You could, however, ask for better music. And lyrics. And a story that has even a whiff of dramatic tension. The musical aspects of “LHOP” — thanks go to composer Rachael Portman and lyricist Donna di Novelli — are thuddingly mundane and forgettable. But Francesca Zambello’s staging is so vital and the cast so pumped that they can lift up even mediocre material and connect with youngsters in the audience, if not so much with theater fans who appreciate that a good musical needs, well, memorable melodies and interesting lyrics. (Photos by Carol Rosegg)

The name-dropping gimmick here is that Melissa Gilbert (top photo, at center), who played young Laura on the Michael Landon TV series in the ‘70s, is now playing the role of Ma. Gilbert is fine, and clearly an audience favorite, but the show really belongs to Kara Lindsay (barefoot, above), who plays the teenaged Laura. Lindsay has spunk to spare, can belt with the best of them, but most importantly radiates joy at being who she is and where she is: a strong-willed tomboy with a lust for life as broad as the Dakota Territory sky under which she and her family are homesteading.

Her key relationship is not with her Ma (who’s the voice of common sense or a bit of a buzzkill, depending on the situation) but with her Pa (Steve Blanchard, with a soaring baritone), who tries to figure out how much rein to allow his headstrong daughter in their dangerous new location. And later with Alonzo Wilder (Kevin Massey), the young farmer who awkwardly courts her as she matures into a young woman. Also standing out: Kate Loprest (bottom photo, at center), who brings comic relief as Nellie Oleson, Laura’s nemesis/rival, a spoiled prairie princess who sparkles like Kristin Chenoweth every time she’s on.

These actors lead a strong ensemble that sings and dances for all they’re worth — and for more than the material is worth — calling to mind shows like “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” and “Oklahoma!,” even though musically “LHOP” is not in their league. And the staging is very inventive, particularly the lighting, which is used to establish mood and changing seasons and frequently evokes the beautiful soft light of the heartland.

There aren’t a lot of memorable lines in “LHOP,” but early on, Laura is pleading with her Pa to drive his team of horses. “It scares me so much, I just have to try it,” she says, which is a pretty cool way to approach life. If you have a daughter who’ll perk up at a line like that, then “Little House” is worth a visit.

Now playing at Onstage Atlanta, “Loot” is set in the living room of Mr. McLeavy (Barry N. West), the epitome of British bourgeois cluelessness and obeying of rules. He is about to bury his wife, whose casket sits center stage. All are about to be seriously abused: McLeavy, his poor wife’s corpse, and even the coffin itself.

Before he can get to the funeral, McLeavy is hit on by his wife’s nurse, Fay (Colleen Shannon Gaenssley), a minx who has lost seven husbands in her short life, not all of them to natural causes. Then McLeavy’s son Hal (Doug Graham) bursts in, like a teenager on fire, followed by his boyfriend Dennis (Topher Payne). They have just looted a bank next to the funeral home where Dennis works, and, looking for a place to hide the money, they spy Hal’s mother’s casket. Mom, meanwhile, goes into a large bureau. (Chasing “Loot” at Onstage Atlanta, from left: Colleen Shannon Gaenssley, Doug Graham, David Klein, Topher Payne, Barry N. West.)

For a while, anyway. Given that the whole show takes place in one room, both Mom and the money move around a lot. Finally, add to the mix Inspector Truscott (David Klein), who soon shows up on the trail of the stolen money. Truscott at first appears to be a buffoon, but he is actually a lot more sinister and ends up being the mouthpiece for some of Orton’s anti-social jabs.

A staple of community theaters, “Loot” has a lot of what you expect in a farce: rampant chaos, shifting agendas, great physical comedy. And some of what you don’t, such as a glass eye as a key plot device, and the unexpected injection of violence that goes beyond slapstick.

