Performance

Celeste is a young girl who dreams of playing the lead role of Clara in her high school's production of "The Nutcracker." But during a slapstick rehearsal, a Christmas tree falls and breaks her leg.

And so begins Gerard Alessandrini's musical tribute to everything within roasting distance of Christmas: "The Nutcracker and I," which will appear through December 31 at George Street Playhouse. Director David Saint's offers a bite of the candy cane with a satirical twist, little dancing, and plenty of songs gently mocking everything up and down Fifth Avenue.

In the early 1970s, PBS, that bastion of civilized television, gave us the first reality show, a documentary that followed "An American Family," the Louds, as the mother asked her philandering husband for a divorce. The heated and painful scene unfolded in their living room, as we watched uncomfortably from ours.

God of Carnage, running through June 5 at George Street Playhouse, delivers us to another American living room as two families meet to duke it out. This show may be making theatrical history, with the ultimate in Method bathroom humor -- a comedy with no holds barred.

Borrowing Shakespeare’s mechanism of dual roles, the dozen actors of the ensemble are portraying animal characters in some scenes, and human characters in others. Forty Highland Park residents, kids and adults, constructed the animal puppets used in the show.

The play by Matt Schatz celebrates the birth of the World Trade Center in the mid 1960s much as if it were a human. Although there is no mention of 9/11, many of its lines are haunting in retrospect.

"This play is our Shakespeare, and the protagonist Walter Lee is our Hamlet," said Marshall Jones III, executive director of Crossroads Theatre Company which is producing "A Raisin in the Sun."

Lorraine Hansberry's landmark drama of an African American family in the 1950s makes its first appearance on the stage of Crossroads in a new production, April 14 through May 1.

Hmm, golf? I’ve never played golf. In fact, I’ve never even been to a golf course that wasn’t of the mini- variety.

So when the curtain rose on “The Fox on the Fairway,” -- George Street Playhouse's new golf-themed farce -- I was a little concerned that the humor would evade me. After all, what do I know about “links,” “scratches” and “traps?”

Puma is the nickname that Erich Maria Remarque (author of All Quiet On The Western Front) christened Marlene Dietrich, the great love of his life.

He gave the same nickname to a beloved Lancia automobile that he was forced to abandon in Paris when both he and Dietrich were fleeing the Nazis.

“Mercy and the Firefly” opens with a prayer.

The set is dark and intimate; the shadows of a Cathedral windowpane and the heavy throb of the supplicant's heart all seem to exist in competition with her words. After a few moments, it becomes evident that the words of the prayer even seem to be in competition with one another.

Set at the end of World War II, and written in 1964 at the beginning of a sea change in Americans’ view of themselves and the world, “The Subject Was Roses” takes a scalpel to one family’s precarious calm, revealing the simmering dysfunction beneath.

Frank Gilroy’s play is receiving a new production at George Street Playhouse, starring Stephanie Zimbalist, Lee Sellars and Chris Wendelken.