The Vaudeville circuit flourished on American stages for half a century. Between the 1880's and the 1930's, an endless parade of performers scraped together a living one stage at a time, wandering across the country in search of fortune. Stephen Sondheim's hugely successful 1959 musical Gypsy is a strange, endearing tribute to the era of Vaudeville. Director Dale Gutzman brings that tribute to life this month as his Off the Wall Theatre presents its production of the Sondheim classic through Oct. 11...

Between Boulevard Theatre's staging of The Constant Wife as a theater rehearsal and Off the Wall's production of Gypsy, at least two local stages seem to be looking at themselves. Marquette adds to the theater-about-theater motif this month with its production of KenLudwig's comedy The Moon Over Buffalo. Running through Oct. 5, the production stars Kevin Hogan and Jennifer Shine as George and Charlotte Hay-a pair of married actors struggling with their own repertory theater company in Buffalo, N.Y. in 1953...

The Boulevard Theatre Ensemble's new production of Somerset Maugham's The Constant Wife (running through Oct. 5) proves that you can easily convey the vivacity of Maugham's script without resorting to elaborate sets and costuming. Less is definitely more. If only this idiom had been extended to the extraneous packaging that hampers this otherwise enjoyable production. The idea of setting The Constant Wife as a play within a play is not entirely without merit, if it helps cast a fresh light on the play...

The mastermind and his confederates cased the World Trade Center for entrances and exits and the coming and going of guards, mapping every step of their coup with the meticulousness of professional criminals going for the vault in a heavily secured bank. But although their scheme was against the law, it was more misdemeanor than felony and would have no victims unless a tragic accident disrupted their careful plan.

Incendiary slide-master Sonny Landreth cut his teeth and forged his way among John Hiatt's backing group The Goners in the late 1980s and '90s. And now, close on the heels of his former frontman's back-looking Same OldMan, Landreth offers one of his own reflective works of middle-aged pondering. Unlike Hiatt's effort, though, From the Reach borrows the guitarist's native post-Katrina sadness ("Blue Tarp Blues"), offers a number of superstar...

Regionalism was all the rage among Midwest artists, especially in the years between the world wars. But in light of "Wisconsin Legendary Artists," a small but worthwhile exhibition focused primarily but not entirely on the first half of the last century, not all art from the Badger State could so easily be defined. The spread in style and content is wide among the paintings and works on paper in the exhibit.

For the fourth in a series of films made outside of his beloved New York, Woody Allen moves from Great Britain to sunnier climes. Set in Spain, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is an ocean away from his mature Manhattan comedies geographically, but emotionally it might as well be just across the Hudson. A rueful examination of love, desire and the impossibility of achieving happiness, VCB unfolds in a dreamy Europe where everyone is a poet or a thinker and great conversations spark to life around copious glasses of wine even in the humblest cafs.

Asia has become fertile ground for horror films. A steady parade of such movies from the Far East have been poached by Hollywood, gutted of their subtlety in clumsy adaptations and pushed into multiplexes, mostly to little acclaim. Remade from a recent South Korean film, Mirrors is the latest among the mediocre-bad attempts to transpose an Asian supernatural sensibility into an American popcorn flick. Kiefer Sutherland stars as Ben, a troubled ex-NYPD detective relieved of duty following a fatal shooting. Popping prescription medication to fight his alcoholic

Hanggai's leader got his start in a punk rock band as the Chinese Communist system loosened up. Later he turned to the traditional instruments of his Inner Mongolian homeland, including the horsehair fiddle and the two-stringed lute, and began singing his ancestral songs in overtones close to the famed . . .

Concert pianist and critic John Bell Young sets out to describe and explain Beethoven's nine symphonies with minimal technical jargon. His Guided Tour largely succeeds. Young offers solid summations of the structure, emotional content and intellectual background of each symphony. He also touches on subjects as various as Beethoven's celebrity status, the role of conductors in interpreting the score, the political backdrop . . .