Onstage Atlanta is a delightful little space tucked into the unlikely site of Decatur’s Suburban Plaza shopping center. The cast of six knock themselves out, but on the night I saw it, the smallish audience never gave back the laughs the production deserves. Sure, some of the English accents can be strained, but Orton’s lines are time-tested and usually get good laughs, such as when Fay places a copy of the Ten Commandments with Mrs. McLeavy’s corpse and remarks, ”She was a great believer in some of them.”

Standouts in the cast are Graham, whose young Hal is a quivering blob of hysteria, as he whimpers and knots his limbs into bizarre contortions as his loot nears being discovered, and Gaenssley, whose Fay is the coolest customer in a roomful of overheated idiots but who isn’t afraid to crawl around on all fours to look for a glass eye.

Alice (Lindsey Noel Whiting) encounters the Red Queen (Molly Brennan). Photos by Greg Mooney

Just as Alice wanders far and wide, so too does this show, which is OK for older kids but may bore or scare (or both) younger ones. Like the original books, it’s less a real narrative than a series of encounters, some of them amazing and some more of a big goof. Even if you find it self-indulgent at times, there’s no denying this is theater that takes big risks and offers big surprises. There were parts of the show where I couldn’t tear my eyes away from what was happening, and times where I was checking my watch.

“Lookingglass Alice” was created by Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre in 1988, the brainchild of David Catlin. His big idea was to fuse the physically demanding circus acrobatic moves and dream-like elements of Cirque du Soleil with good old-fashioned theater, in this case a Victorian story that is full of weirdness with clocks, chess and wordplay. So when Alice goes down the rabbit hole, she does so more literally than usual, shimmying through a hula hoop suspended above the stage. To make this work, the Alliance’s usual stage space has been transformed, studded with trap doors, sliced in half with trick special effects and then put back together.

As Alice, Lindsey Noel Whiting is the perfect combination of actress and acrobat, whether she’s mourning the demise of Humpty Dumpty or soaring high above the stage on a series of looped ropes that she turns into a giant swing. Even if you’ve seen a few Cirques, watching an actor perform these breathtaking mid-air arabesques at the usually stagebound Alliance makes them a little more wondrous.

She is supported by four talented actor-acrobats who play multiple roles: Doug Hara as the White Knight et al, Molly Brennan as the Red Queen et al, Kevin Douglas as the Mad Hatter et al, and Anthony Fleming III as the Cheshire Cat et al.

In the program notes, Celise Kaye writes that Lookingglass Theatre is into “exploring without being literal, digging deeper without commenting.” After it was over, I walked out into the Woodruff Arts Center’s piazza on a warm spring night. Some of the people spilling out behind me seemed puzzled by what they had just seen. I looked across Peachtree Street, where the High Museum had hung banners promoting its upcoming show on Salvador Dali. He was smiling. Maybe he got it.

It’s that tasty 80 that makes the current “Shrew” at the New American Shakespeare Tavern such a delight. The show runs through May 16.

The many characters and their subplots can sometimes be filed as “other,” but here they bloom like a garden of little comic joys. There’s Lucentio, giddily in love with Kate’s sister Bianca, and played by Mike Niedzwiecki as bubble-brained as Bianca usually is. His servant, Tranio, seems to think the play is all about him (in a good, comedic way); actor Daniel Parvis is wildly inventive in coming up with new ways to be ridiculous. Doug Kaye as Baptista, the sisters’ put-upon father, never lets us forget that he is deeply in love with his wine goblet. By the time Troy Willis makes a late appearance as Vincentio and channels both Don Corleone and Rodney Dangerfield, he’d better do that and more to stand out, so he does. That’s not to slight the others in the large cast, just that these particularly pop out.

J.C. Long and Maureen Yasko in the Shakespeare Tavern's "Shrew." Photos by Jeff Watkins

Of course, Petruchio and Kate do tend to take over, and J.C. Long and Maureen Yasko do right by them. Long’s Petruchio is less of a narcissist than he is sometimes played; his actions seem undertaken more from love than just for dominance’s sake. Kudos for the very manly codpiece he wears to their wedding (Shakespeare overlooks that in his lengthy description of Petruchio’s costume), but demerits for his wedding “dance,” which is meant to alienate Kate but which looks a bit too much like a demented stork.

