Better late than never, I tell myself. This is my last chance to review two terrific shows that opened while I was on vacation. Lamb’s Players’ second incarnation of American Rhythm and Ion Theatre’s All in the Timing both close this weekend. North Coast Repertory’s Back to Bacharach and David will be around a while; it just opened.

The Lyceum Theatre is jumpin’ this week with sounds of a century of American music, as Lamb’s Players Theatre winds up its second incarnation of American Rhythm. This Cliffs Notes musical history tour of the U.S. runs through Aug. 13.

“You find the heart inside the music,” says the narrator, and this talented cast sings, plays and dances its heart out in this portrayal of “red, white and blues America.”

Everybody showed up in my audience. Red Hat Society ladies, yuppies, kids, seniors with walkers – all turned out for this spirited musical trip down memory lane.

From “I Love a Piano” and “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” through the “hot” wars to the Cold War, Vietnam, the many assassinations beginning with JFK, to the Chairman of the Board and The Boss, all decades are represented in this colorful, tuneful, dance-filled extravaganza.

Jeanne Reith’s costumes are to die for (especially in the speakeasy number); the terrific band and some great voices all contribute. But the star is American music itself – joyous, sad, bluesy, gospel, country, it’s all here and magnificently presented.

It’s difficult to single anyone out, but Lamb’s is happy to welcome back Tracy Hughes, who now lives in Seattle, and whose interpretations of “What’ll I Do?,” “Stormy Weather” and “Over the Rainbow” alone are worth the price of admission.

But that’s not to slight Angelo D’Agostino’s rubber-jointed salsa dancing, Lane Smith’s “Blue Suede Shoes” and, oh, so many others.

Kudos to the band as well, and especially to conductor/keyboardist Don LeMaster, trumpeter Russ Mitchell and saxophonist Tyler Richardson. Pamela Turner’s choreography is energetic, flashy and just right.

If you didn’t see it last year (or even if you did), American Rhythm is not to be missed, and this weekend is your last chance.

Lamb’s Players Theatre’s production of American Rhythm plays through Aug. 13 at San Diego Repertory Theatre downtown. Shows Wednesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday at 8:00 p.m. and Sunday at 6:00 p.m., with matinees Saturday at 4:00 p.m. and Sunday at 2:00 p.m. For tickets, call (619) 437-0600 or visit www.lambsplayers.org.

And now for something completely different: David Ives’ All in the Timing, a collection of six surreal scenes (or one-acts, if you prefer) that push several logical envelopes but mainly hit that old funny bone dead-on in a way not done often enough in the theater. Carla Nell and Claudio Raygoza split directorial responsibility.

If “language is the opposite of loneliness,” as one character says, this evening of scenes will wrap itself around all of us for the length of the show, as a multitalented (and multitasking) quartet of actors – Laura Bozanich, Andrew Kennedy, Jonathan Sachs and Kim Strassburger – morph easily from one off-the-wall character and one crazy situation to another, schlepping their own props and moving the furniture along the way.

Ives’ sense of absurd situations is akin to Gary Larson’s “The Far Side” cartoons. In Sure Thing, a man (Kennedy) spies a girl (Bozanich) in a café and tries to find the right pick-up line. With each failure, a bell dings, time rewinds and he tries a different tack until finally it appears they will go off to an assignation. (If this plot sounds familiar, know that Sure Thing was written years before the film Groundhog Day.)

Words, Words, Words finds three chimps (Kennedy, Sachs and Strassburger) isolated in a cage, banging away on typewriters, testing the researcher’s famous theory that eventually one of them will write Hamlet. But this is proving difficult, since they don’t know what Hamlet is. The chimps, named Swift, Milton and Kafka, complain that “all he [the researcher] wants is a clean draft of somebody else’s work.” Meanwhile, Kafka is writing “K K K K.”

“What is that, postmodernism?” Swift asks.

The Universal Language brings shy stutterer Dawn (Bozanich) to a teacher of Unamunda (Kennedy), a faker-than-Esperanto language that trades on puns. Like a Berlitz class, only Unamunda is spoken until the price is mentioned; that is clearly articulated in English.

Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread is a hilarious parody on the famous minimalist composer. Glass tries to buy bread from a baker, while two women speculate on whether that is Glass. Repetition abounds, as does a sort of jerky rhythm typical of Glass’ music.

You don’t want to get stuck in The Philadelphia, a terrible black hole of a place where you can’t get either a waitress’ attention or the food you want. