There’s nothing like a good French farce to clear the palate – and the head – after a season of bruising political shenanigans and serious bad news.

North Coast Rep has just what the doctor ordered: Marc Camoletti’s hilarious Don’t Dress For Dinner, playing through Sunday, Nov. 16, impeccably directed by Rosina Reynolds.

Once described as “a typical French farce: six actors, five doors and everyone ends up in their underwear,” Don’t Dress For Dinner features plans gone awry, mistaken identities and attempted infidelity. It demands impeccable comedic timing. This cast does not disappoint.

In a converted farmhouse outside Paris, Bernard (Phil Johnson) has arranged a tryst with mistress Suzanne (Amanda Sitton) while his wife Jacqueline (Lisel Gorell-Getz) conveniently visits her mother. Bernard has thoughtfully hired a cordon bleu chef named Suzette (Jacque Wilke) to add class to their evening repast.

Bernard has arranged cover in the person of best friend Robert (Christopher M. Williams), who thinks he’s been invited for guys’ night. Bernard doesn’t know Robert and Jacqueline are having an affair, so when Robert shows up before Bernard can whisk Jacqueline off to the train station, she cancels her plans and stays home.

When Suzanne arrives, Bernard introduces her as the cook and the later arrival (the real cook, Suzette) as a guest.

Add to the double attempted infidelities the inevitable confusion of two women called Suzy and the fact that everyone has something to hide, and you have ... well, a ménage à quatre (plus one) with questionable sleeping arrangements, a dinner of uncertain quality and sight gags galore. Oh, and there’s the matter of Suzette’s husband George (Matt Thompson). It’s a recipe for, well, for farce.

Goofy? Oh, yes. And wordy, and funny, and fast-paced, and wonderful. It’s no wonder that Don’t Dress For Dinner ran for seven years in London’s West End.

Reynolds could hardly ask for a better production team or cast. Marty Burnett’s multi-doored wonder of a set conveys the right elegantly rustic feel; Michelle Hunt Souza’s costumes are lovely ... and loopy, as needed, and perfect.

This is an outstanding ensemble cast without a single weak link. Johnson is properly harried and a little nerdy as Bernard; Sitton terrific as the ditzy Suzanne, who gets roped into pretending to be a chef; Gorell-Getz a perfect Jacqueline; Williams perhaps the only sympathetic character as the patsy Robert; Thompson hilarious as George, the hulking husband of Suzette. Wilke carries the brunt of the farce as Suzette, who is conned into pretending to be a whole series of people, all of whom she carries off with fine comedic technique. Wilke is new to this area; I hope she returns soon.

If you’re as exhausted with serious topics as I, or if you’d just like an evening of laughs, North Coast Rep is the place to be.

Don’t Dress For Dinner plays through Sunday, Nov. 16, at North Coast Repertory Theatre. Shows Thursday through Saturday are at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 2 p.m. For more information, visit www.gaylesbiantimes.com/links/1089.

Writing teachers always tell you to write what you know. Nobody did that more consistently than Edward Kleban.

“Edward who?” you ask.

Songwriter/lyricist Kleban wrote more than 100 songs, but is remembered for one thing: the lyrics for A Chorus Line, which won him (and composer Marvin Hamlisch) a Tony in 1976. He never achieved his goal of writing both words and music for a Broadway show.

A Class Act is a biomusical about the life and career of this almost-great songwriter who died in 1987 at the age of 48. The show was put together by his longtime companion Linda Kline and Lonny Price, artistic director of New York’s Musical Theater Works.

San Diego State University’s drama department presents A Class Act through Sunday, Nov. 9, in the Experimental Theatre. Paula Kalustian directs.

Artists are often difficult, usually self-absorbed, sometimes even crazy. Kleban was all of those things, in addition to nebbishy, witty and sometimes just a pain in the patootie.

Set at his memorial service, friends come to remember (and, as it turns out, practically roast) him, using his songs to tell his story (perhaps no songwriter wrote more about himself than did Kleban).

It’s a mixed bag of an evening: often engaging, rather too long (2-1/2 hours) and musically somewhat uneven, with 20-plus songs and a medley from A Chorus Line. Some of the songs are terrific, such as “The Next Best Thing To Love” (sung beautifully by Nancy Snow as Kleban’s muse Sophie), “Broadway Boogie Woogie (Kyrsten Hafso as Lucy) and “Better” (which Stephen Sondheim reportedly wishes he had written), with lyrics like “I’ve been healthy and in pain/Pain is reason to complain/Ask someone who’s been insane/Sane is better.” Ira Spector, playing Kleban, sings that one. Some are less so, such as the sappy “Follow Your Star,” sung by Snow and Spector.

A Class Act also features Michael Bennett (Billy Thompson) and Marvin Hamlisch (Brandon Joel Maier) from the Chorus Line days, as well as an assortment of fellow wannabe songwriters in a BMI Musical Theater Workshop taught by Lehman Engel (a solid Joe Joyce).

This is an odd bird of a show memorializing what could be considered the Salieri of the musical theater world. The cast does a fine job and so does the small but terrific combo (Billy Thompson, Wendy Thomson and Jeremy Reinbolt).

A Class Act plays through Sunday, Nov. 9, at SDSU’s Experimental Theatre. Shows run Nov. 6 through 8, at 8 p.m.; matinee Sunday, Nov. 9, at 2 p.m. For more information, visit www.gaylesbiantimes.com/links/1089.

Front-row patrons at Water & Power got a little more than they bargained for on opening night when the stage “rain” cascaded a bit too close for comfort, inspiring one woman to seek refuge on higher ground.

Water & Power, by Culture Clash’s Richard Montoya, plays through Sunday, Nov. 16, at San Diego Repertory Theatre, directed by Sam Woodhouse.

The L.A.-based troupe known for multicultural satire here takes a turn for the serious in an underwritten story about power, politics and the realities of the L.A. power pyramid.

Water, aka Gilbert (Richard Trujillo) and Power, aka Gabriel Garcia (Herbert Siguenza), so nicknamed by their father because “without water there is no power and without power, there is no water” wanted his boys to make a buck and make a difference; instead, both have wound up on the seamy side of politics and the law.

Gabriel is an L.A. cop, violent by nature, who talks with his fists (or more permanent means) when no one will listen. Gilbert is a senator, currently trying to maintain a green zone in an area where The Fixer (Mike Genovese), a developer, wants to put a condo forest. (Genovese, resplendent in a white ice cream suit Ray Bradbury would have loved, plays his power broker to the hilt in a terrific performance.)

There is not much question how this will turn out nor (in my mind, anyway) that papa would not be happy with the “difference” his boys have made. Along for the ride are a young deer dancer (Marc Alexander Gonzalez, who also plays the brothers as kids in flashbacks) and the wheelchair-bound street philosopher Norte/Sur (Bobby Plasencia), crippled by Power some years before. But at the end, the question I was left with was, “¿Y qué?”

Playwright Montoya has said he has “a real yearning to drive a stake through the heart of the notion that Culture Clash is a comedy troupe.” To me, Water & Power plays like a pile of one-liners strung together with a not-quite-clear plot that left me wondering exactly what point Montoya wanted to make.

This show is a couple of rewrites away from ready for prime time.

Water & Power runs through Nov. 16 at San Diego Repertory Theatre. Shows are Wednesday and Sunday at 7 p.m.; Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; matinee Sunday at 2 p.m. For more information, visit www.gaylesbiantimes.com/links/1089.