‘RING ROUND MOON’ AT COLONY STUDIO

French playwright Jean Anouilh’s sardonic drawing-room comedy “Ring Round the Moon” has to gleam, like dark lace. At the same time, a good production must cast moonbeams, because the play deals with heartfelt innocence as well as the heartless rich.

All these measures come together with the pitch of a tuning fork in a delectable production under the direction of Michael Keenan at the Colony Studio Theater.

Parker Stevenson plays twin brothers--one diffident and gentle, the other cynical and brash--with engaging assurance and infectious aplomb. Sheri Galan is the ingenue and she’s absolutely lambent.

Pinpoint casting extends to a deceptively minor character wonderfully enlivened by Judith Heinz as a repressed caretaker to a resident fairy godmother dowager (Amzie Strickland).

The 11-member cast, including a hilarious sycophantic turn by Hugh Maguire and a carnivorous performance by Ferrell Marshall, is uniformly flavorful. Especially fun is the sense that some of the scenes sound like Noel Coward and others like Joe Orton. It’s that crisp.

This buoyancy allows the production to sail right through the play’s inherent peril: the metronome effect of watching alternating characters plot silly games that only the idle have time for. The show has to be effortless, and this one is a balloon.

The expansive set designed by Jim Yarmer is lush and serene, an image of parlor and marble and unseen gardens. And seldom does Equity Waiver create women’s costumes of such delicious scheme and color, the classy work of dress designer Jeanne Harriott. Part of the play’s fancy, in fact, deals with a diaphanous gown that the cynical brother gives to a “mere” ballet dancer (the ingenue Galan) in order to lure his heart-smitten twin away from a vulturous woman.

(In 1975, Michael York and Glynis Johns were partnered in a strong Ahmanson production of “Ring Round the Moon.” The current edition is in that league.)

Performances are at 1944 Riverside Drive, Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m., through Sept. 6. Tickets: $10-$12. (213) 665-3011.

‘FOOL FOR LOVE’

Arguably Sam Shepard’s finest play, the 1983 Obie-winning drama “Fool for Love” is a jolting lovers’ tale that flares between a half-brother and half-sister in a seedy motel room on the edge of a desert.

Talent associated with the Ossetynski Actors Lab is presenting a solid, visceral production at the Olio. And “Fool for Love” is nothing if not visceral.

The director is Gar Campbell, a founder of the old Company Theater, and he has captured the poetry, the physical and emotional violence and the shades of mystery and myth that this play passionately blends. The lovers, who collide like trucks, are impressively rendered by Curtis Conoway’s worn, philandering cowboy and Shanda Cunningham’s small-town cook, a tumultuous, head-hanging, barefoot slave to love.

They got locked into each other years before they learned they had the same father. That old man (quietly and nicely played by Harry Northup) is in the grubby room with them as a disembodied spirit but also a presence who occasionally talks and illuminates the edges of his children’s odyssey.

The lovers can’t shake each other. They have a pact. One moment there’s a long, tender kiss. The next a tremendous kick. She wants him out; she wants him back. He leaves; he returns.

Conoway and Cunningham capture the raw feelings of lovers’ exhaustion. There’s the sexual chemistry, without which they couldn’t lunge to the core of this anguished comedy.

A fourth character, the young woman’s local dolt of a movie date, is parlayed with a sweet lumbering touch by Wayne Pere.

Performances run at 3709 Sunset Blvd., Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., through Aug. 8. Tickets: $8. (213) 667-9556.

‘FOR COLORED GIRLS’

It’s been 10 years since Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf” struck its anthem about black female rage and hope. The blades of this “choreo-poem” still cut deep. Should the words ever become history, they’ll still bleed.

The Orange County Black Actors Theater, a comparatively little-known vagabond group that has no home of its own, makes a strong impression with its production of “Colored Girls” at South Coast Repertory’s Second Stage.

Director Adleane Hunter, utilizing the simplicity of a bare stage and bright, varicolored dresses on her seven actresses, wisely lets the lexicon of Shange’s diamond-hard words carry the work.

The production is disciplined and poetically choreographed. The flashes of biting humor (at black men’s expense) and a few good memories (“lovemaking on lime green sheets”) loom more important to the show today than they did a decade ago.

All the better to really underscore the message of betrayal. Actress Robyn Hastings’ delivery of the tragic “a night with beau willie brown,” about a father hanging his two children over the window ledge, is searing and remains one of the most haunting scenes in black American literature. (Shange herself performed it originally in New York.)

The production’s single gaffe is the occasional inclusion of a dancer weaving a pattern while others speak words. Such a device divides focus and splits attention.

Performances are at 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, Thursday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, Sunday at 3 p.m., ending Sunday. Tickets: $11. (714) 957-4033.

‘THE GOLDEN FLEECE’

Rock musicals are something of an endangered species, and “The Golden Fleece” at the 2nd Stage Theater endangers the genre quite severely.

The trouble isn’t the original music by brothers Hugh and Mac MacDonald or the live, four-member band (smartly led by keyboardist and musical director/vocal arranger Robert Tate). The problem is the musical book, an L.A. rock update of the Greek myth of Jason and the Argonauts.

Jason is now a rock star with the Argonauts, in pursuit of the Golden Fleece (read Grammy). His lover is lead vocalist Mae Dea (Medea, get it?). He falls victim to the drug Ambrosia and is hounded by a punk band called the Furies.

A local area soloist, Jeff Morgan, does an effective job as Jason. Marguerite Baca’s vocalist girlfriend, Adam Boffi’s ex-druggie Orpheus and Steven Walker’s no-good manager are also credible. But throw out the Greek stuff, which here is incomprehensible even if you know the myth, and you have a formula-ridden rise-and-fall rocker soaper, layered with an anti-drug message.

Direction by Michael A. Candela is unfocused and ragged; the music buries the lyrics (no big deal in a concert, but destructive in theater) and the show is bloated by an unforgivable total of 25 numbers.

Performances are at 6500 Santa Monica Blvd., Thursday through Saturday, 8 p.m., Sunday, 7 p.m. Tickets: $10-$12. (213) 466-1767.