If poetry is what’s lost in translation, a good case can be made that drama these days is what you can’t get from the page, or the screen. Oh, yes, you can read Shakespeare or Shaw, and Yasmina Reza is spectacular in print.

Audiences going into Cortland Repertory Theatre’s Souvenir may be tempted to think that the main character, Florence Foster Jenkins, is a preposterous creation of comic playwright Stephen Temperley. She’s the self-deluded “world’s worst soprano” who can’t hold a note and whose warblings fall somewhere between those of the frog and the crow.

Being wives is the only bond the three women have. Their unseen husbands, old school chums, demand that they all get together for dinner once a month. When the boys retire to another room to boast about golf or hunting, not to mention tormenting the cat, the girls are thrown together in the kitchen, cleaning up, pretending to be pals.

The change is only semantic. Still one of upstate New York’s premier arts organizations, Glimmerglass of Cooperstown went from being the Glimmerglass Opera of past years to the Glimmerglass Festival of this summer. That means a stylish Broadway musical, produced with the highest standards, is now featured instead of just being included as an extra.

The  same, only different. Audiences love Agatha Christie mysteries for their branded reliability, the predictable unpredictability. We must start with an assortment of flawed characters, some of whom should be annoying, in a confined country setting.

Precision. Grace. Captivation. High gloss. Finesse. Let’s get to these words right away because we have to haul them out when Auburn’s Merry- Go-Round Playhouse hires director-choreographer Brett Smock to run a show. The Harry Warren-Al Dubin blockbuster 42nd Street is not just a musical that includes dance numbers.

Ah, good taste, what a dreadful thing!” said that old Spaniard Pablo Picasso. He added, “Good taste is the enemy of creativeness.” Taking that cue, the creativeness of sisters Carmela and Delphine Calamari suffers no enemies, and no restraints.

In the opening scene a hapless DHL delivery man, Terrence (Michael Dalto), has dragged an old friend, Josh (Michael Kaplan), on a snowy Christmas Eve to a shabby Super 8 motel to talk to a tall, incomprehensible, dark-haired woman (Charlotte Cohn). “What is this, a setup?” barks Josh, pounding Terrence’s head.

This maverick feature would surely have dropped into public domain obscurity, until little-known (then, anyway) distributor New Line Cinema reissued the flick in the early 1970s as a midnight-only attraction aimed at a new generation of pothead hippies.