Showmag.com

Billy is deaf, born into a hearing family. He has never learned sign language, instead lip-reading the manifold mealtime conversations swirling around him. As he admits late in Nina Raine’s play, he has long been unable to grasp much of those conversations.

Unfortunately, in this production, directed by David Cromer, at least one audience member was likewise unable to grasp much. Or, perhaps like some of the pretentious statements passing for conversation among the family members, the substance wasn’t there for the grasping.

With book and music by Bill Robertson, Tom Sage and Cliff Wagner, Paradise:  A Divine Bluegrass Musical Comedy – currently in production at Santa Monica’s Ruskin Theatre, through March 30 – is a unique,  musical farce that’s sort of a mixture of TV’s Hee Haw series of the sixties and seventies and an overly-long Saturday Night Live skit . Mixing the methods of a down-home hoedown with the modern day sensibilities of reality television, metaphysics, and outsourcing, Director Dan Bonnell, along with Tom Campbell’s canny choreography, coordinates this cast to maximum musical comedic effect.

Based on Lynn Riggs’ 1931 play, Green Grow the Lilacs, the musical Oklahoma! was the first collaboration of composer Richard Rodgers and librettist Oscar Hammerstein II. The original Broadway production opened March, 1943; it ran for over 2,240 performances, finally closing in May, 1948. Demand for tickets to Oklahoma! was unprecedented, as the show’s popularity seem to grow exponentially.  In fact, Oklahoma! held the Broadway record for longevity until My Fair Lady hit the boards of the Great White Way thirteen years later. Since then, several Oklahoma! revivals have taken place to much acclaim, both on Broadway and in London’s West End.

Backbeat, based on Iain Softely’s 1994 film of the same title, is not a musical play about The Beatles as the exquisitely consummate rock ‘n roll band that has become the stuff of legend in modern day musicology. It takes place way before the lore of the Fab Four had gained so much popular traction.

Currently offered by San Diego Repertory Theatre, Bruce Norris’ Tony and Pulitzer awards-winning play, Clybourne Park, begins where Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 drama, A Raisin in the Sun, ended. In Hansberry’s play, a black family, the Youngers, is soon to move into a house in an all- white neighborhood. Act 1 of Norris’ script focuses on the white couple, Bev and Russ, who sold them the home, as they prepare to move away from the all-white middle class neighborhood. In midst of their packing, which is facilitated by their black domestic help, Francine and her husband Albert, several locals drop by to voice their objections to the sale, and the couple is forced to defend their choice and their liberal principles. In Act 2, 50 years later, Clybourne Park has undergone a sea change. Now, a white couple, Lindsey and Steve, prepare to invade the African-American locality, tear down the house, and build a modern dwelling designed by their own architect. Clybourne’s neighbors are again objecting to the newcomers, this time on historical preservation grounds. Both acts feature crude, racist, misogynist jokes and taunts, giving the play its comedic genre, even though it is not altogether humorous.