THE K OF D: AN URBAN LEGEND • Blue Rose Stage Collective

Along Cherokee Street's Antique Row, through an alleyway of rusty remnants and wrought iron running alongside Revisionist Inn, there's a crackling fire pit, hot cider, s'mores, and a makeshift stage on the back of a broken-down facade -- the perfect setting for playwright Laura Schellhardt's "The K of D", presented by director Tom Martin’s Blue Rose Stage Collective and featuring the dexterous Em Piro, the founder and creative fireball behind St. Lou Fringe. She inhabits over a dozen characters to present a legend that was generated by an odd series of events that followed the tragic death of a young boy.

After a few shared ghost stories, a girl from the audience says she’s got one – more urban legend than ghost story. She tells us about the rural town of St. Marys, Ohio, her group of rowdy childhood friends who spend their summers hanging out on a pier by a man-made lake, and Charlotte McGraw. It was Charlotte’s twin brother, Jamie, who was hit by a blue Dodge while he was skateboarding to school.

BONNIE & CLYDE • New Line Theatre

"Bonnie & Clyde" made a brief appearance on Broadway in 2011 after a world premiere in California two years earlier. This musical isn't a remake of Warren Beatty and Arthur Penn's well known 1967 film starring Beatty and Faye Dunaway. It's another take on this infamous young pair of West Texas bandits, and despite a couple of Tony Award nominations, it only lasted for 36 performances on Broadway. So, what better local company to snatch it up and give it a fresh perspective, as it's done many times in the past ("Hands on a Hardbody", "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson", "High Fidelity"), than New Line Theatre?

The opening numbers introduce us to Bonnie Parker (Larissa White), who longs to be a star of the silver screen, and Clyde Barrow (Matt Pentecost), who longs for easy money and celebrity as an outlaw, like Al Capone and Billy the Kid -- his heroes. These two are trying to break away from the poverty of the Great Depression with a craving for wealth and fame.

ASSASSINS • The November Theater Company

There's a new theatre company on the scene folks, and the November Theater Company has chosen for its inaugural production, "Assassins", with a book by John Weidman and score by my hero, Stephen Sondheim. This bold musical that debuted off-Broadway in 1990, jumps historical timelines to parade before us a powerless group on the fringes, who have found the "American Dream" out of reach, so they claim what that dream has, for them, disclaimed, through successful and unsuccessful attempts on the life of a US President. And yes, it's a comedy, but it's a dark one.

Directed by Suki Peters, the opening number kicks off in a carnival setting with a gathered variety of malcontents, urged on by the carnival's ominous Proprietor (Jon Hey) to step right up to the shooting gallery and grab a prize, with the help of an assortment of guns he's more than happy to sell you. Whether it's Leon Czolgosz (Nick Kelly), a rage-filled steel worker with anarchist leanings who killed President McKinley, or would-be assassins like John Hinckley (Nate Cummings), who tried to take the life of President Ronald Reagan to garner the attention of Jodie Foster, these sad historical footnotes are presented as vignettes over the course of the play. Charlie Barron, wonderful as the Balladeer, serves as our narrator, introducing us to certain characters and questioning the motives of others from an affably smug distance, turning in a strong performance as a "special guest" near the end. John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln to avenge the South, wanders throughout the crowd like an "OG", or "OA" in this case, played with cocky charm by Michael Amoroso.

ALL IN THE TIMING • St. Louis Actors' Studio

Playwright David Ives plays fast and loose with the concepts of time and language in his zesty collection of six one-act comedies. You have an idea of what you're getting into when you see Patrick Huber’s set adorned with scenic artist, Cristie Johnston's Salvador Dalí-like melting clock on the floor of the Gaslight's stage, backed by a blue sky with clouds. Fasten your seat belts, please.

The first play, "Sure Thing", opens with strangers meeting in a cafe. As Bill (Ben Ritchie) tries an opening line on Betty (Emily Baker), to no avail, the ringing of an offstage bell reboots their conversation over and over.  "Is this chair taken?" -- "Yes" turns into "Is this chair taken?" -- "No, but I'm expecting somebody in a minute" -- and they make their way through blunders, pretension and disinterest, posing questions and answers in different ways, until a romantic spark is finally ignited, with Ritchie and Baker's performances turning on a dime.

