Summer is the silly season. If you doubt that, note that two of this week’s reviews are for wildly goofy and sometimes over-the-top shows presented by ordinarily perfectly respectable companies.

At Swedenborg Hall, Lotus Theatre Collective and Talent to aMuse present the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) through Sunday, Aug. 29, directed by Sophie Anderson-Ziebell.

Complete Works is a theatrical roast of the greatest dramatist in the English language, in which three actors (Tom Hall, Kevin Six and Tyler Richards Hewes) purport to present all 37 of the Bard’s plays in two hours.

That’s right: all 37. How to accomplish this? Compression of the most desperate sort: The 16 comedies have been shortened to a single sentence: The Comedy of Two Well-Measured Gentlemen Lost in the Merry Wives of Venice on a Midsummer’s Twelfth Night in Winter (or The Love Boat Goes to Verona).

Then there’s Titus Andronicus as a cooking show (“As a young man, Shakespeare went through his Quentin Tarantino phase”), and royal succession in the history plays as a football game with all of Will’s kings as players?

But it’s the tragedies most people think of when the Bard is mentioned, so the concentration is there. Lest you start to hyperventilate at the thought of Shakespearean tragedy, relax, breathe deeply and know that this is high energy but hardly highbrow entertainment. “We’ve found that the comedies aren’t half as funny as the tragedies,” they tell us, and, performed this way, they’re right. Outlandish costumes, goofy props, crazy narration and audience interaction combine to raise the silly quotient. Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Othello and Antony and Cleopatra have never gotten such short shrift.

Hamlet is treated as an audience-participation piece: It drags a “volunteer” Ophelia out of the audience and teaches her to scream while the rest of the audience divides into a three-part chorus, one shouting: “Cut the crap, Hamlet! My biological clock is ticking, and I want babies now!”

I warned you: Highbrow it ain’t. But it has been updated with references to Sarah Palin, Bill Clinton Dick Cheney and (God help us) waterboarding.

Hall gets to be the goofiest, playing the women and a temperamental actor who runs out of the theater in order to avoid doing the Hamlet section (Hewes is dispatched to drag him back). Six represents the voice of reason, or at least some level of responsibility, attempting to signal the audience when one colleague or the other gets out of hand. Hewes acts as narrator and tries to keep the other two on track.

This isn’t your English teacher’s Shakespeare, but for sheer goofy fun it’s hard to beat.

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) plays through Saturday, Aug. 29, at Swedenborg Hall, 1531 Tyler Ave. in Hillcrest. Shows Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. For tickets, call 858-245-4436 or 619-282-8889 or visit www.lotustheatrecollective.com.

Once in a while, an actor gets a part that sticks with him long after the final curtain. Sometimes it becomes a near obsession.

So it was with BD Wong in 1982, the first time he saw Tom Cone’s Herringbone, an offbeat piece about vaudeville, possession, tap dancing and personality integration. He wanted to play it.

Wong plays Herringbone for the fourth time through Sunday, Aug. 30, at La Jolla Playhouse’s Sheila and Hughes Potiker Theatre. Roger Rees (who recently helmed Peter and the Starcatchers here) directs.

George, aka Herringbone (named for his first suit), an adult song-and-dance vaudevillian, narrates and plays all 11 roles in his story beginning in 1929, “the year panic became respectable.”

When 8-year-old George wins a speech contest (and a $25 Baby Bond), a vaudevillian named Mr. Mosely (whose two-man act was called the Chicken and the Frog) appears, offering to make the lad an actor if the parents will only cash in that bond.

George has a long list of things he wants to be: prizefighter, famous writer, deep sea diver, race driver among them, not including his mother’s choice – president of the U.S. Actor is not on that list.

But Mosely takes him on, and before he knows it, little George is possessed by Mosely’s former vaudeville partner – “The Frog,” a midget hoofer named Lou, who makes George’s feet perform tap dancing magic. Thus begins the struggle for George’s soul, told in 14 songs, several dance numbers and a riveting narration.

