Not so long ago or far away, bingo was once highly controversial. Really. In the state of Michigan during your reporter’s childhood, there were repeated attempts, one successful, to outlaw the low-stakes board game. These were widely seen as vindictive assaults from Protestant small towns, well-represented in the legislature, against Catholic cities.

Two nostalgia jukebox musicals, The Taffetas for girl groups, and Forever Plaid for guys, have been bopping around for more than 20 years. They seemed plenty charming at first, but eventually they wore out their welcome, in part because much of the music was self-consciously archaic and limited mostly to the groups being spoofed.

It's the year of Fuddy Mears, Zana Don’t and Judy’s Scary Christmas. Yes, those are titles of stage works appearing in town over the next 10 months, but don’t feel left behind if you have not heard of them before. Let there be no complaining about the same old things; this is the time to catch up.

From a distance, William Nicholson’s Shadowlands looks like three plays telescoped into one. The first is a drawing-room comedy where well-bred Oxford dons sit around and make witty conversation. Second is an unlikely middleaged romance between a 58-year-old confirmed bachelor and a 41-year-old divorcee.

The second titles, Bitches, which now looks like the subtitle, actually came first. It was Bitches while the witty, satirical review was developing at different venues but became Disenchanted during a long and successful run in Orlando.

Two questions arise in audiences’ minds as they enter a performance of The Lion King at the Mulroy Civic Center.

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.