E-Mail This Article to a Friend Bad Dates and a Dream Looking at Boston’s winter stages BY LIZA WEISSTUCH

Before setting down for that long winter’s nap, treat your wakeful eyes to a feast. A medley of flavors awaits, from fanciful escapades to dramas new and traditional to comedies of manners.

The gorging begins this weekend with an encounter with luckless love — make that many encounters — at the Huntington Theatre. The company offers Julie White revisiting her role in Theresa Rebeck’s Bad Dates (January 2–February 1). In this Sex and the City–esque monologue, a middle-aged single mom and restaurateur in Manhattan details her dealings with a catalogue of quirky losers. Love is also on the rocks circa 1930 at the Lyric Stage, where passion and propriety clash in Noël Coward’s Private Lives (January 2-31) with Paula Plum and Michael Hammond. The exploits of Coward’s classic couple are a far cry from the genteel appearances exhibited by two women cohabitating in David Mamet’s 19th-century-set Boston Marriage (February 12–March 7) at Merrimack Repertory Theatre.

Passion takes a musical spin through Urinetown (January 6-18) at the Colonial Theatre (see Sally Cragin’s preview on page 8). The Tony Award–winning tale of want and, uh, waste spoofs grandiose musicals like West Side Story and Brecht’s theater of provocation. After Urinetown departs the Colonial, Twyla Tharp’s interpretation of Billy Joel’s music, Movin’ Out, (March 2–April 10), moves in.

If you want to see how Urinetown burlesques the German spirit, Brecht’s genuine article is on display at New Repertory Theatre. Artistic director Rick Lombardo directs The Threepenny Opera (January 7–February 8), a bleak satirical vision of the bourgeois set in London to Kurt Weill’s cabaret-kissed score.

Visions of a more whimsical nature twirl onto the stage at the American Repertory Theatre, where acclaimed choreographer Martha Clarke pays a visit to direct A Midsummer Night’s Dream (January 10–February 28). Set to music, the production lifts Puck, Hippolyta, and company, and Shakespeare’s comic verse, to new heights with aerial choreography. Cirque Éloize also takes advantage of air space when it ascends with Nomade: At Night the Sky Is Endless (January 20-25) at the Wilbur Theatre. The Quebec troupe merges circus clowning with elegant acrobatics for a fantasy-laced escape.

There’s little likelihood of escape in Mobius’s Descent/Dissent (January 29–February 7). Mari Novotny-Jones and Milan Kohout display Eastern European influence in their metaphysical, multimedia investigation of the nature of dissent through a descent into political and personal realms. We can only guess that escape is what the brothers in Richard Greenberg’s The Dazzle (January 22–February 8) were going for. Stoneham Theatre tackles the play, which delves into the true story of the peculiar Collyer brothers’ fall from high society. They were found dead in their Harlem estate amid 131 tons of garbage, which one of them rigged to trap trespassers.

Trespassers loom in the mind in Conspiracy of Memory (February 6-22), Boston Theatre Works’ premiere of Steven Bogart’s drama about a Holocaust survivor grappling with Alzheimer’s.

Winter winds and chilly reminiscences also blow curtains at the Boston Center for the Arts. Zeitgeist goes Far Away (January 3-24) with Caryl Churchill’s drama about a woman scarred by what she witnessed as a child. SpeakEasy has a he-said/she-said chronicle of a marriage set to music in The Last 5 Years (January 30–February 28). After that rocky tour down memory lane, it’s off to Our Lady of 121st Street (March 5-27). Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Off Broadway comedy has its own nostalgic twist as it tells of old chums reuniting for a teacher’s wake. Just one snag: where’s the body?

Hitches galore interfere with Paddy’s plan to get his pal to join his booming gigolo business in Sùgán Theatre Company’s Gigolo Confessions of Baile Bréag (January 30–February 28), the third installment of award-winning local scribe Ronan Noone’s Ireland-based trilogy. His Irish predecessors are accounted for at Trinity Repertory, where Brian Dennehy appears on a double bill of one-man pieces by Eugene O’Neill and Sean O’Casey in Hughie/A Pound on Demand (February 20–March 28). Also going solo is Annette Miller as Diana Vreeland in the Nora Theatre’s Full Gallop (January 8–February 1).

The landscape is lush where dancers gallop. World Music (617-876-4275) has new works by locals in Dance Straight Up! (January 17-18) and its annual Flamenco Festival (January 29–February 3). Then the Mark Morris Dance Group leaps into the Shubert Theatre (March 11-14), and Boston Ballet kicks off its spring season at the Wang Theatre with Val Caniparoli’s Lady of the Camellias (March 18-21 and April 1-4).