​Noir fiction thrives in its hard-boiled lyricism, in language as blunt as the nose of a revolver. Noir film is a realm of shadows and light, of bursts of sound and inscrutable danger. Noir theater? Well, that’s … hmm.
            The Old Globe is taking a stab at it with its theatrical production of James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity, a novel published in 1943 that became a classic film a year later, directed by Billy Wilder and starring Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray and Edward G. Robinson. A stage adaptation by David Pichette and R. Hamilton Wright, which premiered nearly two years ago in Seattle, is very much true to Cain’s literary rhythm and attitude. Moreover, on the Sheryl and Harvey White stage, the Globe’s Christopher Barreca, Shawna Cadence and Ben Thoron team up on a design and lighting scheme that comes close to giving the play the desired film noir motif. Invoking 1940s Los Angeles, from the Long Beach oil fields to Hollywood & Vine, on a small stage is no snap, but by and large, the Globe production directed by John Gould Rubin manages the logistics.
            Yet even with Cain’s anti-heroic characters and the sharp-dressed cast (period costumes by David Israel Reynoso) portraying them, the production doesn’t rise to the level of hardcore noir. It’s suspenseful, sometimes funny and other times spooky, but it does not fully inhabit the genre. It’s true that for all its brilliance, the beloved Wilder film’s figures smack of caricature, but then pop historians have made film noir a cultural stereotype. The Globe cast, in the story of a duplicitous (and worse) woman who with the help of a morally bankrupt insurance salesman murders her husband, does avoid affectation. In fact, Angel Desai as aspiring black widow Phyllis Nirlinger, is sexiness personified and is able to convey both desperation and deceit. Michael Hayden is her more calculating, and human, counterpart as insurance man Walter Huff, who by the end of the play actually elicits a degree of sympathy. Murphy Guyer doubles as the targeted husband and as Huff’s boss, and his performance is the most grounded among the ensemble of five, which also includes Megan Ketch and Vayu O’Donnell.

​If you’d substituted the wine drinking for beer drinking, “Sideways” the movie might have become the ultimate guy picture, because it had all the other requisite elements, including sexual escapades with two gorgeous women. Even with wine instead of beer, “Sideways,” adapted from Rex Pickett’s novel, became a hit that burnished the reputations of director Alexander Payne, actor Paul Giamatti and the Santa Ynez Valley wine country. Now Pickett’s tale of two buddies on a no-holds-barred road trip has been turned into a play, adapted by Pickett and directed by Des McAnuff for La Jolla Playhouse.
            Can a road movie be turned into a play? Absolutely. With the inventive use of quickly interchangeable tasting-room, hotel-room and restaurant sets, along with picturesque backdrops of the Central Coast, this Playhouse production carries you away every bit as well as the film did. After all, “Sideways” is less a travelogue than a ride-along with two flawed but funny protagonists, the neurotic oenophile Miles (Patrick Breen) and the engaged party boy Jack (Sean Allan Krill). When they encounter comely waitress Maya (Nadia Bowers), party-girl wine pourer Terra (Zoe Chao) and a beer-swilling boar killer named Brad (Tom Patterson), you know you’re in for one hell of a ride.
            Pickett’s play takes a few significant detours from the 2004 film (director Payne and Jim Taylor wrote that screenplay), but the essence of the story is the same. The Playhouse cast is, like a good pinot noir, rich and memorable, with Krill turning in a knockout performance that blends physicality with deft timing. His Jack, hedonist though he may be, is also more likable and profound than Thomas Haden Church’s movie version. Krill’s Jack is a friend to the end – betrayals, bloody noses and all.
            Breen has his moments – especially when Miles is filthy drunk – and the boar hunt the guys embark upon is a raucous departure from the tasting rooms. Terra’s gun-wielding confrontation of the duplicitous Jack is even more dangerous to our heroes. But survive it all they do.
            “Sideways” the play is more profane than the film (a good thing) and less precious (an even better thing). Wine lovers will be thirsty on the way out – maybe a few beer drinkers too.

