Goodtime Charley

Wishy-washy milquetoast guy, decisive headstrong gal: a game match for a musical comedy, no? No. Not when the guy is Prince Charlemagne and the gal is Joan of Arc and there's the Hundred Years War and that burning at the stake on our minds. It's easy to see why Goodtime Charley flopped on Broadway back in the mid-'70's - it tries to whip up comic froth from material that is better suited to drama, and its tone is all over the place. The current street-clothes staged reading at The York doesn't do anything to convince that the musical's concept is anything but wrongheaded, but it does do one huge thing sensationally right by having Jenn Colella play Joan of Arc. At last, here's a role (the most interesting in the show, despite the title) that gives Colella the chance to shine and she does, bringing an intensity to her solo numbers that makes them sound like showstoppers.

Cirque Dreams: Jungle Fantasy

There's a nifty moment near the top of Cirque Dreams (consumer warning: no relation to Cirque du Soleil) where one member of the acrobatic troupe walks across the stage bent at a ninety degree angle and costumed as an ostrich. It's the only bit in the first act that showed fresh theatrical imagination; there may be others in the second, but I was not about to find out for myself. The garish costumes (they're meant to be jungle animals, but most look like unitards made out of shredded neon-colored streamers) and the drippy power ballads (of the follow your dreams and reach for the stars variety) don't do the gymnast performers any favors. In the absence of an artful, cohesive presentation, the world-class feats of athleticism get very old very quickly.

Occupant

Occupant isn't a play; it's an interview. If you can get past that, there's a nice steady rhythm and intimacy to the conversation between The Man (Larry Bryggman) and Louise Nevelson (Mercedes Ruehl). But the total lack of action and obstacle makes this into a passion project for Edward Albee, and for people like me who know nothing about Nevelson, it's hard to appreciate the painstaking work Ms. Ruehl takes to remain in character (even when a cell-phone rings). There's a bit of playfulness in the idea of storytelling, as The Man corrects Nevelson's active imagination, but Christine Jones's set doesn't come to life until the climax of the play, and despite the talents of both actors, nothing significant ever seems to occupy the stage.

Heist

Heist has a killer opening, as mastermind plotter The Sturgeon (Rachel Jablin) goes over their plans for a bank job with associate Seahorse (Jeff Clarke). To distract passersby from the sound of Blowfish's (Amanda Boekelheide) explosions, they're going to infiltrate "a one-woman show set in Indira Ghandi's vagina." To keep things interesting, things go wrong: Seahorse falls for Ophelia (Tracy Weller), the vain vaginalist, and Blowfish is forced to turn on her comrades in order to get the necessary explosives out of the sneering Jaguar (Christopher Ryan Richards). If you can get past the fact that the pieces of Paul Cohen's plot never lock together (Ocean's Thirteen, this is not), the show has plenty of individually funny bits, from Jacques Coolidge, the taste-making theater blogger who "steers the ship of culture to the dangerous shoals of invention" and "blogs directly to [the audience's] loins," to Ophelia's script ("The velvet vulva of inchoate yearning"). Just listen to Maureen Dowd's vagina: go see Heist, go see Heist!

All Kinds of Shifty Villains

All Kinds of Shifty Villains may be a little shifty in its direction, but thanks to some comic villains, Robert Attenweiler's new show is far from bad. The play opens in full-blown noir, a chiaroscuro cityscape chalked in the background, and a sultry showgirl, Precious Jones (Elizabeth Stewart), singing sweet exposition. By her first chorus, the black and white has fallen away to reveal a cartoon-like world, where villains like Fonzy and The Fonz (Nathan Williams and Bret Haines) hide whiskey in cereal boxes, loyal assistants like Therese Trueblood (Kari Karchock) have their kinks, and hallucinatory heroes like Max Quarterhorse (Joe Stipek) go through nicotine withdrawal. It's a live-action Who Framed Roger Rabbit (that is, no cartoons), kept aloft by a cast that knows not to look before leaping.

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Palace of the End

Lynndie England: accidental torturer. David Kelley: heartsick weapons inspector. Nehrjas Al Saffarh: trusting member of the Iraqi Communist Party. With the allegory of Alice’s looking glass, Judith Thompson not only connects these desperate and disparate characters, but also turns a sharp mirror on society by revisiting the infamous abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. Built by invisible, arbitrary borders (like Iraq itself), Palace of the End isolates all three of these characters on stage and then, monologue by monologue, uses their fractured realizations of the world to tie them together. Thompson takes liberties with her mix of research and storytelling skills when explaining Lynndie’s infamous “thumbs-up” pictures, Kelley’s suicide, and Saffarh’s struggle to resist Saddam. But these “invented” characters hold fast: Her writing is seamless and every bit as breathtaking for the audience as it is for the actors who labor for breath, fogging up that looking glass.

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