For author Eugene O’Neill, Ah, Wilderness!, his only comedy, was clearly a catharsis of fancy. The Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning American playwright was best known for dramas doting on dysfunction and addiction based on personal experience. Scholars cite Wilderness, a warmly nostalgic snapshot of a New England family Fourth of July circa 1906, as the life O’Neill, born to an acting couple in a Broadway hotel room in 1888, probably wished he had.

Jesus Christ Superstar was a first at many levels when it debuted on stage in 1971. It began as a double album in 1970 with staging to follow a year later and coined the term “rock opera”; it brought worldwide attention to its young composers Andrew Lloyd Webber (music) and Tim Rice (lyrics) and it depicted the son of God as a human being full of doubts and uncertainty about His predestined fate. The Shorewood Players are finishing up their 78th season with a production of the opera that, despite some problematic choices, points out the strengths of the music and lyrics built around the last seven days in Christ’s mortal life.

Local sketch comedy group Broadminded launched its second show of the year this past weekend. Stacy Babl, Anne Graff LaDisa, Melissa Kingston and Megan McGee return in a show that mixes pre-recorded video segments with live performance. Broadminded: Now In 3-D! takes comedic aim at the mass media in more than a dozen different skits. The show’s comedy is a slightly uneven mix of quality, but even though there are moments when the “broads” fail to be funny, they never fail to be fun. Overall this is a very good show. There are only a couple of skits in the mix that are completely . . .

It could be worse. At least Suze Rotolo is a likable writer. Near the end of her memoir we finally get the story behind the famous album cover of Rotolo walking alongside Bob Dylan for the folk singer’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. A Freewheelin’ Time could have revealed something about the folk-blues revival of the early 1960s and its most enduring artist, but instead spends most of its pages on Rotolo’s artwork (including baubles that hang from ladies’ boots, rejected by Bloomingdale’s at the time) and politics (hanging out in Cuba back in the day and treating Dylan as a fan treats Dylan). We have a charming but boring person on a record jacket writing a book as though she was part of the album’s music. Credit Rotolo for her voice . . .

In his novel The Terror, Arthur Machen imagined that the animals, sickened by the carnage of World War I, turned on humankind with tooth and claw. Later, Daphne du Maurier in a story adapted by Alfred Hitchcock thought the birds might strike at people for reasons known only to themselves. In The Happening, director-writer M. Night Shyamalan explores the idea that plants, threatened by our poor stewardship of their environment, might launch a holocaust against humanity. It’s the right message at a moment when much of our world seems to be collapsing, except for water levels and prices, which are on the rise. Is Shyamalan the wrong messenger? For their own inane reasons, movie critics . . .

At some point we’ve all felt as if we could explode in berserk rage and release the pent-up monster within. Maybe the moron on his cell phone who nearly ran you over at the intersection provoked the impulse? Or the numbskull boss dressing you down? How about the deceitful politician setting the world on fire to promote his own agenda? Most of us have been socialized to show restraint, whether from an ethic of behavior or fear of punishment. The person without restraint is called psychologically dysfunctional, when he’s not the superhero called the Incredible Hulk.

The automatic, meaningless standing ovation has been out of control in the U.S. for years. Does it come from the American need to overstate everything? Maybe it indicates a lack of standards. It is refreshing to attend performances in Germany and Austria, where knowledgeable audiences applaud appreciatively at length, but never stand up. I am accustomed to being the only one sitting during applause, and am familiar with the resulting looks I get. It is a ridiculous situation. A good performance does not merit a “standing O.”

"Are you angry or are you boring?" asks one of the pieces included in the new “Gilbert & George” exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM). The idea that nothing worthwhile exists outside these two states might explain why the work of the artistic duo has become progressively larger and louder over time, often resorting to such malodorous mediums as feces, sperm and spit. Is this preponderance of bodily fluids meant as an avowal of the artists' own mortality or simply a desperate attempt to counter the stultifying effects of old age and withered rebellion? The answer, like the meaning of their work, remains elusive . . .

American Players Theatre (APT) has been known for breaking boundaries during its 29-year tenure, and not always successfully. However, the Spring Green troupe’s opening production for the 2008 season, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, proves why this noble effort should continue unabated. The Shakespearean comedy, which dodged the ongoing siege of torrential rain plaguing southern Wisconsin to open Saturday night, is a loosely woven collision of three separate stories familiar to Shakespeare fans . . .

Ten years ago I described Tarsem’s feature debut as a director, The Cell, as an example of an emerging cinema whose impressions were visual more than verbal and whose visuals were achieved in part by quick montages of images. That Tarsem made his mark with the R.E.M. video “Losing My Religion,” as well as sneaker and soft drink ads, was held against him by critics who resisted the kinetic, jump cutting visual language of the MTV generation . . .