​Star-crossed love is not the exclusive domain of the houses of Montague and Capulet. In Joe Calarco’s deconstruction of the Bard’s Romeo and Juliet called Shakespeare’s R&J, two male students in a strict Catholic boarding school encounter passions of their own as they and two fellow scholars act out the timeless romantic tragedy.
            It’s an idea whose novelty wears off quickly, reducing this production at Cygnet Theatre to a stripped-down (few props, only four actors, no ornate costumes) Romeo and Juliet. There’s nothing particularly startling about an all-male Romeo and Juliet if you know anything about the way in which Shakespeare’s plays were originally staged. Shakespeare’s R&J’s story-within-the-story about the oppressed students is what’s most intriguing here, and there’s simply not enough of it. You want to know much more about these four young men. Not merely that they know their Latin and their higher math. Not just that they know their Ten Commandments and how to recite them robotically. To discover that they have a revealing connection to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet does not necessitate their clandestine enactment of the entire play, regardless of their ingenuity in pulling it off.
            There is plenty of ingenuity, thanks to director George Ye and the inexhaustible cast (Christian Daly, Tyler Lea, Dave Thomas Brown and John Evans Reese). Objects as elementary as flashlights and a wispy strip of red fabric stand in for light, swords and blood, and the students’ uniforms are cleverly utilized to suggest changes of character (everyone plays multiple roles).
            As Shakespeare’s R&J nears its conclusion, you may begin to wonder how you sat through all those Romeo and Juliets in your past and why the balcony scene gets so much pub. The original play is a pretext here, a vehicle for adolescent rebellion and recognition of truths and desires. This, however, is understood almost from the opening scene. It may not be what Joe Calarco had in mind, but you can’t help but want one of the emoting students to break character and share another, more personal story than one we’ve seen and heard so many times before.

​Barstow is that backwater where you stop for gas on the way to Vegas, a high desert California town otherwise ignorable. But the Barstow of Jose Rivera’s References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot can get as steamy as late-night Cinemax. When G.I. Benito comes home to Barstow not long after the Persian Gulf War, he also comes home to a wife, Gabriela, who is simultaneously turned on by his manliness and repulsed by his soldier-boy callousness. Gabriela wants the husband she knew before war changed him, a man capable of lust and tenderness. Benito, none too bright, believes his wife doesn’t know what she wants or why.
            Moxie Theatre’s production of References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot, directed by Dana Harrel, basks in all of Puerto Rican playwright Rivera’s sensual poetry and magical realism, some of it more distracting than conducive to the storytelling. But by and large it doesn’t matter much: this is a surrealistic work whose peripheral characters include a wayward house cat (Anna Rebek), a predatory coyote (Steven Lone) and the moon (John Padilla), who descends from the night skies to dance with and hopefully seduce the remarkably sexy Gabriela (Jacqueline Grace Lopez). Also with the goal of seduction – he’ll settle for being seduced, too – is the young teen Martin (Apollo Blatchley), panting after Gabriela nearly as hungrily as the coyote pants after the cat.
            Gabriela seems to entertain these overtures, but her body and soul are reserved for Benito – if he could only be the man he once was. The couple’s confessions, admonitions and second-act coupling don’t resolve the question, and you wonder whether they really want any of that to do so. Or is passion, of whatever stripe, passion? The moon looks down from the heavens, the cat and coyote lurk on the perimeter, and sex, love and battle scars swirl about in the tenacious desert dust. References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot harbors lofty romantic aspirations and metaphorical ambitions, but it’s self-conscious and at times frustrating. Lopez and Rodriguez generate plenty of physical heat, but their rants and articulated regrets or disappointments leave you cold.

​It’s Christmas Eve at Lyman and Polly Wyeth’s Palm Springs home, and it’s about as merry as a dust storm. Daughter Brooke has come home for the first time in six years with quite a present for the folks: a soon-to-be-published memoir that will reopen the lid clamped down on a dark family tragedy and, as Lyman and Polly see it, make them headliners in the tabloid press.
            Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities, on stage at the Old Globe, is a clenched-teeth family drama swathed in political overtones. It’s set in 2004, shortly after Dubya’s re-election, and right-wing Lyman (Robert Foxworth) and Polly (Kandis Chappell) are at odds with “lefty” Brooke (Dana Green) on a philosophical basis even before she raises the subject of her new book. As such, there’s a lot of sociopolitical rhetoric flying from both sides, little of which we haven’t heard before. The unrelenting tension in the Wyeth living room (a masterful Palm Springs set conceived by Alexander Dodge) between a tormented father, an angry, disillusioned mother and a daughter in the throes of passion and pain is what makes Other Desert Cities the rich theatrical experience that it is. Foxworth inhabits every bit of Lyman’s steeliness and charisma (he’s an ex-movie star turned politician) and even without speaking he compels our attention, as when he brushes away Brooke’s conciliatory embrace.
            On hand for mostly comic relief are the obviously named brother Trip (Andy Bean), who produces a cheesy reality-TV show and breaks out the stash of pot, and Polly’s wise-cracking sister Silda (Robin Pearson Rose). Each gets moments of gravitas and implied wisdom as to the family crisis, but Other Desert Cities is at heart about Lyman, Polly, Brooke and the specter of Henry, the radical son who, after implication in a bombing, evidently committed suicide.
            The Act 2 revelations are not as surprising as intended, but we are consumed by this scarred family’s eruptions and catharses. The entire cast is in top form, and director Richard Seers does not allow the proceedings to dissolve into yet another dysfunctional family story. Playwright Baitz understood the political as well as personal ramifications of the Wyeths’ plight, and so do we.