It’s a remarkable piece of writing and an astonishing performance. Adding immeasurably are the songs by Skip Kennon and clever lyrics by Ellen Fitzhugh and the musicians: Thumbs DuBois (Dan Lipton) on piano, Slim (Benjamin Campbell) on bass and Patty (Brad Briscoe) on drums and percussion.

The set is simplicity itself – the stage is black with a single, stand-alone door. Pianist Lipton (playing this difficult score from memory) is on a turntable, sometimes rotating around the perimeter.

This is theater at its most basic and most difficult – one actor alone, with a few musicians and no safety net. Herringbone will make you think, feel, laugh, perhaps cry and most of all cheer BD Wong, the musicians, Rees and everyone connected with this show.

Herringbone plays through Sunday, Aug. 30, at the Sheila and Hughes Potiker Theatre at La Jolla Playhouse. Shows Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.; Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 7 p.m; matinées Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m. For tickets, call 858-550-1010 or visit www.lajollaplayhouse.org.

Something sinister is afoot at Mandacrest, the English estate owned by Lord Edgar Hillcrest (John Cariani) and his new wife Lady Enid (Jeffrey M. Bender).

For one thing, that portrait of previous wife Irma Vep staring down from the wall is, well, kind of creepy, and Lady Enid wants it removed. The housekeeper, Jane Twisden (Cariani) misses her previous mistress: “I can’t bear the thought of her in a grave. She was always so afraid of the dark.” Jane has not taken well to Lady Enid.

A wolf seems to haunt the manor, and there’s Nicodemus the peg-legged caretaker (Bender), who has an unusual relationship with the full moon.

Are you getting the idea? It’s Charles Ludlam’s hilarious send-up of Victorian and gothic parlor mysteries, The Mystery of Irma Vep, playing through Sept. 6 at the Museum of Art’s Copley Auditorium. Henry Wishcamper directs.

Bender and Cariani play seven characters between them in this tour de force romp that careens through some of the best-known works in the genre including Rebecca, The Mummy’s Curse and Wolf Man. It’s all very silly and a whale of a lot of fun.

A jaunt to Egypt in the second act nets Lord Edgar a pristine tomb, complete with mummy (thanks to mysterious local expert Alcazar). Of course, Lord Edgar ships the mummy home as a souvenir, just in time to find not just the wolves getting out of control, but Jane, Lady Enid and Nicodemus as well. Then there’s the revelation that Irma Vep is anagrammatic for (wait for it) vampire.

The show’s design team should take a bow. Robin Vest’s set is terrific – a beautifully appointed English drawing room, with “family portraits” all around, a suit of armor, a “zebra” hide and a stuffed animal. The living room holds a great double-sided settee, a chaise and two intriguing tables with knickknacks.

Likewise, Jenny Mannis’ costumes, Jason Bieber’s lighting and Paul Peterson’s sound design are outstanding.

Dressers and stagehands deserve a hand as well, keeping the show moving by getting the actors in and out of costumes in a flash and providing more hilarity by tossing Nicodemus’ wooden leg into the fray or scaring Lady Enid with a wolf’s head on a stick.

But it’s Bander and Cariani you’ve come to see, and they do not disappoint. The heftier Bender’s elegant Lady Enid in pencil skirt or voluminous gown contrasts with his robed and fezzed Alcazar and the hunched-over Nicodemus with wooden leg and withered hand and, of course, the mummy Pev Amri.

The slighter Cariani knows just how to modify the patrician bearing of Lord Edgar to become convincing as housekeeper Jane, and then sufficiently menacing as an intruder.

Both are excellent at turn-on-a-dime characterizations and accents. They’re obviously having such a good time, it would seem churlish not to join in.

Ludlum once said of his art, “Don’t look for deeper meaning. Just take it at face value.”

If you do that, you’ll have a wonderful time.

The Old Globe Theatre’s production of The Mystery of Irma Vep plays through Sept. 6, at the Museum of Art’s Copley Auditorium. Shows Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday at 7 p.m.; Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; matinées Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m. For tickets, call 619-23-GLOBE or visit www.theoldglobe.org.