Most kids want to run away to join the circus at some stage in their lives. Lorenzo Pisoni ran away from the circus —  in footie pajamas.

The  mental picture of a young Lorenzo shuffling down the highway in PJs is humorous, but the scenario is representative of the serious themes behind the schtick: the father-son relationship on view in Philadelphia Theatre Company's one-man show Humor Abuse. Directed by Pisoni's college friend Erica Schmidt, Humor Abuse is a mostly true account of Pisoni's childhood growing up the son of two circus performers. Throughout the production, Pisoni performs pratfalls and physical gags, falls off of ladders, springs out of trunks, wears flippers, does back flips and employs an entire repertoire of physical humor — all of it handed down from his father, the professional clown Larry Pisoni.

The physical timing is first-rate, and Pisoni's 20 years of circus training and performance serves him well in this production. It's entirely possible to treat Humor Abuse as a behind-the-scenes tour of your very own circus, but the show also places a father-son relationship literally in the spotlight, showing the ragged edges hidden behind even the most sequined performers.

    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.

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.

Originally penned by Ian Fleming, the creator of Bond, James Bond, it’s no wonder that the best part of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is its foreign spies.
One tall and thin (Dirk Lumbard), one short and round (Scott Cote), these two Eastern European undercover men from the made-up country of “Vulgaria” keep Chitty Chitty Bang Bang from descending into the too-precious conceit of precocious children and flying cars with adult cracks and humorous capers. Read more.