Yasko’s Kate is so full of rage that it’s a little hard to see why Petruchio is so instantly smitten with her, but that’s love for you. Can you ever really know what’s going on between two people, even when they’re shouting at each other in a roomful of others?

Under the direction of Drew Reeves, the actors lock firmly into Shakespeare’s cadences in a conversational American style that communicates perfectly. His “Shrew” is quick, sharp and full of unexpected comic bits, like the three actors who change costumes at center stage and find themselves pantsless. Since this production isn’t afraid to give the text a wedgie with the occasional anachronism or ad lib, they’re missing a bet not to namecheck the recent Internet song sensation “Pants on the Ground.” Come on, guys — I dare you.

This “novel,” which is in “dramatic form,” opened at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre in 2006 and is now at Atlanta’s Theatrical Outfit through April 11. It’s about two men, a white man named White and a black man named Black. I detect some symbolism there. White is a professor, filled with sadness and despair, who has just tried to commit suicide by jumping in front of a commuter train named the Sunset Limited. Black is a Christian who intervened and saved White, and brought him back to his little run-down apartment underneath the train tracks.

White checked out of his own life years ago and can see nothing but the beckoning abyss; as he himself says, the question isn’t why he tried to kill himself today, the question really is why he waited so long. Black, a much more vibrant character, tries to use his faith and humanity to penetrate White’s walls. (Photos by Chris Bartelski.)

On the one hand, there’s a lot of talk about the meaning of life, and faith, and death. On the other, “Limited” doesn’t end up amounting to much more than a decent guy pestering the hell out of a stubborn guy for more than an hour and a half. There is no action, at best a dab of momentum and no resolution to speak of. Two characters talking can be amazing (from “Waiting for Godot” to “My Dinner With Andre”), but as McCarthy proves, they can also be very trying.

No fault goes to the actors: E. Roger Mitchell as Black and Peter Thomasson as White give it everything, and make portions of the material lively and engaging. Nor the director, Jessica Phelps West. The fault is entirely with the play; if it didn’t have McCarthy’s name attached — if it was, say, Beans Baxter’s “The Sunset Limited” — it’s hard to imagine it being staged based on what’s on the page. I salute Theatrical Outfit for their philosophy — “stories that stir the soul” — and willingness to take risks, but this is one excruciating evening.

So begins “The Last Cargo Cult,” an offbeat but wonderfully engaging night of theater in the form of a one-man show/monologue/rant by the never-boring storyteller Mike Daisey. A large (to be kind), pale man, dressed all in black, he walks out, sits down at a plain wooden chair behind a plain wooden table and tells a bunch of stories, which are really one big story.

Those who can’t imagine an evening spent listening to a single storyteller are invited to imagine a great stand-up comedian, only with less aggressive laugh-wrangling and more of a big-picture viewpoint. Daisey is certainly funny, and if I had to pick other well-known performers to compare him to, it would be Lewis Black (the sputtering, profanity-laced outrage) and George Carlin (the keen eye for human foibles). But they are (were) still both stand-ups, and Daisey is a theatrical monologist, pursuing a more varied range of audience responses. (Photos by Jeff Gaines.)

“The Last Cargo Cult,” which is playing at the Alliance through April 11, weaves two threads together. The first is the Great Economic Shudder of late 2008, when our banks and bank accounts were suddenly revealed, he says, as “a mirage that began to shimmer and shake.” But Daisey is after more than the old news of the fall of Lehman Brothers; he digs into the always-fresh news of class consciousness, class envy and economic anxiety that defines us so much more than we wish it did.

