Digging Up Dessa investigates a cluster of themes of importance to young audiences. The ambitious play by Laura Schellhardt receives a splendid production from Metro Theater Company.

Once a year, for a couple of weeks, Circus Flora invites the rest of St. Louis, and our neighbors and friends, to come to the Big Top so they can share with us what they do. It is always a treat.

Take Two Productions is a community theater that gravitates toward musicals of substance, such as its current offering, Fun Home. The company presents the show with great distinction.

If a person picks up an orange, a perfectly ordinary orange, and says it is blue, even continues to say it is blue when he peels it open, is that person delusional? That’s the question posed by Christopher, a young Black man in a London mental hospital, for the two psychiatrists who are treating him in Blue/Orange at Stray Dog Theatre.

Steph Del Rosso’s new play, The Gradient, is named for its setting—a residential facility where people accused of sexual misconduct receive treatment. In the not-too-distant future depicted in the play, the alternative to The Gradient is prison.

This Is Our Youth may or may not be based on the author’s life, but the play has the ring of lived experience in the excellent production at Saint Louis University.

“Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” Farce is even harder. It is a serious craft. Like any good craftsperson, the actor takes pleasure in doing good work. But that is something the audience sees only indirectly, if at all. What they see is the character doing ridiculous, silly, very human things, done precisely and with invention.

Scott Miller and New Line Theatre are easing themselves into the Reduced Pandemic Era with a small, pleasant production of a small, pleasant musical, The Story of My Life, with two actors and an accompanist

Like all jukebox musicals, Jersey Boys is built around preexisting songs. Like few other jukebox musicals, Jersey Boys features a story as brilliant as the score.

Elsinore presented a bold perspective on a classic in last weekend’s fine production by the Alumni Theatre Company of Prison Performing Arts (PPA). It was the company’s first full-length production performed in the St. Louis community.