Hollywood agent Diane (Karson St. John) lets you know you’re in for a bumpy ride in her opening monologue, when she speaks of “my client, a rising young movie star who suffers from a slight, recurring case of homosexuality” and who wants to bring his mother to an awards show “so nobody will know he’s gay.”

Douglas Carter Beane’s 2007 play The Little Dog Laughed was nominated for a Tony, and the character Diane provided the vehicle for Julie White’s Best Actress award that year. Small wonder. Diane is a dream role – a shark in stilettos, manipulating actors and playwrights with panache, charm and an iron fist, and St. John makes the most of it.

The Little Dog Laughed is a hilarious and biting satire on the price of stardom.

The client in question, Mitchell (Brian Mackey), is on the brink of stardom, but has mutually exclusive goals: He wants both to be a star and to come out of the closet. One drunken night, he hires rent boy Alex (Bryan Bertone) online, and that’s where the trouble starts.

Their first scene is a wonder of desire and denial, longing and loathing, as the artistic and sexual whores Mitch and Alex try to convince each other they’re really not gay. Alex even has a self-protective (if unsatisfying) on-again, off-again relationship with Ellen (Kelly Iversen), whom he describes (in an on-again, off-again way) as his girlfriend.

The Little Dog Laughed is a wild and dizzymaking verbal romp exploring a world where image is reality, one-upmanship and lying are part of a business model, and refusing to get sucked into the vortex can be costly. More than any play in recent memory, it is a collection of scene gems that actors looking for audition pieces would do well to keep in mind. Where else will you find a character likening Buddhist sand mandalas to the salad-ordering habits of the power-lunch Hollywood set? It’s a brilliant bit – and extremely funny.

Fleming gets the best out of this fine cast. Mackey turns in one of his best performances in recent memory, diving below the surface to the poignancy of Mitch’s need for connection. Bertone’s Alex is the character best grounded in reality, but even he lies to himself. Iversen does what she can with the underwritten role of Ellen.

But this is St. John’s show, and that’s not to slight the other fine performances. Look for her on the dais of the various annual awards shows this year.

No dogs, little or otherwise, laughed in the production of this play. But it’s safe to say that all the people watching it did.

The Little Dog Laughed, directed by Robert Barry Fleming, plays through Sunday, May 31, at Diversionary Theatre. Shows Thursday at 7:30 p.m.; Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 2 and 7 p.m. For tickets call 619-220-0097 or visit www.diversionary.org.

A buttoned-down 25-year-old piano wunderkind suffering early burnout goes to study in Vienna in an effort to re-ignite his lost musical passion in Jon Marans’ Old Wicked Songs, at North Coast Repertory Theatre through May 31. David Ellenstein directs.

Stephen Hoffman (Tom Zohar), a member of the streamlined, hurry-up younger generation, expects to work with a noted pianist, but finds he’s been passed off to decidedly Old School Professor Mashkan (Robert Grossman), whose specialty is vocal training.

Mashkan, noting his student’s pinched and unhappy look, asks why he wears a tie: “It’s strangling you.”

“It reminds me I’m alive,” says Stephen.

Mashkan will spend the next few months teaching this impatient young man that passion comes of the combination of joy and sadness that infuses not only art but all of life. The vehicle will be Robert Schumann’s poetic love song cycle Dichterliebe, set to the poems of Heinrich Heine. Despite his protests, Stephen will learn to put emotion into his voice before he gets to touch the prof’s “very grand Grand piano.”

Schumann’s lovely and poignant song cycle, the third character in this riveting play, was one of Marans’ student projects in Vienna, and lends itself very well to sentimental education in the best sense of the term.

Stephen, who admits that what he does best is imitation, demonstrates that with wonderful, whimsical impressions of Alfred Brendel, Vladimir Horowitz and Glenn Gould. But when it comes to his own playing, Stephen’s previous no-nonsense approach to a piano has been of the pound-it-into-submission variety; here he will learn that “she must be flirted with, not pounced on” and that playing a piano should be considered a form of seduction.

Old Wicked Songs, a 1996 Pulitzer Prize finalist, is set in 1986, when Karl Waldheim was running for president of Austria, inspiring discussions of Waldheim’s Nazi past and whether it will or should affect the outcome of the election.

Zohar and Grossman are terrific foils for each other – the brash arrogance of youth confronting the rounded (albeit it a bit crusty) experience of age. Approaching the truth of the music frees them each to reveal their own personal truths.

Old Wicked Songs is a lovely piece, beautifully performed, leaving us with this profound observation: “Art consists of knowing the basic rules and realizing when it is time to deviate from them.”

Old Wicked Songs plays through Sunday, May 31, at North Coast Repertory Theatre. Shows Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 2 and 7 p.m. For tickets, call 858-481-1055 or visit www.northcoastrep.org.