PURLIE • The Black Rep

Ossie Davis’s Tony Award winning musical debuted in 1970, and is based on the play, “Purlie Victorious", that he wrote in 1961. The Black Rep gives this uplifting show about freedom and tenacity a rousing production.

We start at the funeral of Ol' Cap'n Cotchipee (Jim Anthony), the late, cocky, bull-whip wielding owner of a cotton plantation in rural Georgia. Purlie Victorious (Kelvin Roston, Jr.) is conducting the service, and though everyone's convinced the Cap'n is probably frying in hell right about now, Purlie and the congregation that toiled under his service, are giving him a fine send-off in the gospel-flavored opening number, "Walk Him Up the Stairs". From here, we're taken back to Purlie's quest to buy back the local church his father started, Big Bethel, from the hands of Cotchipee. There's a $500 inheritance that's due to Purlie's deceased Cousin Bea, so he plans to fool Ol' Cap'n into handing over the money to an impersonator, Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins (Alicia Revé). Lutiebelle is straight out of Alabama and as country as a chicken coop, but willing to do anything to help out Purlie, whom she becomes very fond of. Purlie also enlists the help of his brother Gitlow (J. Samuel Davis) and Gitlow's wife Missy (Kimmie Kidd) to pull off the scheme, with Cotchipee's own son Charlie (Greg Matzker) playing his part in the plot.

THE NORMAL HEART • HotCityTheatre

It's been nearly thirty years since Larry Kramer's autobiographical play about the early brutal days of the HIV-AIDS crisis debuted off-Broadway, but this smoldering indictment of the failure of bureaucrats to acknowledge the epidemic, the silence of the press, and the apathy of the gay community has lost none of its muscle in HotCity's potent current production.

The play hinges on Ned Weeks (John Flack), an outspoken writer and activist at heart who serves as the proxy for Kramer, who co-founded the Gay Men's Health Crisis in 1982. Ned wrangles a group of his friends together to form a support organization to get out as much information as they can about this savage disease that was claiming the lives of gay men at a staggering rate. While Ned's confrontational approach frustrates his friends, Dr. Emma Brookner (Lavonne Byers) is one of the first in his corner. She's the victim of another virus -- polio, and is among the first doctors to try to treat men in NYC showing early symptoms of a disease with no name. Ned's brother Ben (Greg Johnston), a rich lawyer, helps him get the organization off the ground, but the long-held tensions between these two start to show once Ned asks his brother for public backing from his firm. While Ned struggles with his brother and the members of his group, and the New York Times continues to bury the story at the back of the paper, and the public officials continue to vilify those who have lost their lives to the disease, Ned meets and falls for Felix (Eric Dean White), a closeted New York Times fashion and style reporter, who eventually notices a purple lesion on his foot.

FIRST LADY SUITE • R-S Theatrics

R-S Theatrics has never been a company to shy away from unconventional material, and its current St. Louis premiere production is no exception. Composer-lyricist Michael John LaChiusa dismantles four iconic First Ladies of the United States, along with their friends and associates, in four imaginative, if not bizarre vignettes. LaChiusa, a self-professed "first lady-ologist", riffs off of nuggets of truth and rumor found in each of the first ladies featured (Jacqueline Kennedy, Mamie Eisenhower, Bess Truman and Eleanor Roosevelt), and adds a rhythmically tricky and melodically atypical score that the cast can sink their teeth into, in an off-the-wall chamber musical that's anything but standard musical theatre fare. Love.

After a prologue with past first ladies flanking the current one, "Over Texas" starts with Mary Gallagher (Katie Donnelly) aboard Air Force One, missing her cat and bemoaning the demands of being personal secretary to Jacqueline Kennedy (Christina Rios) to a politely listening Evelyn Lincoln (Kay Love), the secretary to JFK. While exhausted and trapped in her service to Kennedy, Mary is giddy about having tea on the president's plane, and hopeful at the prospect of one day getting to ride in the motorcade.

