There’s a new kid on our theater block. Lake Geneva Theatre Company premiered with Noel Coward’s Private Lives on July 4, offering its own celebratory bang. Bright, sophisticated comedies from the 1920s and ‘30s—such as Coward’s exemplary romps—took a nosedive into oblivion post-World War Two. “Realistic” replaced “Artificial” comedies. Using the memorable performances of Tallulah Bankhead and Donald Cook in Coward’s classic as a yardstick, the theater company measures up exceedingly well—which translates: “They mostly don’t make out like they’re doing Neil Simon.”

In March, the fledgling Spiral Theatre hosted one of the theater season’s most pleasant surprises with its production of the 1969 Leonard Gershe play Butterflies Are Free. Spiral managed to take a dated and tiresome romantic comedy and stage it as an exceedingly entertaining love story with subtle shades of accomplished acting. Ruth Arnell starred as a young pseudo-hippie who falls in love with a blind musician . . .

Though the show remains highly popular, it’s been more than a decade since the last major revival of Ross, Adler, Abbott and Wallop’s Damn Yankees. And, in an interesting twist, the mid-’90s Broadway revival may have cost the Sunset Playhouse’s Mark Salentine a spot in the Blue Man Group...

Local sketch comedy group Broadminded launched its second show of the year this past weekend. Stacy Babl, Anne Graff LaDisa, Melissa Kingston and Megan McGee return in a show that mixes pre-recorded video segments with live performance. Broadminded: Now In 3-D! takes comedic aim at the mass media in more than a dozen different skits. The show’s comedy is a slightly uneven mix of quality, but even though there are moments when the “broads” fail to be funny, they never fail to be fun. Overall this is a very good show. There are only a couple of skits in the mix that are completely . . .

Jesus Christ Superstar was a first at many levels when it debuted on stage in 1971. It began as a double album in 1970 with staging to follow a year later and coined the term “rock opera”; it brought worldwide attention to its young composers Andrew Lloyd Webber (music) and Tim Rice (lyrics) and it depicted the son of God as a human being full of doubts and uncertainty about His predestined fate. The Shorewood Players are finishing up their 78th season with a production of the opera that, despite some problematic choices, points out the strengths of the music and lyrics built around the last seven days in Christ’s mortal life.

For author Eugene O’Neill, Ah, Wilderness!, his only comedy, was clearly a catharsis of fancy. The Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning American playwright was best known for dramas doting on dysfunction and addiction based on personal experience. Scholars cite Wilderness, a warmly nostalgic snapshot of a New England family Fourth of July circa 1906, as the life O’Neill, born to an acting couple in a Broadway hotel room in 1888, probably wished he had.

Given the current state of our union, it’s not difficult to imagine that some people would seriously consider revolution. Local playwright Rex Winsome speculates on the lives of modern revolutionaries in his new, feature-length production, Paint the Town, a drama running July 11-27 at the Alchemist Theatre in Bay View.

American Players Theatre (APT) has been known for breaking boundaries during its 29-year tenure, and not always successfully. However, the Spring Green troupe’s opening production for the 2008 season, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, proves why this noble effort should continue unabated. The Shakespearean comedy, which dodged the ongoing siege of torrential rain plaguing southern Wisconsin to open Saturday night, is a loosely woven collision of three separate stories familiar to Shakespeare fans . . .

Even though sketch comedy can be perilously inconsistent, there’s something vibrant about its imperfection that can add depth to a city’s theater community. The all-female sketch group Broadminded, a recent addition to the Milwaukee scene, opened a promising, monthlong show at the Alchemist Theatre on Kinnickinnic Avenue this past March. The group returns to the Alchemist on June 20 with its new show, Broadminded: Now in 3-D . . .

When celebrated playwright Eugene O’Neill wrote the humorous Ah, Wilderness! in the early 1930s, he had recently won his second Pulitzer Prize for Drama (Beyond the Horizon, 1920, Strange Interlude, 1928). Legend has it that the idea came to him in a dream and that he wrote the entire script in only five or six weeks. Wilderness is O’Neill’s only true comedy, and many have dismissed it as one of his lesser works—something he quickly banged-out before going on to serious works like The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey Into Night. But American Players Theatre (APT) in Spring Green is intrigued by that contrast in O’Neill’s style, and continues the early part of its season with a preview of Ah, Wilderness! on Friday, June 13.