Summer orchestra programs seem generally be selected using one criterion: Will the program survive the beer and blanket test? As in, will the music stand up to the distractions of the summer season at the Mann, where themed picnics and fireworks tend to leave a longer-lasting impression than the music itself?

    Under the direction of Grant Llewellyn on Tuesday night, the Philadelphia Orchestra opened a two-week run of the expected popular favorites and crowd-pleasers, while also plugging the lesser-known work of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, a shining star in a program that luxuriated in easy-listening favorites.

    Easing into the program with Strauss' “On the Beautiful Blue Danube,” Llewellyn cruised at a relaxed pace that pleasantly contrasted the oom-pah-pahing that too often characterizes this piece. The languid tempo, though the perfect accompaniment for picnics and summer crowds, took its toll close to the end, however, as the final few bars came to their rather abrupt crescendo, taking the low strings seemingly by surprise at the work's close.

    Dressed in neon lights and with jagged, contemporary choreography transporting its characters across the stage, Spring Awakening's shock value is wrapped in hipness and shrouded with casual cool. In 1891 when author Frank Wedekind's novel first appeared though, the story was banned by adults who feared it would taint their children's innocent young minds. The irony was evident even then, but more than a century later, Spring Awakening is even more of a poignant — and important — reminder that those whom we wish to protect with ignorance are usually the ones who are most in need of education.

The real-life character of Edith Bouvier Beale is too often faulted for the disgrace of the Beale family estate, and of her own daughter, Edie. 
    “You have become that most pitiable of creatures: an actress without a stage,” says Major Bouvier to Edith, castigating his daughter for their dysfunctional family dynamics. Yet one can argue that the blatant disregard shown by Edith’s father and by Edith’s absent husband toward her talent and character is the true cause for blame in the musical Grey Gardens, on stage at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre through June 28.
    The infamous story of the Beales, originally immortalized in the 1975 documentary by Albert and David Maysles, is told here with an expanded ticket of songs performed by two of the most tragic divas to have ever graced the high-society circles of New York.  
    The true story of Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Edie, aunt and cousin to Jackie Bouvier Kennedy and keepers of the immense mansion Grey Gardens, is recited in whispers: Two formerly wealthy Kennedy relatives end up the sole occupants of a dilapidated, filthy mansion unfit for habitation, carrying on in a manner that suggests mental instability and possible insanity. The newspapers were relentless when the Board of Health discovered them in 1973, house-bound and living amid a sea of feral cats, opossums, raccoons and cans of cat food piled 5 feet high.

Cheeky, bawdy and utterly offensive in so many ways, Walnut Street Theatre’s The Producers gets top marks for being guaranteed to offend all ages, races, religions, sexes and beliefs. In fact, the show is all-inclusive in its discrimination — everyone gets his or her full dose, which is exactly how writers Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan pull it off.
    The show is in great hands at the Walnut, where it can stretch to the epic proportions necessary to be utterly ridiculous in its numerous slurs. Ben Lipitz plays the spurious Broadway producer Max Bialystock, inflating the role with the great comic timing he last employed as Pumbaa in a national tour of The Lion King. Next to Max’s ill-placed bravado — despite his string of Broadway flops — Ben Dibble’s Leo Bloom is a twitchy, nervous mouse of an accountant, hired to keep Max’s books. When Leo discovers that theoretically, a producer could make serious money by raising funds from too many investors and then opening a bad Broadway show, Max swindles his clean-as-a-whistle accountant into cooking the books and being his partner as a producer. Just one caveat: The show has to fail, and miserably so, in order for the men to make any profit. If it succeeds, they both go to jail.

    Half musical, half  ballet, Movin’ Out only loosely follows a plot, includes only a few lines of dialog and hardly even gives us our characters’ names. Yet it was catapulted forward without missing a beat during a limited run at the Academy of Music last week.
    Renowned choreographer Twyla Tharp is one of the few artists I’ve seen give an edge to Frank Sinatra’s work, displayed during Pennsylvania Ballet’s “Nine Sinatra Songs”  in February. If she could make Ol’ Blue Eyes bite, then the music of Billy Joel — much of it already full of poetically raw material, often hidden under the deceptively lyrical nature of his songwriting — must have seemed an easy feat in comparison.