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.

   From watching countless episodes of “Tom and Jerry” and the “Bugs Bunny” shorts, one thing is certain: Cartoon characters can’t die. No matter how many times Wile E. Coyote dives off the edge of a cliff, or how frequently Tom squashes Jerry, the resilient little critters just seem to spring back to life again without any harm done.
   The same miraculous quality of the undead applies to the animated character Petey Pup, the star creation of brilliant artist Tony Wiston. But in Tony’s case, it is the franchise of Petey Pup that is even more important than the character — meaning that Petey’s fans simply won’t let him either die, or be written out of the next script.
   Bruce Graham’s Something Intangible, receiving its world premiere at the Arden Theatre, cleverly juxtaposes the inverse relationship between Tony’s Petey-driven fame, and his frustration that he feels artistically confined to the silly antics of a cartoon pup.

   Curating an exhibit of ancient Maya artifacts is somewhat akin to participating in an international high-stakes scavenger hunt: One is constantly in competition with looters, and the prize might be fragmented, damaged, or even completely nonexistent.
   But one thing remains constant: The prize is always worth the chase, even when it’s shattered into a million pieces.
Or so explorers and curators and the University of Pennsylvania have believed for many years, currently evidenced by a new exhibit on display at the UPenn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, titled “Painted Metaphors: Pottery and Politics of the Ancient Maya.” The exhibit will remain at the museum through Jan. 31, when it will embark on a multi-city national tour.