JERRY SPRINGER: THE OPERA | Artistic director Paul Daigneault is at the helm of this SpeakEasy Stage Company area premiere of the 2004 Olivier Award–winning London sensation. So how do you exaggerate The Jerry Springer Show? First you give TV's long-running combative confessional such a pottymouth that, subject to the FCC, it would be bleeped from here to eternity. Then you take it to eternity, by means of a second act that finds Springer moderating a Blakean smackdown in Hell. Most important, you plug the lowlife losers, cheaters, and perverts that are the show's 15-minutes-of-fame-seeking fodder and turn their profane, pathetic extrusions into the high art of opera, with influences ranging from Bach and Handel to Gershwin (not to mention jazz, funk, and Busby Berkeley). There has never been anything quite like this wild ride on the back of Jerry Springer from composer Richard Thomas and stand-up comic Stewart Lee. And if SpeakEasy Stage Company doesn't clear every hurdle, it stays in the saddle with an extravagant, large-cast production that includes swirling projections, a hand-held video cam, tap-dancing Ku Klux Klansmen, and something perilously close to an auto-da-fé. | Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont St, Boston | 617.933.8600 | Through June 7 | Curtain 7:30 pm Tues-Thurs | 8 pm Fri | 4 pm [May 30] + 8 pm Sat | 3 pm Sun [June 7] | $51-$54; $46-$49 students, seniors; $30 gallery seats; $14 student rush
MOTHER G | The opening entry in Our Place Theatre Project's ninth annual African-American Theatre Festival is Robert Johnson's play about a choir director in a black Baptist church back in 1963 and the minister — Reverend Mercy — who seduces and then abandons her. Johnson based his story on the true experience of his mother. Our Place artistic director Jacqui Parker is at the helm; musical direction — yes, there's gospel singing — is by Chauncey McGlathery. | BCA Plaza Theatre, 539 Tremont St, Boston | 617.933.8600 | Through June 5 | Curtain 7:30 pm Wed-Thurs | 8 pm Fri-Sat | 3 pm Sun | $15-$35
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING | Actors' Shakespeare Project transfers the Bard's Sicilian comedy to a vaguely 1950s America, where soldiers returning home from a war, show up at a nightclub (with cabaret tables for actors and audience) and couples sway to music of the era and Bobbie Steinbach delivers the play's signature tune, "Sigh no more, ladies," as a jazz number to which listening gents snap their fingers as she turns "Hey nonny, nonny" into Elizabethan scat. And as the sparring Beatrice and Benedick, tart, smart, long-married thespians Paula Plum and Richard Snee are the life of the swank-on-a-shoestring affair, managing to wed Noël Coward–esque sparring to the slapstick of the twin scenes in which, thinking themselves successful eavesdroppers, B&B are tricked into acknowledging their feelings for each other. Some of the comedy feels forced and some of the drama overwrought, but director and designer Benjamin Evett's production concept captures the festive feel of much of the play, and the show beautifully suits the old-fashioned, high-ceilinged elegance of Hibernian Hall. | Roxbury Center for the Arts at Hibernian Hall, 182 Dudley St, Roxbury | 866.811.4111 | Through June 14 | Curtain 1 pm Wed [June 3] | 7:30 pm Thurs-Fri | 2 + 8 pm Sat | 2 pm Sun | $25-$47
