MacGregor uses humor to illustrate the challenges of a man learning how to be a woman. In Act Two, Gene reemerges as Jean, played now by Rhiannon Ragland.

Riverwalk veteran Joe Dickson, as down-on-his luck stand-up comedian Eddie McCuen, ultimately wins the contest for most intensely agitated actor on stage, but Bob Murrell and Sarah Sonnenberg, as musical writers Roger Hopewell and BernIce Roth, run a close second and third.

It’s always just a little odd when people writing for Broadway transform gritty, venial life stories into happy-go-lucky, salt-of-the-earth, charmingas-all-get-out-musicals.

A Here’s a challenging and convoluted notion: Write a one-act play, and then 45 years later write a prequel that helps explain the motivation of one of the central characters.

Now playing at the Purple Rose Theater, “Couples” takes the audience through the early moments of high expectations that couples have when first embracing the idea of pregnancy and parenthood, then through the heartbreak of hopelessness that ensues when nothing whatsoever happens.

Return with us now to those thrilling moments of yesteryear — no, it is not the Green Hornet and not the Lone Ranger either, but rather Miss Marple of Agatha Christie fame, as presented in the Starlight Dinner Theater's production of “A Murder is Announced.” While ...

While scenic designer G. Max Maxin has thrown tons of technological video graphic wizardry at the audience in the Michigan State University Theatre production — a spectacular unfolding of everything plus the kitchen sink that a scene designer can do...

CHELSEA — At first squint and frown, “Corktown,” now playing at the Purple Rose Theater, appears to be nothing more than the latest incarnation of the hit-man-with-a-heart-of-gold genre popularized in crime novels by Elmore Leonard, on the big screen by “Pulp Fiction,” and on HBO by “The Sopranos.”

In Joe Di Pietro’s "Over the River and Through the Woods" ' now being performed by the still new kids-on-the-block, Holt Dimondale Community Players ' we’re going to an Italian-American grandmother’s household in Brooklyn..

Those who watched TV in the 1950s memorized the phrase, “There are 8 million stories in ‘The Naked City’ ' this is just one of them ... .” While far more eloquent than any of the “Naked City” episodes, Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge” is, oddly, also a lot like one of them.