The second is his extended visit to the South Pacific island of Tanna, one of the few places left on the planet that uses no money whatsoever. Tanna is part of the Vanuatu archipelago, known both as the inspiration for James Michener’s “Tales of the South Pacific” and one of the “Survivor” TV shows. But Daisey chose it because it is home to one of the last surviving cargo cults. In World War II, the U.S Navy set up bases on scores of Pacific islands, then abandoned them, leaving islanders fascinated with this rare connection to the outside world, and the stuff — the cargo — that they brought and left behind: the whole panoply of American Cool, such as cigarettes, chocolate, radios and engine parts.

“That is the point of Western civilization,” Daisey proclaims. “Our shit is awesome!” By pointing out his own addictions to our awesome stuff — iPods, American Express cards, Ikea furniture — he makes us squirm over our own addictions, and asks why we should be surprised that this Third World island culture literally worships our stuff; don’t we do the same? Daisey goes deeper, funnier and longer, than this thin summation can capture.

Maybe a bit too long. I clocked the show I attended at two hours and 10 minutes, and would have been very happy with 20 minutes less. As in the final reel of “The Return of the King,” you keep thinking this is a perfect place for it to end, but there’s always a little more.

But Daisey is not a minimalist. He’s a big voice with big ideas, a mashup of the hypnotic narrative skills of a Spalding Gray and the power of an Old Testament apocalyptic prophet, here to give us a reality check, even if it’s too big for us to cash.

But dozing is not an option. After first taking Off-Broadway then Broadway by storm in 2006, winning eight Tony Awards and everything else they hand out, “Spring Awakening” has finally made it to Atlanta. It’s not for everyone — rock musicals with onstage sex, a suicide, an abortion and a song titled “Totally Fucked” rarely are — but it’s like a welcome boot to the ass end of the trend to make all new Broadway musicals based on either old movies or TV series.

The musical is based on an obscure 1891 play by German playwright Frank Wedekind. With its candid views on sex, rebellion and the inner lives of adolescents, the Victorians couldn’t handle it and either shunned it or censored it; frankly, it still can be jarring in the way it peers into the jumbled thoughts and dreams of young people.

The show adds contemporary music by rocker Duncan Shiek and lyricist Steven Sater, a lot of it stunning, but the setting is still small-town Germany in the 1890s, where boys and girls are educated separately, and strictly. Much of how teenagers live has changed since then — headmasters don’t cane them any more for talking back. But so much more has remained exactly the same, especially that overwhelming desire to be initiated into the mysteries of sex and adulthood, and the equally overwhelming fear of the same, and that is what makes “Spring Awakening” so potent.

The play deals with sex as the primal, life-changing force that it is, rather than with the snickering leer that pervades so much of our modern pop culture. The first big blow-out in the show is “The Bitch of Living” — pictured above — a song about lust, masturbation and frustration, and the boys’ thrashing choreography is more mosh pit than de Mille.

A girl named Martha sings a haunting song about how her father is sexually abusing her, but no one in the play helps her. Most memorably, the awkward seduction and simulated but realistic sex scene between the teen hero, Melchior, and heroine, Wendla, that ends Act One feels like it pulls the oxygen from the audience; you can hear a couple of thousand people begin to breathe again when it’s over.

But it’s not just sex. These young people, trapped in a repressive society where teachers and parents leave no escape hatch, are questioning authority, politics, religion. They’re waking up to more than just their hormones; they’re awakening to the vast promise of the world outside of Latin class.

Christy Altomare in "Spring Awakening"

The national touring company is up to the tough demands of the show. Christy Altomare has a ravishing voice and presence as Wendla. (On Broadway, Lea Michele originated the role, then went on to star as Rachel in the Fox TV show “Glee.”) As Melchior’s tortured friend Moritz, Taylor Trensch is fantastic, looking like a 19th-century Eraserhead but stomping the stage like AC/DC’s Angus Young when he gets a solo. Jake Epstein, who usually plays Melchior on the tour, is on vacation this week and understudy Matt Shingledecker is stepping up; on opening night he started a bit wobbly but grew much stronger, until it no longer mattered that he was an understudy.

