This is a tale of tenderness, and the six actors each embody two men alternatively separated across four decades with a lived-in familiarity and well-forged chemistry. And when they all sing together (under the heartfelt musical guidance of Manning), it’s all the more magical.

Poignant and inventive, "Darling Grenadine" dazzles with its ingenuity, its heart and its candor.

As Hedwig, Will Lidke is a lissome time bomb. Aided and abetted by Robert S. Kuhn (costumes), Keith Ryan (wigs), and, naturallement, Jeremy Ramey (music direction), he can win you over one minute with an anthem as bopping and empowering as “Wig in a Box.”

This gag-a-second, mile-a-minute romp just goes to show that sometimes, the oldest jokes in the book are still in the book for a reason.

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.