Stylish Agatha Christie mysteries have flourished at Cortland Repertory Theatre for several years now. The company really has the hang of them, beginning with dialect coach Dustin Charles, who commands British accents of different classes and, in the case of the season opener, The Unexpected Guest, two social classes in Welsh. Costumer Wendi R. Zea loves period costumes; this is a late Christie, 1958.

Call it balance, if you will. The holiday show for Syracuse Stage’s 2013-2014 season will be the best-known stage work in the English language, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, albeit a new, non-musical version by innovative playwright Romulus Linney.

For several hundred years, the sprawling stories of western culture’s oldest epic, Homer’s The Iliad, were recited and acted out before they were written down. Even when seen on the page, certain pages seem to cry out to be spoken:stark verbal encounters and the hair-raising viciousness of battle.

As you can tell from the title, Hamlet Cha Cha Cha is not a tragedy about a melancholy Danish prince who can’t make up his mind. Strange to say, this Hamlet (Peter Dowling), sometimes called “Hammy,” speaks quite a few of the lines from Shakespeare. Like, “O! that this too solid flesh would melt,” only here it becomes a gag line.

It’s hard to tell where the curtain speech (comments about exit doors, cells phones and so on) ends and the action begins in And, Lately. . . . Actor-playwright Rachel Lampert, who is the producing artistic director at Ithaca’s Kitchen Theatre Company, asks for a show of hands, “There isn’t anybody here who doesn’t know me, is there?” One timid hand goes up. With a shrug of the shoulders, she then advises, “You will.”

In her program notes for Cry Havoc, fledgling director Lois Haas describes her campaign to get Appleseed Productions to mount the dramatic rarity as a “labor of love.” Haas, a stalwart at the company for many years, sees Allan R.

Newsflash: Peter Pan is actually a boy, or, rather, a strapping American adolescent with a certain amount of swagger. After a century of tinkering with the text, cartooning and musicalizing, Peter Pan has come to mean for many audiences a singing, 60-year-old retired female gymnast who flies around the stage on visible wires.

Starting just about on time at 7 p.m. on Sunday, May 5, at Eastwood’s Palace Theatre, the complete ceremony ended at exactly 8:34 p.m., more than an hour ahead of the usual pace. This somehow occurred even though there was live music on stage from retro-rock specialists The Coachmen and video clips of productions from last year’s season.

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.