The idea of a girl rock band getting its start in a PTA talent show has a certain appeal, especially when the “girls” in question are a trio of wives singing about the trials of housewifery.

Hope Juber, who was the member of a variety band called The Housewives from 1982-1995, has expanded her experiences with the group into a full-length musical by inventing a (very slight) backstory to prop up what really is a full-length concert. Juber and her friend Ellen Guylas wrote the book; songs and lyrics are by Juber and her husband Laurence (former lead guitarist for Paul McCartney’s Wings).

Following a successful run in Los Angeles, It’s The Housewives! plays through Sunday, Sept. 27, at the Tenth Avenue Theatre. Hope Juber directs.

The plot, such as it is, hinges on a plumber (Tony Cicchetti) who comes to fix the kitchen sink of Becca (Jamey Hood), years after the group disbanded. He recognizes her and offers a discount if she will tell him the real story behind the group and their breakup. This forces Hood to both participate in the exposition and perform as part of the group. It looks a little barebones.

The Housewives – redhead Becca, brunette Lynn (Corinne Dekker) and ditzy blonde Lexie (Jayme Lake) have terrific voices and Sharell Martin’s outrageous costumes add to the humor. The Jubers’ songs, intended to parody song styles, have great titles and okay lyrics: the bluesy “Ironing Bored,” the doo-wop “Spotless Love,” “Reynolds Rap” (get it?), the robotic “Domestiphobia” (what woman doesn’t have that?) keep the beat going.

One stray subplot (Becca’s addiction to the “All My Children” soap) occasions the amusing “Erica You Bitch!,” and the bluesy “I’ve Been Defrosting All Day” will speak to wives of workaholic men.

A variety of underwritten subsidiary roles are played by local actor O.P. Hadlock, Lisa Cicchetti and Dan Gordon. The best of the lot is Andy Lurie, terrific as Hugo, owner of a laundromat where the trio gets its “professional” start.

Hood, Dekker and Lake sing to taped music, and appear to be lip-syching, though I’ve been assured this is not the case. Either way, they can really sing.

But it’s difficult to see how this underwritten show achieved the popularity it did in Los Angeles.

It’s The Housewives! plays through Sunday, Sept. 27, at the Tenth Avenue Theatre downtown. Shows Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m.; matinees Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m. For tickets, call 888-663-3729 or visit www.ticketderby.com.

If novels by greats like Dickens and Cervantes provide inspiration for musical comedy, why not Jane Austen, one of the world’s great social satirists?

Graduate students Joshua Salzman and Ryan Cunningham decided to take four of the characters from Pride and Prejudice (Elizabeth and Jane Barret, Fitzwilliam Darcy and Mr. Bingley), run them through the gender reversal machine, plop them down in contemporary New York and observe them at the dating game.

The result was I Love You Because, written as their senior project at NYU’s graduate musical theater writing program – a show so bright, bouncy and clever that you won’t mind that the resemblance to the Austen original is no more than tangential.

I Love You Because opened off-Broadway in 2006, has had some 30 productions since, and is in its San Diego premiere through Sunday, Sept. 27, at North Coast Repertory Theatre. Rick Simas directs.

There’s nothing original about the premise: a romantic couple and a comic one; two characters looking for love, the others for a fling (or “friendship with benefits,” as one puts it).

Austin Bennet (Nick Gabriel) and Marcy Fitzwilliams (Kelsey Venter) are both rebounding from romantic disasters. Austin, an uptight, tie-wearing writer of greeting card verses, is crushed when he catches “fiancée” Catherine with another man. Free-spirited photographer Marcy has just ended a two-year affair, but is having second thoughts.

Neither is ready for another relationship, according to Marcy’s friend Diana (Kristen Mengelkoch), an actuary who has reduced relationships to a mathematical formula.

“Dating isn’t a wild free-for-all,” she tells Marcy, “it’s a game of numbers,” and in a hilarious song calculates the RT (rebound time), or “the fraction of a year it takes for the pain to disappear.” She counsels Marcy to find the worst possible match she can – just to get through the six months needed to get over the breakup – before she starts looking for a real romance.

Austin’s buttoned-down outlook on life and Marcy’s loosey-goosey style make them a perfect match in Diana’s mind – for the duration of Marcy’s recovery period.

