THE SPARROW | This Stoneham Theatre entry from Nathan Allen, Chris Mathews, and Jake Minton is not another Edith Piaf bio-drama but rather a story of teens and telekinesis, with orphan Emily Book returning to the town she grew up in for her final year of high school — only it seems she’s not the same girl she was when she left. Allen himself directs. | Stoneham Theatre, 395 Main St, Boston | 617.279.2200 | October 22–November 8 | Curtain 7:30 pm Thurs | 8 pm Fri | 4 + 8 pm Sat | 2 pm Sun | $38-$44; $34-$40 seniors; $20 students
SPEED-THE-PLOW | Recently revived on Broadway with Entourage’s Jeremy Piven and Mad Men’s Elizabeth Moss, David Mamet’s scathing 1988 indictment of business as practiced Hollywood-style, with plenty of testosterone, gets a New Repertory Theatre outing directed by Robert Walsh, with Aimee Doherty as Karen, Gabriel Kuttner as Charlie, and Robert Pemberton as Bobby. | Arsenal Center for the Arts, 321 Arsenal St, Watertown | 617.923.8487 | October 18–November 7 | Curtain 7:30 Mon [October 19] + Wed [November 4] | 2 pm [October 22] + 7:30 pm Thurs | 8 pm Fri | 3:30 pm [no October 24] + 8 pm Sat | 2 + 7:30 pm [no evening October 25] Sun | $35-$54
SWEENEY TODD | Metro Stage Company warms up for Halloween with the Stephen Sondheim/Hugh Wheeler musical that’s surely sounded the death knell for the barbershop shave. | Cambridge Family YMCA Theatre, 820 Mass Ave, Cambridge |www.metrostagecompany.com| October 16-24 | Curtain 7:30 pm Thurs | 8 pm Fri-Sat | 2 pm Sun | $24; $20 students, seniors
VALET OF THE DOLLS | Ryan Landry’s Gold Dust Orphans pan Jacqueline Susann territory with this spoof starring Afrodite as Anne Welles, Penny Champayne as Jennifer North, Liza Lott as Neely O’Hara, “and introducing Ryan Landry as Miss Helen Lawson.” Ryan needs an introduction? Anyway, “only one will win that special parking space . . . that space reserved only for the STAR! . . . And guarded by . . . the ‘Valet of the Dolls.’ ” | Machine, 1254 Boylston St, Boston |www.brownpapertickets.com| October 23–November 22 | Curtain 8 pm Fri-Sat [7 pm October 31] | 5 pm Sun | $35
NOW PLAYING
BASH | Theatre on Fire opens its fifth-anniversary season at the Charlestown Working Theater with Neil LaBute’s triptych of one-acts in which characters reveal their most horrendous acts to unseen interlocutors. In A Gaggle of Saints, two Boston College students in evening dress recount a trip to New York for a “bash” at the Plaza Hotel that ends in a different kind of bash, the beating-to-death of a gay man. Iphigenia in Orem finds a Utah businessman cornering a strangely inert stranger in a hotel lobby at a convention for the purpose of talking his ear off. And in Medea Redux, a woman who’s been convicted of murder tells how at 13 she was seduced by her high-school English teacher. Darren Evans directs. | Charlestown Working Theater, 442 Bunker Hill St, Charlestown | 866.811.4111 | Through October 17 | Curtain 7:30 pm Thurs-Sat | $20; $15 Thurs
