Described by the Chicago Tribune as “clever, funny, moving, lively, and geeky,” and filled with what Time Out Chicago called “deliciously dorky references to the early days of the Internet,” the Dungeons & Dragons-fueled comedy-drama She Kills Monsters serves as the latest production in the Playcrafters Barn Theatre's Barn Owl Series, its August 9 through 11 run guaranteed, according to the New York Times, to “slash and shapeshift its way into your heart.”

There's a British invasion going on at the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre, and Friday's performance of The Who's Tommy was in your face, intense, and powerful, a rock opera that cranked up the volume on the phenomenal music of one of the most influential groups of the 20th century: English rock band The Who.

I was in Friday's opening-night audience for the Mississippi Bend Players' Dames at Sea. George Haimsohn and Robin Miller wrote the 1966 piece's book and lyrics, with music by Jim Wise, and as Augustana College's Brunner Theatre lobby display notes, it's a spoof of the films Gold Diggers of 1933, Footlight Parade, and 42nd Street. The old show-biz tropes it sends up are easy targets, and the tunes are imitative (naturally), but vastly enjoyable. As for the script, it's just one giant, cheerful wink in which continuity and plausibility are irrelevant. Show people playing show people putting on a show is a sea of fun to begin with, and the plot merely dips a toe in the water now and then, leaving the singing and dancing to make the big splash – which, here, they do.

Though they traditionally deliver pre-show entertainment for the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse's mainstage productions, the theatre's wait staff of Bootleggers will be “the main course” on the five Thursdays in August when the singing and dancing servers present The Best of the Bootleggers, an August 1 through 29 revue of some of the gifted performers' most memorable pre-show performances from Circa '21's 42 seasons.