Meanwhile Diana, the extremely verbal bean counter, and malaprop-prone slacker Jeff, unlikely as they seem as a pair, at least appear to share the same goal.

The four meet at a local bar, where sparks begin to fly and where the audience also gets to meet Geno Carr and Heather Anne Paton, playing the bartender and waitress (and an amusing assortment of other characters).

Gabriel projects an endearing combination of a romantic outlook and the rigidity of someone just this side of OCD – a perfect foil for Venter’s freewheeling, never-go-to-the-same-coffee-shop-twice style. But it’s clear that both want to hook up. The voices are strong and well-matched too.

Maddy and Mengelkoch are hugely amusing as the above-it-all, hookup-of-convenience pair who will overplay their intellectual cards and end up right where romantic comedy pairs are supposed to.

Resident scenic design genius Marty Burnett has done it again, with a set both evocative and fabulously functional. The lighting design by Matt Novotny and Matt Lescault-Wood’s sound design are terrific, as are Jennifer Brawn Gittings’ costumes.

Yes, I Love You Because is a tad overwritten. Yes, you can guess where it’s going. Yes, Simas has injected a lot of shtick. But the result is tuneful, clever and fun, helped along by a terrific cast and great production values.

I Love You Because plays through Sunday, Sept. 27, 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.

Playwright David Mamet turns his savage humor on the Hollywood film industry in the 1988 Speed-the-Plow, exposing Tinseltown’s famous conflict between art and business (and Mamet’s well-known misogyny as well). Ion Theatre’s production of the Mamet play runs through Saturday, Sept. 26, at Sushi Space. Glenn Paris directs.

Bobby Gould (Claudio Raygoza) and Charlie Fox (Matt Scott) are longtime friends and slaves in the lower echelons of the studio system. Bobby has just been bumped up to Head of Production, and even before the paint dries on the walls of his new office, Charlie comes to him with a surefire thing: bankable actor Doug Brown has just agreed to “cross the street” and do a script Charlie had sent him earlier. It’s a prison story, and Charlie has a 24-hour option window to settle the deal.

It’s a no-brainer, right? But nothing is that easy in Mametland. In Speed-the-Plow there’s also a dame to contend with: Bobby’s attractive temporary secretary Karen (Sara Beth Morgan) who can barely figure out the phone system but, like everything in Hollywood, may or may not be what she seems.

But she’s pretty enough, and Bobby gives her a script for a “courtesy read” (Hollywoodspeak for “no way we’re doing this film”), making a side bet with Charlie that he can bed her by tomorrow. (Her assignment is to read it and report to Gould that night in his apartment.)

The title of the deadly script is The Bridge, or Radiation and the Half-Life of Society, a Study in Decay, and the late-night reading of selected turgid passages (she loves the script) in Bobby’s apartment is inspired theater. With the right encouragement, can she get Bobby to green light the project?

Mamet’s famed rat-a-tat dialogue is in full flower here, as Bobby and Charlie speak in sentence fragments, interrupt each other and finish each other’s thoughts. It’s a verbal tennis match, and Raygoza and Scott have the rhythm and attitudes down. They’re also great on the accompanying facial expressions and gestures.

Morgan is a wonder here, taking Mamet’s misogynist writing and making Karen more fascinating than the playwright may have intended.

Everyone’s willingness to double-cross the others is what keeps audience interest level high. Mamet even manages to make us sympathize with Bobby (well, a little) for the regret he seems to feel that the prevailing attitude (“That’s what we’re in business to do: make the thing everyone made last year”) cheapens the product and debases the art form.

Ah, Hollywood. What would writers and comics do without it?

Plea to the movers and shakers of this city: Would somebody please find (and fund) a performing space for the many small, homeless theaters in town? Sushi is not bad for dance, but its enormous sound problems (an extremely high ceiling and massive windows on two sides) make it a nearly impossible venue for the spoken arts.

Ion Theatre’s production of Speed-the-Plow runs through Saturday, Sept. 26, at Sushi Performance & Visual Art, 390 Eleventh Avenue. Shows Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.; Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m.; Saturday at 6 and 9 p.m. For tickets, call 619-600-5020 or visit www.iontheatre.com.