“I’m gonna bruise you, / You’re gonna be my bruise,” Melchior sings to Wendla, and the line is repeated later by other characters. That’s such a classic adolescent line, and “Spring Awakening” is a musical aimed mainly at adolescents — and those adults who have not forgotten that part of their soul. Despite its explicitness, I recommend it for high school students, although I can guarantee that parents and teens who watch it together are going to be deeply uncomfortable.

Certainly Kenny Leon isn’t into it for the pull of the past. His new version of “Our Town” at True Colors Theatre Company, playing at Atlanta’s Southwest Arts Center through March 21, isn’t particularly revolutionary — mixed-race casts have already been done — but clean, affirming and present-tense. He stirs in lots of extra music, including some deliberate anachronisms designed to tickle us, and adds a nice wrinkle in Act 3 when a real breakfast is cooked onstage, the smell wafting out into the auditorium and emphasizing the point of the scene in an unexpected way.

But for the most part, Atlanta’s celebrated theatrical mogul lets Wilder’s play speak its simple truths that we never seem to listen to but cannot hear enough, summed up in Emily Webb’s final monologue: “We don’t have time to look at one another … Oh, earth, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it — every, every minute?”

Of course we don’t. We didn’t in 1913, when Emily makes her lament, or in 1938, when “Our Town” debuted on Broadway and won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, and certainly not today, in what Leon calls in his program notes “our fast-paced, Blackberry-run world.”

The town is Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, and in True Colors’ world not only is it an easy-going racial mix, but a stew of accents. Some of the cast sound Yankee, some Southern, and it really doesn’t matter. Nor does it matter that the key role of the Stage Manager, who explains everything to us, has been split in two, between Daniel Thomas May (white) and Ellis Eugene Williams (black), and that neither actor reverts to the sort of suspender-snapping aw-shucks shtick that the role usually brings out.

The cast is wonderful, but two actors need to be singled out. Jmichael as Simon Stimson, the town drunk and church organist, finds that sweet spot of getting lots of laughs and maintaining dignity. And Bethany Anne Lind, as Emily, is simply adorable and completely believable as a teenager. I’ve always thought Wilder loved Emily above all his other “Our Town” characters, and a great Emily goes a long way toward making a great “Our Town.”

An integrated cast, a hodgepodge of accents, a couple of songs that wouldn’t be written until decades after the play is set: Wilder would approve. He wanted universalism, not verisimilitude. “ ‘Our Town’ is not offered as a picture of life in a New Hampshire village,” he wrote in his preface to the play. “When you emphasize place in the theatre, you drag down and limit and harness time to it. You thrust the action back into past time, whereas it is precisely the glory of the stage that it is always ‘now’ there.” In True Colors’ “Our Town,” it is always “now” there, and pretty glorious.

Anne Horak as Inga and Roger Bart as Dr. Frankenstein

Producers, the real ones, love these shows because the audience already knows and presumably loves the basic franchise. But beware the double-edged sword: The musical also has to compete with the audience’s fond memory of the original, and there “Young Frankenstein,” which is playing at Atlanta’s Fox Theatre through Sunday (Jan. 31), stumbles.

The 1974 original was Brooks’ best movie: a sly, loving send-up of classic monster movies of the 1930s, shot in gorgeous black and white, packed with insider gags and starring Gene Wilder, Marty Feldman, Cloris Leachman, Madeline Kahn, Peter Boyle, Gene Hackman and Teri Garr at their comedic best. The Broadway version, adapted by Brooks the master himself, is enjoyable and not quite the turkey that some New York critics labeled it, but pale and unimaginative compared to both the movie and to what Brooks did in revamping “The Producers.”

A chorus line in Mel Brooks' "Young Frankenstein," directed by Susan Stroman. Photos by Paul Kolnik

Brooks wrote all of the songs, and they sound pretty much the same. The staging and choreography offer plenty of sensory overload, but most of the big numbers have a generic feel, and while the lyrics are frequently clever, there isn’t a memorable melody to be found. With the exception, of course, of “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” courtesy of Irving Berlin. Or, as fans already know it here, “ ’Uttin’ on duh Itttz!”

