The Berkshire hills are alive with the sound of music as the Williamstown Theatre Festival and Barrington Stage Company launch their summer seasons with musicals. And the Berkshire Theatre Festival does its part in its resurrection of the legendary 20th-century dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, since his ghostly presence is accompanied by snippets from the scores of the ballets he made famous.

Despite the prominence of the gangster Macheath in Der Dreigroschenoper/The Threepenny Opera, the 1928 Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill revision of 18th-century playwright John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, the revival at WTF depends more on the outsized personalities of the quartet of women surrounding him. Jesse L. Martin (of Broadway’s Rent and TV’s Law and Order) portrays Macheath as a dandy, immaculately dressed for a party but missing the ruthless cut of the cloth that might distinguish him from others in his line of work. There is, however, ample compensation from Melissa Errico, of the melting soprano voice and faux virginal air, as Polly; Karen Ziemba, who turns Lucy Brown into a coquette hoping to " remain perpendicular " in her dealings with men; Randy Graff, as the pragmatic Mrs. Peachum; and especially Betty Buckley, who brings the mordant Jenny Diver to life. Buckley’s rendition of " Pirate Jenny " had the opening-night audience holding its collective breath to catch every word, and she looked quite dashing later on in her men’s tuxedo, a visual reference to the European-demi-monde Sapphists of the period immortalized by Marcel Proust. These leading ladies are well supported by David Schramm as Mr. Peachum, majordomo of the London poor; Laurent Giroux as the insinuating Street Singer, who sets the tone from the top with the " Ballad of Mack the Knife " ; and our old friend from his years at American Repertory Theatre, Jack Willis, as the endearingly oafish police commissioner, Tiger Brown.

Director (and former WTF honcho) Peter Hunt concentrates on punching the songs rather than forwarding the plot. Few other summer theaters can afford the dark opulence of a production like this, one that sprinkles stars among a cast of 60, including seven musicians conducted by James Sampliner. The orchestra is perched on the second story of an elaborate multi-leveled set of scaffolds criss-crossed by stairways, ladders, and a series of grids designed by John Conklin and bathed in white and black lighting by Rui Rita that accentuates the shadows.

Even with the frequent references to London landmarks, no in Weimar Germany believed Der Dreigroschenoper was taking place anywhere but in the chaotic milieu of 1920s Germany. Brecht and Weill were holding a theatrical mirror up to the mean and dangerous streets of Berlin, where the masses were marching, stirred to action by the promises of a Communist-tinged future. By costuming the men of the chorus in gray-toned stormtrooper uniforms, Hunt reminds us that Weill’s evocative score, which resonates with the mesmerizing whine of the klezmer bands, would be silenced within a few years of the show’s premiere, when both Brecht and Weill would flee to America. Their defiance and revolution blazed into the American consciousness in 1954 when the first successful English-language production opened Off Broadway, with its sardonic inversion of the Golden Rule: do unto others before they do unto you.

Julianne Boyd, artistic director of Barrington Stage Company, has also reached back into show-biz history to mount Funny Girl, the seldom revived 1964 Jule Styne/Bob Merrill musical biography of Fanny Brice, famed star of the Ziegfeld Follies, who morphed her clowning into the character of Baby Snooks. No doubt the aura that’s grown up around the show’s original staging, which made Barbra Streisand a star, has deterred many directors. Boyd, however, has a secret weapon named Jeanne Goodman in the title role. Like Brice and Streisand, Goodman would have trouble snagging a place as a Ziegfeld showgirl. But she’s blessed with a sensational voice, a face that can’t keep itself from mugging (à la Brice), and a charisma that rockets her right off the stage. The rest of the cast pale into the sepia of faded newsprint by comparison, though Christopher Yates, as Brice’s hustler husband, Nicky Arnstein, tries. And song-and-dance man Craig Waletzko makes a convincing rat-a-tat-tat with his tap shoes as Brice’s best friend, Eddie Ryan.

Isobel Lennart’s book and Bob Merrill’s lyrics are conventional. But Styne’s score offers the poignant ballad " People " and the anthem of independence " Don’t Rain on My Parade. " (It also introduced " You Are Woman, I Am Man " and " Sadie, Sadie, Married Lady. " ) Brice’s mama, skillfully portrayed at BSC by Laura Kenyon, is presented in Funny Girl as a cliché when actually she was no slouch in the formidable-mom department. In real life, the elder Brice ran the family saloons to support her kids while her husband played pinochle; then she left him to start a successful real-estate business.

Funny Girl remains Styne’s attempt to equal the heights of 1959’s Gypsy, which he created with more inspired collaborators, lyricist Stephen Sondheim and librettist Arthur Laurents. The BSC production of the show could use a few more bodies to fill up the unfriendly high-school-auditorium stage of the Consolati Performing Arts Center in Sheffield and a bit more creativity for the Ziegfeld spectacle scene, which is nonetheless enhanced by the gorgeous tenor voice of Luke Longacre.

In 1916, when Nijinsky was touring America as the star of the Diaghilev Ballets Russes, Brice was a headliner in that year’s edition of the Ziegfeld Follies and featured in a number that spoofed the famous dancer. Her star was on the rise; his had only a few more years to burn in public before it was extinguished by the mental illness that would keep him locked up in sanitariums until his death, in 1950.

Unfortunately, Norman Allen’s one-man play, Nijinsky’s Last Dance, now running in the Berkshire Theatre Festival’s intimate Unicorn Theatre, trades on Nijinsky’s madness and his homosexuality without sufficiently emphasizing the genius of the man. Nijinsky was as important for his prescient choreography (especially in L’après-midi d’un faune and Le sacre du printemps), which looked forward to the experimentation in the arts that would follow World War I, as for his virtuosic performances.

In Allen’s condescending play, the role is a tour de force for actor Jeremy Davidson, who bears a striking physical likeness to the many photographs of Nijinsky that have come down to us. (There are no extant films of his dancing.) As the sole actor on stage for 100 minutes without intermission, Davidson also portrays members of the group surrounding and protecting Nijinsky: the impresario Sergei Diaghilev; the ballerina Tamara Karsavina; and Nijinsky’s wife, Romola de Pulszky, who was not a ballerina in Diaghilev’s company, as Allen represents her, but a Ballets Russes groupie who followed the company to South America, where the couple wed.

As Nijinsky, Davidson employs a variety of emotional states, including howling on his knees. The narcissistic lisp he affects to depict the young Nijinsky becoming aware of his sexual attraction gives way to a more satisfactory, clear-voiced discussion of his artistic intentions. Joe Calarco is credited with the show’s direction, but I suspect that choreographer Karma Camp was responsible for Davidson’s startling re-creations of the poses captured by the Baron de Meyer photographs of the dancer in L’après-midi d’un faune. The actor also looks godlike in the nude, his body molded by Daniel MacLean Wagner’s dramatic lighting scheme in a way that suggests the sculptures of the dancer by Auguste Rodin.

The show opens and closes on scenic designer Mike Fagin’s spare setting of a platform that’s backed by a padded wall. Your first glimpse of Nijinsky finds him wrapped in a straitjacket, another overdone image. For those who revere the achievements of the era’s brightest talents, Nijinsky’s Last Dance vibrates with the tinge of exploitation. One might wish that the artist be allowed to rest in peace.