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.

     Although spaced a decade apart and both hopelessly outdated, 1978's movie version of "Grease" and 1987's "Dirty Dancing" still exert an irresistible pull. It's hard to pinpoint the source of the attraction — certainly, Patrick Swayze and John Travolta were cute, but the films really succeeded on the strength of their characters: While behaving badly and acting like punk teenagers, they still exuded a powerful charisma that made thousands of teens want to get up and dance.
   That vital blend of attitude and charm was sadly lacking in last week's performance of Grease at the Academy of Music. The cast may have felt compromised by the substitution of its Danny Zuko for understudy Mark Raumaker, but the entire performance felt both coarsely performed and outdated.
    While the actors onstage played their guts out on the energy level, nailing that hand jive and cheesy dance moves, the main characters felt like carbon-copies of the 1978 film, but with a much less finely tuned realization of what makes Danny and his gang "cool" or Rizzo and her girls strut. As a result, the beloved tunes and familiar choreography felt as out-of-date as Danny's ex-girlfriends.

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.