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.

The Full Monty is the Redhouse Arts Center’s contribution to The District theater festival’s trio of rotating productions at the New York State Fairgrounds’ Empire Theater.

Forget the movie. Gore Vidal greatly opened up and lengthened (i.e. mutilated) Tennessee Williams’ oneact Suddenly, Last Summer for director Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s black-and-white film adaptation in 1959. This alliance further estranged Vidal from the playwright.

Ashland, Ore., has come to Syracuse. Timothy Bond, producing artistic director at Syracuse Stage, served for more than 10 years with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. Over the years, he has favored some old Ashland colleagues, such as director Penny Metropoulous, who helmed last spring’s Red.

Once upon a time, many eons ago, playwrights fashioned dramas about functional rather than dysfunctional families. It sounds like a fairy tale, but in stage plays such as I Remember Mama, husbands and wives willingly remain faithful to one another, and they love their children.