(This article was amended on November 24, 2012 from its original version.) ‘Tis the season when many daddies and mommies want to spoil their little girls, by taking them to that special performance, filling their eyes and ears with enough magical sparkle to feed memories for years to come. Olney Theatre Center has brought back […]

Tom Dudzick’s Over the Tavern has seen a lot of productions since its first stage outing back in the mid-1990s. Olney Theatre Center’s new production looks good and feels authentic. But unfortunately, that’s as close as Sunday’s formal opening performance was able to get to the play’s dramatic core.

I’m not a set designer or a director, but if forced to guess, I’d say there’s nothing easy about putting on a solid staging of Little Shop of Horrors. When one of the main characters is a giant talking/singing/murdering plant, it logically follows that this is going to take some creativity.

British playwright Anthony Shaffer’s ingenious, hairpin-turn stage thriller about a competitive game of one-upmanship, humiliation and revenge, is scored like a tennis game.

I am going to give you a summary of this astounding tour de farce, now playing at the Mulitz-Gudelsky Theatre Lab of the Olney Center for the Arts, and then recommend that you forget it immediately.

Nothing wishy-washy about Olney Theatre Center’s exuberant, child-sized production of the musical You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. Here, the Peanuts gang is rendered with such bright, broad strokes they seem to have leapt from the pen of Charles M. Schulz himself.