The Milwaukee Rep closes its season at the Quadracci Powerhouse Theater with a pair of world premieres. Next week, The Rep stages the world premiere of Charles Randolph-Wright’s The Night is a Child. And next month, The Rep opens its production of Armadale, Jeffrey Hatcher’s adaptation of the 19th-century Wilkie Collins novel of the same name. Randolph-Wright, a man of many talents, enjoyed one of his biggest successes as a playwright with Blue, which opened Off-Broadway in 2001. The Night is a Child is a story of personal transformation through vacation, perhaps inadvertently paralleling the theme touched on in the Rep’s production of Enchanted April last month. Elizabeth Norment stars as Harriet, a mother who lost her son to a senseless act of violence.

Far from the visiting Broadway puppet shows of the Downtown theater district, Andrew Edwin Ross and Daniel Koester spoke an old familiar dialogue from Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men as the tragic story was brought to the stage by the UW-Milwaukee Department of Theatre and director Rebecca Holderness . . .

Awhole generation has grown-up since “Sesame Street” first aired in 1969. The savvy educational public television show that mixes muppets, animation and live actors has become highly iconic. The premise of using the “Sesame Street” format to deliver comically satirical lessons to those who have grown up watching the show is brimming with brilliant possibilities.

Usually, when describing a small theater space people tend to use generally agreeable words like “cozy” or “intimate.” These words don’t really work for Boulevard Theatre’s latest production. In staging Casey Kurtti’s Catholic School Girls, director Mark Bucher’s tiny storefront space on South Kinnickinnic Avenue can best be described as comically unsettling. The space at the Boulevard is only a tiny bit smaller than the average grade-school classroom. A line of four students’ desks sits onstage facing the audience right next to a teacher’s desk underneath a crucifix. When all the title characters are present and a nun enters the room, the atmosphere is unmistakable, even for those of us who went to public school.

The stage was the scene of mass commotion: people rushed about; platforms moved around; Lenny killed Curly’s wife. Amid the flurry of it all, in a most pleasant voice, director Rebecca Holderness told me that everything was going well with just more than a week until opening night for the UW-Milwaukee Department of Theatre’s production of Of Mice and Men.

Really good classic cabaret is a bit like a really good cappuccino. The qualities that make either of them successful are illusive. Off The Wall Theatre comes close to bringing together all the right elements for very classy cabaret now through March 3 with its production of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. The guys are in white shirts with black ties. The women are tastefully dressed. The band is live if not entirely visible. Everything looks good without being flashy. Almost everything is perfect. Something’s missing, though. Aside from the limitations of the Off

Ida, Lucille and Doris are three women who have something in common: they’re widows who’ve lost their respective husbands within a few years of one another. As members of “The Cemetery Club” they visit their husbands’ graves once a month. There’s clean-up to do around the headstones, news to tell of weddings and grandchildren and memories rekindled along with the pain and grief that resurfaces in the remembering. Sunset Playhouse has created a warm greeting card of a production out of Ivan Menchells’ play The Cemetery Club that opened last week. And as good friends as they are, Menchell has created three very different women, setting the stage for conflict, comedic and otherwise.

Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s production of Crime and Punishment invites audiences to enter the mind of a murderer. It’s a cramped and tawdry place. Oddly angled walls painted a bilious green seem to close in on you; disembodied sounds emanate from the background and doors swoosh open and shut, marking phantomlike entrances and offering glimpses of a diaphanous limbo in which the protagonist’s fearsome existence appears to be couched. Rarely does stagecraft, sound and lighting play such a significant role as it does here in this pareddown production.

Kopper Bear’s production of Three Viewings, a comedy set around a funeral home, closes Feb. 17 at Sunset Playhouse. Less than a week later, Sunset Artistic Director Mark Salentine directs Ivan Menchell’s comedy The Cemetery Club. It’s the lighthearted story of three aging Jewish widows who meet each month to visit the graves of their late husbands. Doris (Frances Klumb) clings to the memory of her late husband, Lucille (Susan Loveridge) dates as many men as she can and Ida (Sally Marks) tries to find a balance between the two extremes. Previous productions of this episodic comedy have been compared to the style of a sitcom.

Three people play six characters in two acts occurring in one location. The delicate threads of human interaction unfold in a small space as Windfall Theatre presents its production of Three Days of Rain now through March 1. The Richard Greenberg drama has met with considerable acclaim since its California debut in the ’90s. The first act, set in 1995, features two sons and one daughter of a visionary pair of architects meeting to discuss the mysteries behind their parents’ inheritance.