HUMAN TERRAIN • Mustard Seed Theatre

Mustard Seed kicks off its season with a world-premiere by Jennifer Blackmer that focuses on an anthropologist embedded with a military unit in Iraq. The story is fictional, but the program is real. Established in 2006, a United States Army program called The Human Terrain System employs social sciences personnel to provide the military with some understanding of the local culture.

Mabry (Melissa Gerth) is the anthropologist -- a new PhD and skilled linguist, who spent her time in the army under the command of hard-nosed Captain Alford (B. Weller) -- sometimes at odds with her purpose, but well-intentioned. Along with ordering her to wear a sidearm for her own protection, he assigns a young soldier named Detty (Taylor Campbell) to accompany her as an armed escort. Both of these mandates make her job of winning the hearts and minds of the locals more challenging, but Mabry manages to do some good, and meets and forms a tentative friendship with Adiliah (Wendy Greenwood), an Iraqi woman. All of this is played out in flashback. When the play opens, Mabry finds herself in a small room, worn out and confused, and back in the States being questioned by a DA named Kate (Dawn Campbell) about a bombing in Fallujah, and her allegiance is questioned.

THE SPITFIRE GRILL • Insight Theatre Company

Insight continues its season with a musical based on the 1996 film of the same name -- a folksy, simple little tale of hope, set in rural Wisconsin.

Newly released from prison, Percy (full name, Perchance and played by Sam Auch) is drawn to the small fictional town of Gilead after seeing a photo of their Autumn colors in a magazine. The local Sheriff is Percy's parole officer, a bachelor named Joe Sutter (Pete Winfrey), and he wonders why anyone would want to come to this depressed, broke little town. Gilead may be picturesque in photos, but it's pretty dreary when you live there. The Sheriff helps her get a job at the one restaurant in town, the Spitfire Grill, where Percy meets its surly owner, widow Hannah Ferguson (Janet Wells) who, getting on in years, reluctantly agrees to take Percy on to help out at the diner. Hannah's been trying to sell the grill for years, but there haven't been any takers. Percy and her new buddy Shelby (Jenni Ryan) come up with an idea about raffling off the grill to the person who can write the best essay on why they'd like to own it, which annoys the local busybody, Effy the postmistress, (Amy Loui) and Shelby's asshole husband, Caleb (Troy Turnipseed), once the hundreds of letters start to roll in. A few secrets of the residents come to light over the course of the show, and the musical ends sweetly, though predictably, as the content of these letters, full of hope and heartbreak, spur the townsfolk to reexamine their own outlooks on life.

MARY SHELLEY MONSTER SHOW • Slightly Askew Theatre Ensemble

Mother Nature's thunderstorms contributed nicely to the mood of Slightly Askew's opening night of "Mary Shelley Monster Show", an original play conceived by SATE's artistic director Rachel Tibbetts, managing director Ellie Schwetye, and written by local playwright Nick Otten.

In 2011, Schwetye and Tibbetts hatched an idea to create a two-woman piece around Dr. Victor Frankenstein and his monster after watching the National Theatre of London’s production of “Frankenstein” that was being screened at the Tivoli. Driven by a mutual interest in the story, they had a meeting with Otten, associate director for Clayton High School’s theater program, resulting in a narrowing of the focus to the true creator of Frankenstein’s monster -- the novel’s author, Mary Shelley.

FOUR SUGARS • Stray Dog Theatre New Works Laboratory

A quick shout out to a strong production playing at Tower Grove Abbey. Stray Dog's annual New Works Laboratory is presenting local playwright and actor, Stephen Peirick's latest full-length play, "Four Sugars". Two things -- one, it's only got one more performance, and two, it's free with an opportunity to donate what you'd like. With Peirick's works having been produced in several states from Oregon to Massachusetts, the chance to see a new play in the workshop stage is a treat, and the opportunity to offer feedback after the show with Peirick and the cast is an added bonus.

The play centers around roommates Alyse (Sarajane Alverson) and her gay buddy Travis (Jonathan Elkins), who have been married for three years so Alyse can become a U.S. citizen. The parallels of their evolving relationships outside of their marriage of convenience couldn't be more different. Travis has just met Shawn (Mitch Eagles), a hook-up with potential, while Alyse's three year relationship with Ryan (Aaron Dodd) is producing more commotion than anything else. These altercations are an annoyance to their apartment neighbor, Phil (Jason Meyers).