​Sorry, “Blazing Saddles” fans, but 1974’s “Young Frankenstein” is Mel Brooks’ best film. It’s stylish insanity from start to finish. So what a treat to discover that Brooks’ 2007 musical-stage adaptation is also big-time entertainment. In Moonlight Stage Company’s outdoor amphitheater in Vista, Young Frankenstein rocks the house, even if the jokes are a bit musty now (“Werewolf? There wolf”) Those familiar with and fond of the film know every line that’s coming, yet they still get laughs. A bonus is the musical score. Brooks wrote that, too, along with the lyrics for the show, and while there’s no Broadway classic here, there’s at least one deliciously lascivious number (“Deep Love”) and the very catchy “Translyvania Mania.” Throw in Susan Stroman’s high-stepping choreography, particularly on the showcase tune “Puttin’ On the Ritz” (credit Irving Berlin, not Brooks, on that one, of course), and you have a people-pleasing night of theater not too far outside Moonlight’s family-friendly confines.
            This production, with re-created original direction and choreography by Matthew J. Vargo, also benefits from Robin Wagner’s Broadway sets and costumes by William Ivey Long, and a cast that stands up well against the all-stars from the film, which included Madeline Kahn, Marty Feldman, Gene Wilder and Cloris Leachman. Jessica Bernard is a comic force of nature as the doc’s fiancee, the role Kahn played, and her interplay (and intercourse) with the Monster (Randall Hickman, uproariously menacing) is a laugh riot. Tracy Lore as Frau Blucher (cue horse whinnying here) does Leachman proud, and Larry Raben’s Dr. Frederick Frankenstein (“That’s FRONK-IN-STEEN!”) is steady and limber throughout.
            A couple of the musical sequences slow the pace of the comic doings – does the blind hermit (Doug Davis) really need his own song?  But at least we’re rewarded, as in the blind hermit’s scene with the Monster, with Brooks’ cup of camp overflowing. On the subject of cups overflowing, there’s also a lot of cleavage on stage. Does that surprise you, or do you think “What knockers!” really has something to do with the door to the castle?

​Cruel intentions abound in ion theatre’s production of British playwright Simon Stephens’ Punk Rock, in which bullying, baiting and general nastiness at a northwest English public school lead inevitably to shocking violence. Benjamin Cole, seen in last year’s The Mystery Plays at ion, portrays Bennett, the biggest bully of them all, and his chief target is David Ahmadian’s nihilistic Chadwick. But the most neurotic in the bunch is J. Tyler Jones’ William, behind whose puppy-dog eyes lurks terrible pain and impulse.
            Punk Rock is relentless in its darkness. School newcomer Lilly (Lizzie Morse) comes closest to being a sympathetic protagonist, but even she is swallowed up in an adolescent inhumanity that goes way beyond angst. There are no fresh revelations about teendom or meanness, though as with the recurring real-life headlines of mayhem inundating us, we can’t ignore them. 

