This H2$ si unapologetic, for sure, and that’s just how Music Theater Works artistic director Rudy Hogenmiller likes it and directs it, a gleeful sound in a season-long parting shot before he resigns.

Take Me has the potential to be a fun-house mirror held up to humanity’s (in)ability to cope with tragedy and misfortune. We can stay on board for this. That is until we encounter, among other things, living toys, sequined galaxy-hopping country music stars and a city council made up of ex-Soviet dogs.

It also could mean just pretending for a moment that the world outside wasn’t a powder keg about to blow; that squeezing out of Castro’s grasp was only the beginning of the struggle; that one day, their neighborhood would no longer be their neighborhood.

It’s in the elegant spareness that August Rush soars, when the storytelling is as as elemental as two people making their own music, literal and metaphorical, best exemplified in the simplest scenes.

Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s Moby Dick opera, then, is as rare and fine a sighting as the white whale itself: on first hearing, it’s clear it’s made the operatic canon.

Missy Wise is that electricity.... She sings like an absolute dream, at turns as dry as whisky, as gentle as a lullaby, or throbbing with unfathomable grief. Even when she’s off-stage, you want her back.

Special mention goes to the scenic design of Riccardo Hernandez. Rather than becoming indulgent with the aesthetic of the setting, Hernandez makes marvelous use of the negative space, constantly reminding the audience of the character’s internal isolation.

It wouldn’t just take genius to find new surprises within this material; it would take real chutzpah. Jim Corti and Brenda Didier, as director and choreographer, respectively, deliver on both fronts and all without compromising Mel Brooks’s gleeful anarchy.

Chicago gets shellacked by ice and freezing cold, but at Underscore Theatre, the show goes on. Shows, plural, actually.

But son of a gun, It Works. And Porchlight’s production — a regional premiere extended as it opened — proves one can deliver the goods without breaking the bank.