John Waters, the shock jock of American cinema, successfully translated his 1988 film Hairspray to the Broadway stage in 2002, where it has racked up 2,000 performances and counting.

Now his 1990 film Cry-Baby gets a fast-paced and charming stage makeover in La Jolla Playhouse’s latest bound-for-Broadway musical. Set in 1954 Baltimore and directed by Mark Brokaw, this interpretation of the Romeo and Juliet story plays through Dec. 16 at the Mandell Weiss Theatre.

While most theatergoers will be enchanted, hardcore Waters fans will complain that the film script has been run through the washer by writers Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan in an attempt to make it palatable to a mainstream audience. Fortunately, Waters has avoided blandness by hiring “The Daily Show” head writer David Javerbaum, whose speedy, irony-laced lyrics are clever if seldom grungy, with occasional flashes of Waters tastelessness.

Cry-Baby opens at the Anti-Polio Picnic and Vaccination Carnival, where Mrs. Vernon-Williams (Harriet Harris), grandmother of coed Allison (Elizabeth Stanley) announces proudly that “the Baltimore Women’s Club has come out against polio, 50-8.” The squares, led musically by the Whiffles, a Four Lads-like high school quartet, and their full-skirted girlfriends are about to line up for the shot when those bad kids, the Drapes, burst uninvited onto the scene, led by black leather-jacketed Wade “Cry-Baby” Walker (James Snyder) announcing, “Sorry I’m late. I was lookin’ for a place to abandon my car.”

All the squares are properly horrified except pretty blonde Allison, whose fate is sealed as soon as she locks eyeballs with Cry-Baby. “I’m a good girl, but I don’t wanna be,” she says, and soon she’s hanging with an assortment of Waters weirdos including Mona a.k.a. Hatchet-Face (Cristen Paige), with a scar not quite as wide as the Missouri, but still unmissable, Cry-Baby’s perpetually pregnant sister Pepper (Carly Jibson) and the delusional Lenora (Alli Mauzey), sure as can be of things that just ain’t so (notably that Cry-Baby wants her).

The best thing about this show is Rob Ashford’s sparkling choreography, especially in the first act Jukebox Jamboree section. It’s energetic and athletic, and with a graceful bow to Jerome Robbins manages to look both ‘50s and fresh.

The film is notable mostly as Johnny Depp’s breakout film role. This version may well do the same for Sacramento native Cry-Baby James Snyder, who will debut the role on Broadway in spring 2008.

The rest of the cast are seasoned veterans, all terrific. My favorite is Mauzey’s Lenora, crazy as they come and a pleasure to watch. And let’s not forget Harris, whose upper-class snootiness as Mrs. Vernon-Williams can’t hide the fact that deep down there’s a dance in this old dame yet, and a little daring too.

See Cry-Baby here while you can. This is likely to be a hot ticket on Broadway.

Cry-Baby plays through Dec. 16 at La Jolla Playhouse’s Mandell Weiss Theatre. Shows Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.; Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 7 p.m.; matinees Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m. For tickets call (858) 550-1010 or visit www.lajollaplayhouse.org.

“We came through the Depression by the skin of our teeth,” says Sabina (Rebecca Levy), maid of Mr. & Mrs. George Antrobus (Joel Gelman, Michelle Diaz). “One more tight squeeze like that and where will we be?”

One place we’ll be is in the middle of Thornton Wilder’s fanciful yet serious classic The Skin of Our Teeth, playing through December 1 at La Jolla Playhouse’s Potiker Theatre, presented by graduate students of UCSD’s Department of Theatre and Dance, directed by third-year MFA student Sarah Rasmussen.

On one level, The Skin of Our Teeth is a whacked-out time-bending parody of history, geology and the human animal; on another, it’s a plea for reason and humanity written on the brink of U.S. entrance into World War II.

Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus live in Excelsior (suburban New Jersey) with son Henry (Rufio Lerma), daughter Gladys (Liz Elkins), pets mammoth (Christine Herde) and dinosaur (Matthew Bovee) and Sabina, whom George brought home after the rape of the Sabine women. George is the inventor of the wheel, the lever and beer; his wife of the apron. The Antrobuses are about to celebrate their 5,000th wedding anniversary.

If this sounds goofy, it plays that way too. Wilder’s wild and woolly cast includes Sabina, who acts as narrator and Greek chorus, the typical mouthy maid of opera fame; Henry, with a bit of an anti-social temper (he was renamed from Cain after heaving a rock at his brother and killing him); a fortune teller (Lorene Chesley), who can tell the future but not the past; Judge Moses in yarmulke; Homer, a blind, blues-singing beggar with a guitar, and a stage manager (Larry Herron) attempting to hold this motley crew (and the play) together. They spend three acts trying to survive global cooling, avoid drowning in the big flood, and attempting to re-establish some semblance of normal life after the war.

The first audiences in 1943 weren’t sure what to make of this play. The parody is so extreme that it’s easy to miss or ignore the seriousness of Wilder’s points about the man’s inclination toward evil and the love that can overcome it; that reason can overcome the insanity of war, and that man often causes his own problems.

Kudos to Rasmussen for her brisk directorial pacing, scenic designer Kristin Ellert for her terrific off-kilter set with pieces that lean as precariously as the characters’ psyches, and to Rachel Sachar for her fine costumes, especially for the critters.

In this uniformly fine cast, Levy is a standout, but you’ll fall in love with Bovee and Herde as the dinosaur and mammoth. They’re just so darned cute.

Better hurry; only a few performances remain.

The Skin of Our Teeth plays through Dec. 1 at the Sheila & Hughes Potiker Theatre. Shows Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; matinee Dec. 1 at 1 p.m. For tickets call (858) 534-4574.

Multi-talented local theater personality Ruff Yeager has come up with a holiday show that riffs on Dickens (yes, that story), Kurt Weill, Bob Barker, actors, critics and ever so much more in his musical A Christmas Carol: Not-So-Tiny Tim’s Great Big Musical!

The idea, as writer/composer/lyricist/accompanist Yeager tells us at the top, is to draw “the line between life and art,” or maybe to blur it, or to jump back and forth across it.

Never mind, the show is really just A Christmas Carol recast a bit, with Tiny Tim (Fred Harlow) now an adult and acting very much like Scrooge, down to the lines and the penny-pinching ways, and three Scrooges, or actors who have played Scrooge, singing a great song called “The Script’s Gonna Hit the Fan.”

The Cratchits are now the Castillos, or maybe not (Jason Connors and Olivia Espinosa play both couples), the dying little kid is now Rosita (Jessica Lerner), and the Christmas ghosts look remarkably like real folks, not ghostly at all.

This show could stand a rewrite – some of the lines are a bit lame, and what’s the point of making Tiny Tim Scrooge? – but it’s all goofy and fun and the best thing about it is Yeager’s songs, mostly jaunty and clever of lyric. One called “God Bless Us Everyone” had me reaching for a tissue, and “Lousy So-and-So” sounds like it belongs in a Kurt Weill musical. All in all, this is a pleasant Christmas outing.

Vox Nova Theatre Company’s A Christmas Carol: Not-So-Tiny Tim’s Great Big Musical! plays through Dec. 23 at 6th@Penn Theatre. Shows Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 7 p.m.; matinees Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m. For tickets call (858) 539-6251 or visit www.voxnovatheatrecompan.com.