high expectations created by listening to the rich, often humorous songs by composer Leonard Bernstein and lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green.

The cast of the Timber Lake Playhouse's Rumors does its best to squeeze out every bit of humor from playwright Neil Simon's clichéd farce. Some of the actors are wildly successful, eliciting laughter beyond what Simon's script deserves. Others at least have their moments in this play about eight anniversary-party guests trying to figure out why their host (who is never seen) shot himself in the earlobe, and why his wife isn't home for the gathering.

Director/choreographer Christina Myatt nails the humor and heart of the story in Countryside Community Theatre's Shrek: The Musical, borrowing sparingly from the Broadway show's original directors, Jason Moore and Rob Ashford, without copying their achievement. Myatt's personal mark on the material is most clear in her choreography, especially in the rousing, showy "What's Up, Duloc?", with its Broadway-style kick-lines, and the subtly innocent "I Know It's Today," which involves Princess Fiona at three different ages (played, from youngest to oldest, by Ali Girsch, Emily Baker, and Melissa Anderson Clark). Yet while funny and full of energy, Myatt's Shrek also hits the right notes in its heartfelt moments, during which Myatt's pacing allows some welcome breathing room. And it also doesn't hurt that the musical, with its book by David Lindsay-Abaire and its memorably singable songs by Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori, is a whole lot of fun.