​If you’ve watched “The Wizard of Oz” on TV or DVD a hundred times – and who hasn’t? – then you’ll feel right at home with Moonlight Stage Production’s musical, originally adapted for the Royal Shakespeare Company. It’s practically note-for-note and line-for-line, which is a double-edged sword. Fans of the film, young and old, will feel like they’re watching their favorite movie live and in person. But with the familiarity comes a lack of surprises (not to mention the lack of Judy Garland).
            There is one bonus in this musical adaptation: the inclusion of a song-and-dance number that was cut from the motion picture. “The Jitterbug,” presented early in Act 2, finds Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion singing and jitterbugging in the dark forest on the way to the Wicked Witch of the West’s castle. This song is no “Over the Rainbow,” but at least it’s something different from the film we all know so well.
            The Moonlight production also offers faithful orchestration (conducted by Elan McMahan) of the Harold Arlen-E.Y. Harburg film score, along with additional background music by Herbert Stothart, and lively choreography by Roger Castellano, who also directs. Randall Dodge rocks as the Cowardly Lion, though Carlin Castellano appears too mature to be a believable Dorothy, and Danette Holland merely channels Margaret Hamilton as the Witch.
            The Wizard of Oz  runs through Aug. 10 at the Moonlight Amphitheatre in Vista. $15-$50. Moonlightstage.com
            Just got around to seeing Intrepid Shakespeare Company’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Musical. It’s a refreshing take on The Bard’s whimsical comedy, with actors belting out ‘50s and ‘60s pop songs in between the iambic pentameter. Kevin Hafso-Koppman is a superb Puck, and David McBean and Jacquelyn Ritz (as Oberon/Theseus and Titania/Hippolyta) duet with feeling and verve, as on the Turtles’ “Happy Together.” Phil Johnson (as Bottom) fronts the play’s hapless amateur-acting troupe, conceived here as a doo-wop outfit.
            A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Musical may be the most unusual show you see this summer. It could be the most memorable, too.
            A Midsummer Night’s Dream The Musical  runs through Aug. 18 at the Performing Arts Center on the campus of San Dieguito Academy in Encinitas. $15-$35. Intrepidshakespeare.com

​We already know that professional wrestling is pure theater, of the low-brow kind. But there’s intelligence in the theatricality of Kristoffer Diaz’s The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, in which the stage is a wrestling ring. It’s true that metaphor is spelled with a capital M in Diaz’s Pulitzer-nominated play, which none-too-subtly equates winning the championship belt with attaining the American Dream. Nevertheless, Diaz’s commentary about American-style stereotyping, hero worship and media manufacturing is rich with unvarnished truth. The cast at ion theatre, which is staging Chad Deity’s San Diego premiere, is also championship caliber, in particular Steven Lone as “Mace” Guerra, the story’s narrator and the skilled wrestler who takes falls to prop up the lesser skilled but more charismatic, as with the designated champ, Chad Deity (Vimel Sephus, stalwart in the role). Catalina Maynard and Claudio Raygoza co-direct with aplomb, and with the moments of audience participation elicited, you’ll have fun and be cerebrally stimulated at the same time. Can’t say that about WWF.

​For the fourth year in a row, San Diego Repertory Theatre has partnered with the San Diego School of Creative and Performing Arts on a musical production. In the Heights, which follows Hairspray, The Who’s Tommy and last year’s Zoot Suit, may be the biggest crowd-pleaser in the bunch, and with good reason. Dazzling choreography by Javier Velasco and a robust, streetwise performance by Jai Rodriguez as a Dominican-born bodega owner launch the Rep’s new season with energy and spirit.
            Lin-Manuel Miranda conceived and composed the music and lyrics for the Tony Award-winning (in 2008) musical, with a book by Quiara Alegria Hudes. At the Rep, Sam Woodhouse directs a production that includes more than 30 performers on stage and a 20-piece orchestra (musical direction by the SDSCPA’s Andrew Bearden). SDSCPA students appear in both the ensemble and the orchestra, and it all adds up to a celebratory evening that literally has cast members dancing in the aisles.
            The dancing and the musical numbers that showcase Rodriguez’s superb rapping skills are the chief reasons to celebrate this production. The story, about the changes in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York and the changes within the hearts and minds of that neighborhood’s extended family of friends, relatives and lovers, is a busy one. Moreover, there are some familiar twists and turns: the girl whose parents don’t approve of her boyfriend, the boy who thinks he isn’t good enough for the girl of his dreams, the immigrant son of a farmer pursuing the American Dream of his own business. That we’ve heard some of these stories before doesn’t detract from the likability of In the Heights, which traffics neither in violence nor in moralizing. Besides Rodriguez’s good-hearted Usnavi, we meet and quickly come to care about everyone’s grandma, Abuela Claudia (Susan Denaker), about star-crossed lovers Nina (Chelsea Diggs-Smith) and Benny (Desmond Newson), and even about the neighborhood hawker of piraguas (a Puerto Rican icy treat), played by Victor Chan.
            The Washington Heights-neighborhood set by Sean Fanning is a stunner, and when the action spills into the theater aisles, the effect is transformative. You are there, and what’s more you’re glad you are.