Brooks also hasn’t added much new humor to the musical, except for some amusing double-entendre throwaways, and what’s here hasn’t been recycled as well as Eric Idle did in “Spamalot.” The two source movies, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” (for “Spamalot”) and “Young Frankenstein,” are of the same era and have been nearly memorized by devotees, so the element of surprise is gone. But the Python silliness came alive on the stage, while most of “Young Frankenstein’s” jokes feel like they still belong on the screen, like the horses that whinny in terror every time Frau Blucher’s name is mentioned.

The cast for Atlanta is blameless, and a blast. Reprising from Broadway are the actors playing the three main roles: Roger Bart as Dr. Frankenstein, Marietta’s Shuler Hensley as The Monster and Cory English as Igor. They all sing and dance at a level that Gene Wilder, Peter Boyle and Marty Feldman, respectively, could not have approached, but the show mainly made me want to see the movie again, for those loving close-ups of Feldman’s googly eyes and Wilder’s mouth-frothing speeches.

It’s all a long way from a cappella’s roots in early church music (the term means “from the chapel” in Italian). But the blending of strong human voices in intricate harmonies appeals to something deep in our brains, whether it’s Gregorian chant or the Drifters.

In “Avenue X,” we’re in Brooklyn in 1963, where African-Americans have recently moved in to a traditionally Italian neighborhood. The two ethnic groups are distrustful of one another, to say the least, but both are rich in musical heritage. On the Italian side, Pasquale (Nick Spangler), Chuck (Jeremy Cohen) and Ubazz (Steve French) have a little street-corner group they hope to enter in a local contest, while Pasquale’s sister Barbara (Rebecca Blouin) mainly just dreams of escaping the stifling neighborhood, with its chain-link fences and butcher shop smells.

Across the sidewalk, Roscoe (Lawrence Clayton) and his wife Julia (Neda Spears) have recently moved in from Harlem, along with Julia’s teenage son Milton (J.D. Goldblatt) and family friend Winston (J.D. Webster). Through their love of the sounds of their own voices, and how they can blend, Pasquale and Milton become friends, bridging the ethnic gap like Tony and Maria in “West Side Story,” with results that work out about as happily as it did for those two.

The story for “Avenue X” is ridiculously thin, despite having been reworked from the original for this new production, according to Wendell Brock’s article in the AJC.

Very little happens plot-wise in Act 1, except for set-up. Then in Act 2, big chunks of drama are heaved into place, building up to a violent climax that feels like it flew in from Planet What-the-Hell-Just-Happened. The ending doesn’t feel at all organic with what’s come before, and is a major flaw.

Despite that, there is much to love here, all of it musical. The 21 original songs by Ray Leslee and John Jiler span a nice range that includes doo-wop, gospel and r&b, the ingredients that combined to make early rock ‘n’ roll such a heady blast. The songs are mostly simple rather than sophisticated, which is true to the style of the era. But the vocal arrangements by Darryl Jovan Williams, who also did “Jesus Christ Superstar Gospel” for the Alliance, are just sublime, and the performers are perfectly miked, their voices filling the theater.

Winston (J.D. Webster), Milton (J.D. Goldblatt), Roscoe (Lawrence Clayton), Pasquale (Nick Spangler) and Ubazz (Steve French) unite their voices in a “battle-of-the-bands” competition.

As the star-crossed friends, Goldblatt and Spangler lead the ensemble, but Lawrence Clayton steals the show as Roscoe, a middle-aged African-American man who has bottled up a lifetime of disappointment. He first shines on a deliberately hokey old-school number, “Command Me,” which he invests with both humor and dignity, and by the time he gets to his big number, “Stay,” he not only commands the stage with his physicality and voice, but several acres of Midtown as well. In the creaky second act, his monologue about how his singing career was cut short is the non-singing high point of the show.

“Avenue X” has some worthwhile points to make about race, even if not particularly startling ones. You should see it to hear it, more than to reflect on it.