Camp in a parallel universe

A suitably frothy, tuneful staging by West Coast Ensemble makes it easy to understand the off-Broadway success of the whimsical musical fairy tale, “Zanna, Don’t!”

Creator Tim Acito (with Alexander Dinelaris) borrowed the title pun and dimension-hopping antics from “Xanadu” to launch us into an alternate reality that mirrors present-day Americana -- except everyone in it is gay.

Without taking itself seriously, the show wittily tweaks homophobia with a parade of inverted stereotypes. Elfin matchmaker Zanna (Danny Calvert) presides over romance in the reproductively improbable town of Heartsville. In a daring move, Zanna and his fellow drama club students perform a topical musical about whether heterosexuals should be allowed in the military -- as good a pretext as any for a campy production number (Christine Lakin and Paul Nygro’s choreography consistently transcends the limitations of the thimble-sized stage).

When the star quarterback, Steve (Brent Schindele) wins the big game by catching his own 40-yard pass, the victory is seen in its proper perspective. (“I’m glad we beat them -- their uniforms were awful.”) Of course, Steve could never compete with the honor afforded the school’s nerdy chess champion (Dan Pacheco). Under Zanna’s spell, the two pair up in a match made in heaven -- until Steve’s role in the school play forces him to kiss lesbian Kate (Rebecca Johnson, the cast’s musical comedy standout).

They make a cute couple -- Kate in her welder’s mask, wielding a power drill, Steve in his apron baking muffins. But alas, the town is too selfish, closed-minded and afraid to accept their love, and the resulting “Heterogate” scandal engulfs the entire ensemble (Brian Weir, Justine Valdez, Natalie Monahan and Matthew Rocheleau capably supply multiple supporting roles).

The show’s premise may be one-note, but director Nick DeGruccio and musical director Bill Brown engagingly steer it through a varied song cycle spanning bubble-gum pop, rock, soul, and country and western -- none of it with any redeeming social value, thankfully.

-- Philip Brandes

“Zanna, Don’t!” Lyric-Hyperion Theatre, 2106 Hyperion Ave., Silver Lake. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays. Ends Sept. 2. $32. (323) 906-2500 or www.tix.com. Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes.

Two Richards, two approaches

One of Shakespeare’s early plays, the mind-bogglingly intricate “Richard III” contains prolific political subterfuges that might boggle any but the most ardent Shakespearean scholar.

In his current production at the Miles Playhouse, part of the Fourth Annual Shakespeare Santa Monica series, director Louis Scheeder makes the play’s obscurities abundantly comprehensible. Unfortunately, Scheeder’s cast, which ranges from the competent to the amateurish, can’t always keep stride with Scheeder’s vision.

Line flubs are common, and certain performers never rise above the level of community theater. Strapped into cumbersome gear that severely limits his movement, Stefan Wolfert is a capable Richard, but lacks the subtext of gleeful devilment that should inform the role. However, Wolfert’s turn is of undeniably professional caliber, in contrast with other, more unfortunate portrayals.

Despite the uneven standard of performance, Scheeder’s neatly inventive staging has passages of inspired clarity. A case in point is the chilling assassination of Clarence by murderers who swoop in on roller shoes, relentlessly circling their helpless prey. And Scheeder’s telling take on the Battle of Bosworth Field has the warriors miming combat with invisible adversaries -- a neat allusion to the vengeful, unseen ghosts that ultimately dog Richard to his death.

At the other end of the historical spectrum is the “Richard II,” which treats the deposition of Richard by his resentful cousin, Bolingbroke. The launching point for Shakespeare’s Henriad, which concludes with “Richard III” and the fall of the Plantagenets, the play understandably rankled Elizabeth I’s sensibilities back in its day.

Now being produced by the Independent Shakespeare Company as part of its Free Shakespeare in Barnsdall Park series, the play receives a crisply professional staging by director Joseph Culliton, who plays John of Gaunt, among other roles.

Culliton’s take is more workmanlike than obviously inventive. His straightforward tack consists of assembling a likely crew of crisply professional actors and letting them tear into Shakespeare’s text. Spearheaded by the wonderful David Melville, who plays Richard II with a daring tinge of comical effeteness, the performers prove unerringly proficient, belting out their lines to the back row of this amphitheater setting without the benefit of amplification. No frills and sharp as a tack, this terrific production makes the faraway history of the doomed Plantagenets as immediate and accessible as today’s headlines.

