E-Mail This Article to a Friend Winter stages (continued)

Now we’ll zoom ahead a few centuries — and back to America — for another satire. Broadway in Boston hosts a return engagement of Mel Brooks’s The Producers (February 22 through March 6). Bialystock and Bloom, those screwball impresarios of theatrical duds, will once again create "Springtime for Hitler" at the Colonial Theatre. Another Manhattan-set musical, Sweet Charity, will be calling all "real big spenders!" when it stops at the Colonial (March 18 through 27) on its way to Broadway. Married with Children’s Christina Applegate stars as 1960s-style dancehall hostess and Bridget Jones precursor Charity Hope Valentine in the show penned by Neil Simon, with score by Cy Coleman.

For a more contemporary representation of American life, New Rep has Suzan-Lori Parks’s Pulitzer-winning Topdog/Underdog (February 23 through March 27), a co-production with Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre and Providence’s Trinity Rep (where it plays January 7 through February 13). Parks’s jazzy, hard-hitting comic fable introduces us to two African-American brothers, Lincoln and Booth, both hustlers by trade. As they trade the secrets of three-card monte, Parks dissects the American Dream by bringing matters of sibling rivalry and black identity into their scheme.

Contemporary Manhattan looms in SpeakEasy Stage Company’s area premiere of Tristine Skyler’s The Moonlight Room (January 28 through February 19). An Off Broadway hit last season, the play tracks 24 hours in a New York hospital waiting room as two teens await news of the fate of a friend. And one of New York’s home-town heroes steps up to the plate at the Wilbur Theatre in Nobody Don’t Like Yogi (March 1 through 6). Tony winner Ben Gazzara portrays Yogi Berra, telling the legend’s personal story upon his first return to Yankee Stadium 14 years after his final trek off the field.

Long before he suited up as beloved Number 8, Gazzara won acclaim as the self-destructive George in a 1976 Broadway revival of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? A new Broadway-bound production of that exercise in marital fisticuffs stops at the Colonial Theatre (February 10 through March 6), with the physically gifted Bill Irwin as George and Kathleen Turner as his lovely if rancorous wife, Martha.

Another American classic is at the Lyric Stage Company. Vincent Ernest Siders and Nancy E. Carroll turn on the Southern charm in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (January 7 through February 5), which will be directed by Eric Engel. The Lyric follows with Red Herring (February 18 through March 19), Michael Hollinger’s noir comedy that braids three love stories and a murder mystery into the fabric of a nuclear-espionage plot to reveal how marriages are almost as explosive as nuclear gadgets. Set in 1952, the play involves Senator Joe McCarthy’s daughter’s engagement to a Russian spy. Paranoia also runs high in the Huntington’s production of Trumbo (February 8 through 27), a one-man show that stars Tony winner Brian Dennehy as the celebrated screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who in 1947 scored himself a role with the notorious Hollywood Ten for taking a stand against the blacklist.

Just when you think you can’t brave one more night of winter chill, SpeakEasy warms up the Calderwood Pavilion with Melinda Lopez in Nilo Cruz’s Pulitzer-winning Anna in the Tropics (March 4 through 26). The lyrical piece transports us to a Florida cigar factory in 1929, where Cuban immigrants rolling cigars are visited by lectores who educate them by reading aloud. Exposure to Anna Karenina proves to be particularly life-altering for some of the listeners. Then there’s Crash Arts’ annual "Flamenco Festival," which this year comprises The Four Elements (February 3 and 4), and Flamenco de Cámara (February 5 and 6).

Boston Ballet has a dizzyingly busy month of March, beginning with the romantic fable La Sylphide (March 3 through 13), to be performed in honor of the 200th anniversary of Danish choreographer Auguste Bournonville. Then the company spins into "Fallen Angels" (March 17 through 20), a quartet of pieces that includes two works by Czech choreographer Jirí Kylián. No sooner is all that over than, on April 1, Teatro Lirico d’Europa presents the Russian National Ballet Theatre of Moscow in Swan Lake at the Cutler Majestic Theatre. Meanwhile, the Bank of America’s Celebrity Series brings fêted American choreographers’ troupes to town. Mark Morris Dance Group leaps into the Shubert (March 10 through 13) ahead of Paul Taylor Dance Company (May 20 through 22); and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater makes its annual appearance to rock the Wang (April 19 through 24).