Kind of like going to the wedding of your second cousin once removed (or is it twice-removed?), Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding is good, dysfunctional family fun. It ran through April 20 at the Turner Hall Ball. The scenario goes something like this: You’re seated at a table with a bunch of people you don’t know but with whom you interact cordially, and before you know it the show begins. As wedding “guests,” the audience has a role to play, too.

Playwright Neil LaBute first came to the attention of national audiences with 1993’s In the Company of Men, a successful play about a pair of misogynists looking to ruin the life of an innocent girl. Less than 10 years later, he turned the tables by telling the story of a female art student who makes a living work-of-art out

Last week, Bay View’s Boulevard Theatre opened local playwright Chad M. Rossi’s comedy Eureka! Just a little further south, Alchemist Theatre and Insurgent Theatre open a pair of one-act dramas in a double feature that promises to be considerably darker than Eureka! Alchemist Theatre’s 31 is the story of a detective who finds himself consumed by the hunt for a serial murderer.

Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire depicts the wanton dismantling of an elaborately woven ideal and the erection of a hard-boiled, pressing reality in its place. Blanche DuBois, a faded and delusional Southern belle, represents a dying gentility. Her voracious brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski, represents the archetypal male—the obnoxious leader of a beer-swilling pack, the prize cock who woos, marries and impregnates Blanche’s sister, Stella. He secures his future through the fruit of his loins while ensuring that Blanche remains eternally incarcerated within her tragic illusions.

Racine-based comedy troupe 1000 Channels comes to Milwaukee for a series of shows beginning this month. The group consists of roughly seven people from just outside Milwaukee who exhibit varying degrees of talent and potential while performing the standard sort of fare one would expect of a local sketch comedy group. Some of it’s quite bad.

The Boulevard Theatre closes its season with the premiere of local playwright Chad M. Rossi’s Eureka!, a coming-of-age love story/buddy-comedy set in Milwaukee. Cesar Gamino and Jason Krukowski play Wayne and Clyde: a couple of guys in their late-20s sharing an apartment. Clyde’s a dreamer who wants to reform society. Wayne has a stable job and dates a dominant, conservative woman named Nancy (Rachael Lau). Clyde feels threatened by this until he finds his own love interest in the free-spirited Teri (Rachel Lewandowski).

The Off The Wall Theatre continues its season with a stage adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile. Karl Miller stars as Belgian detective Hercule Poirot on a cruise down the Nile River. As such things usually go for Poirot, someone is killed on the cruise and he must discover who the murderer is before the boat can return to shore. Miller brings an entertainingly dichotomous energy to the role of Agatha Christie’s beloved character. He’s both earnestly humble and slyly arrogant, with a dramatic edge driven by comic timing. In Miller’s hands Poirot is every bit as interesting as he should be, but there are a number of other characters who aren’t nearly as interesting

Perched on an elevated platform, the “mad gothic organist” Jack Forbes Wilson could barely be seen playing the comically florid opening music for Next Act’s The Mystery of Irma Vep: A Penny Dreadful. Next Act closes its season with the absurdist comedy featuring two actors playing eight different characters. The two in question are John McGivern and Christopher Tarjan—talented comic actors playing multiple roles in full costume with the aid of backstage talents Marsha Kuligowski (who designed the costumes), Properties Master Meghan Savagian

A good kids’ play or musical often meets greater approval from parents than from children—perhaps because their appreciation is mingled with a sense of relieved gratitude. First Stage’s production of A Year with Frog and Toad goes further than most in wooing adults as well as their offspring. The musical, like the stories on which it’s based, evokes a nostalgia that’s free of cloying sentiment or honeyed charm. The characters, basking in their sylvan idyll, are homely creatures whose lives are dictated by the reassuring cycle of seasons . . .

Over the course of the current theater season, actors on local stages have played such diverse roles as the devil, a fish, a ghost, an angel in the body of a human, a Hollywood producer, con men, hit men, royalty, lizards, prisoners, twins, a faith healer, a priest and a seminarian. This week, four Milwaukee actors in their late-20s and early-30s will tackle the challenge of … playing four people living in Milwaukee in their late-20s and early-30s, as the Boulevard Theatre launches the world premiere of local playwright Chad M. Rossi’s Eureka!, a contemporary coming-of-age romantic comedy set on the East Side.