-- F. Kathleen Foley

“Richard III,” Miles Playhouse, 1130 Lincoln Blvd., Santa Monica. 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Sundays, 3 p.m. Saturdays. Ends July 29. $25. (310) 270-3454. www.ShakespeareSantaMonica.com. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.

“Richard II,” South Lawn of Barnsdall Park, 4800 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. 7:30 p.m. July 21 and 22 and August 5, 9, 10, 19, 25 and 31. Ends Aug. 31. Free. (818) 710-6306. www.independentshakespeare.com. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.

Shallow sitcom? Don’t bet on it

Six friends. Eight rooms. One big penthouse in the Big Apple. If it sounds like the cookie-cutter formula for a sitcom -- well, that’s exactly the genre playwright Michael Elyanow sets out to deconstruct in “The Idiot Box.”

In Jeremy B. Cohen’s adept staging for Open Fist Theatre Company, what begins as a clever, amusing parody darkens into a savage indictment of the way television sells us a make-believe cocoon to insulate ourselves from reality.

Cohen, whose connection with the play dates back to its 2003 Chicago debut, artfully plunges us into a safe, antiseptic sitcom world, complete with a blandly upbeat theme song, freeze-frame credits and hollow laugh track hilarity as a sextet of sex-starved roommates battle life’s trivial problems with snappy comebacks and double entendres.

With impeccable comic timing, the well-cast ensemble quickly differentiate their familiar stock characters -- a ditzy masseuse (Tisha Terrasini-Banker, a romance novelist with writer’s block (Amanda Weir), her mopey husband (David Castellani), a slacker (Dominic Spillane) and Mark (Kelly Van Kirk), a cynical paramedic who owns the shared apartment.

Cozy complacency starts to unravel when roommate Chloe (Anna Khaja) attends a Chekhov play in search of insomnia relief but instead finds herself energized and intrigued by a world she never knew existed. The seductive grad student (Joe Holt) she meets at the play becomes her lover and guide to the real world. When Chloe’s growing dissatisfaction with her shallow life proves contagious, Mark takes desperate action to preserve their artificial utopia.

Elyanow’s sharp dialogue shows masterful facility with the glib sitcom banter he lampoons, though the play’s simplistic and sometimes pretentious moralizing doesn’t rise as far above it as one would hope. Nevertheless, the clash he sets up between make-believe and post-9/11 reality resonates with sobering truth: “This is home, for better or worse -- we can’t go back to the way things were and pretend we don’t know what we know.”

-- P.B.

“The Idiot Box,” Open Fist Theatre, 6209 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends Aug. 25. $20. (323) 882-6912 or www.openfist.org. Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes.

Sex and lies in Ayckbourn farce

Infidelity, rickety lies and the near-constant danger of being caught. Alan Ayckbourn’s “How the Other Half Loves” adopts these standard elements of sex farce but kicks things up a notch by ... well, let’s leave that for its current audiences to figure out.

The enduringly popular 1969 play is now at the Odyssey Theatre, which has become a go-to spot for Ayckbourn’s comedies. This is the fifth of the British playwright’s works to be presented there.

The story -- a puzzle with a clever structural conceit -- unfolds in two households. For clues, take a few moments to study Victoria Profitt’s set design before the performance begins. Notice, for instance, how two dining tables intersect.

Greg Mullavey, the “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” veteran and Los Angeles theater mainstay, portrays a mild-mannered, absent-minded husband, Sarah Brooke, his wife. Seemingly unaccustomed to caginess, she clumsily evades his questions about her tardiness the night before; he’s a human question mark, never quite able to piece things together.

They’re British -- a bit upper crust, to judge by their accents. Employment connects Mullavey’s character to the other household, where the accent is a tad more working class. Here, an unaccountably self-satisfied lout, played by Ron Bottitta, shuffles about shirtless, letting it all hang out. Exhausted by an overactive child, his wife, played by Tracie Lockwood, nevertheless finds the energy to warily appraise his every move.

A hastily invented lie soon places another couple -- a shy, painfully polite husband and wife played to perfection by Scott Roberts and Kate Hollinshead -- smack in the path of a storm.

Like so many farces, this one involves an awful lot of plodding buildup, culminating in too-brief bursts of manic activity. But director Barry Philips and his actors can see that Ayckbourn filled this sex comedy with more than the usual amount of social observation, and Mullavey digs still deeper to find unexpected depths of emotion.

-- Daryl H. Miller

“How the Other Half Loves,” Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., West Los Angeles. 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. Ends Sept. 2. $24 and $26. (310) 477-2055; www.odysseytheatre.com. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.