QUILLS • Max & Louie Productions

Playwright Doug Wright, whose works include "I Am My Own Wife", "Grey Gardens" and "Hands on a Hardbody", offered audiences a fictionalized depiction of the Marquis de Sade's last years in Charenton, an asylum for the insane outside of Paris, in his 1995 debut of "Quills". It's true that Sade -- his name coining the term "sadism", spent over 2 dozen years of his life in prison for literary works deemed too carnal, violent, blasphemous and politically subversive. Wright's play takes Sade's unrelenting creative spirit as inspiration to look deeper into morality and censorship -- all framed inside a salaciously insightful comedy with sharp dialogue, masterfully directed here by Brooke Edwards -- with robust performances and stylish creative contributions.

LABUTE NEW THEATER FESTIVAL II • St. Louis Actors' Studio

Part two of the LaBute New Theater Festival, featuring the remaining three finalists, kicked off this past Friday, with Neil LaBute in town for the festivities. This week's crop of plays seemed more polished that last week's, but all of the plays lay out a variety of styles that make this festival a bracing one. You can read about the first group here.

John Doble's "Coffee House, Greenwich Village" takes the awkward first moments of a blind date towards an increasingly menacing trajectory between a couple who met through a magazine ad. Nathan Bush is convincing as a nervously compliant Jack with Ellie Schwetye's Pamela remaining clearly and effectively in charge. Paul Cereghino is deadpan funny as the obnoxious waiter who serves up plenty of snark. Director John Pierson maintains the tone of this dangerous game of "I see that, and raise you this..." perfectly.

FUNNY GIRL • Stray Dog Theatre

Stray Dog closes its season with Bob Merrill and Jule Styne's "Funny Girl", very loosely based on the life of turn-of-the-century actress, singer and radio star, Fanny Brice. This story of a young Jewish girl from the Lower East Side and her rise to stardom is heavily associated with Barbra Streisand, who originated the role onstage in 1964 and starred in the 1968 film adaptation, but Lindsey Jones puts her own stamp on the score with a reliably strong voice, anchoring the show. Isobel Lennart's book (perhaps the weakest part of the musical) narrows the focus of Brice's life to her career in the Ziegfeld Follies and her marriage to charismatic gambler, Nick Arnstein, played here by Jeffrey M. Wright.

We start at the dressing table of Fanny, who's waiting for her husband's return after his release from prison. From there the story unfolds as a flashback with her mother, Mrs Brice, (Laura Kyro) and her friends playing a game of poker. Mrs. Strakosh (Lynda Levy Clark) and Mrs. Brice try to discourage a teenaged Fanny, who by that time had already worked in vaudeville, from aiming for higher show business dreams because of her plain looks. With the encouragement of her friend, a dancer with a crush named Eddie Ryan (Zach Wachter), and her own determination and talent, Fanny wins over Florenz Ziegfeld (Michael Monsey) and lands a job in the Follies. She first meets Nick before that at Keeney's Music Hall when he visits her backstage. This handsome gambler is willing to bet on Fanny and her career, and Fanny is immediately taken with him. As Fanny's star rises, her relationship and eventual marriage to Nick becomes complicated.

LABUTE NEW THEATER FESTIVAL I • St. Louis Actors' Studio

The St. Louis Actors’ Studio's LaBute New Theater Festival, featuring premiere one-act plays, began its second appearance last Friday after a successful debut last year. Over 250 world-wide submissions were whittled down to seven finalists and three high school finalist that will be presented over the next month. The first set of four finalists will be presented from July 11th through the 20th and the second set of three begin on the 25th and run through August 3rd, with the high school finalists presented as free stage readings on the 26th. The festival's namesake, playwright and screenwriter Neil LaBute, has also once again written a world premiere one-act for the festival, “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush”, that will be presented nightly.

We kick off the night with Steve Karp's comedy, "Rubbas", directed by Milton Zoth. And it's rubbers -- as in prophylactics.