Near the end of our recent interview, I ask David Casas a question that, I think, most people would want to ask a professional magician who spends much of his time making doves appear and disappear: "Has anything really awful ever happened during your act?"

He smiles and replies: "The only thing that's really happened was at one of my first shows. Every time I used to produce a bird, I would always hold them close to me. So I was doing that at one show, and people started laughing, but I didn't know what they were laughing at. So I just kept going with my act, and they kept laughing, and I think I went to grab a silk or something ... . And then I see this big line of bird poop running down my coat.

"And I was like, 'Oh-h-h-h ... now I get it,'" says Casas. "I just shook my head and said, 'That'll happen with birds,' and kept going, you know? And I learned that when I produce the bird, I need to hold it out."

St. Ambrose University's Commedia Dell'arte, which closed its one-weekend run on April 19 *, was like nothing I'd previously seen on a local stage. Director/writer Daniel Rairdin-Hale and composer Dillon Rairdin put together a production that felt like a sequence of sketch-comedy bits and musical numbers, but one linked by a story about a mistaken romance forbidden by two fathers. Servants step in to help the young lovers, and hilarity ensued by way of juggling, dancing, singing, the playing of instruments, and comical gags both aural and physical, with most of the actors performing in mask.

Given its sharply funny script, Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage is one of the few plays I could see over and over again. And while Scott Community College's presentation of this story about two sets of parents discussing a fight between their young sons doesn't quite live up to the brilliance of Reza's dark comedy, director Kevin Babbitt and his cast and crew still nail the play's most important points. That includes the necessary on-stage puking, which is just one enjoyable element in what ends up a rather humorous production.

The fifth time is apparently the charm for writer Greta Grosch and composer/lyricist Drew Jansen, as the final installment in the Church Basement Ladies series is, for me, the most cohesive and amusing from beginning to end. Primarily, this is because there's a clear plot that ties together the story as, through flashbacks, we learn about the founding of the show's rural-Minnesota church, the initial introduction of the titular ladies to their basement kitchen, and the eventual disbanding of the congregation. This musical is the history of the ladies' Lutheran church in its entirety, a thread that pulls together the proceedings in a beautiful way.