When asked if he considers himself “rich,” tall, graying Dr. Michael Dillon (David Andrew Macdonald) hesitates but admits he might be “comfortable.” This brings an immediate rejoinder from a scruffy visitor to his office, Margie Walsh (Kate Hodge): “That makes me uncomfortable.”

Gene Tierney’s eyes, Ingrid Bergman’s cheekbones and Ava Gardiner’s eyebrows. She asks her father if her cruel fate had befallen her because they don’t go to church. Making up for lost faith, she begins her trek in North Carolina’s Spruce Pine, crossing the South by bus to find deliverance in a Protestant Lourdes—with a televangelist in Tulsa, Okla.

There are more than 1.3 million Puerto Ricans in New York City, but their life on stage has been most visible as the Sharks and their girlfriends in West Side Story. That does not mean there’s no such thing as a Puerto Rican playwright. Miguel Pinero’s prison-based Short Eyes enjoyed a brilliant but brief career back in the 1970s.

Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs, the first of the semiautobiographical, let’s-get-serious “BB” trilogy, has always been popular with audiences, but it is not often seen on local stages. That’s not because, unusual in the Simon canon, the laughter must make its way through layers of tears.

Nostalgic jukebox musicals celebrating and spoofing songs from our collective youth have long been catnip for local audiences. Forever Plaid, written in 1990, on pre-Beatles boy groups, has enjoyed plenty of local productions in the last two decades. Taffetas, from 1989, had an intense if short run.

William Finn and James Lapine’s Falsettos might have won two Tony Awards at its premiere two decades ago, but portions reappear on local stages more often than they do in other regions of the country.

Still not showing its age at 134, Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance means reliable fun no matter how it is presented. Mix in a director of infinite jest, like Le Moyne College’s Matt Chiorini, and you can’t measure just how high the hilarity will jump.

Aristocrats, Moliere told us 350 years ago, are just like other people. When the greatest French comic playwright of them all flourished in the 1660s, only the top 1 percent could go to the theater, and those people wanted to see themselves on stage, with silk, lace, knee breeches and tall white wigs for women and for men.

Brevity, we have been told, is the soul of wit. To this playwright David Ives adds, “It’s all in the timing,” although he did not say it first. That means slow burns can wreak gales of laughter, but generally speed, preferably breakneck, increases laughter.

Arthur Storch said repeatedly that he liked being in Syracuse and that he looked upon Syracuse Stage as an opportunity to do what he wanted to do—and could not do as readily anywhere else. At least that is what he said to this Syracuse New Times interviewer on several occasions.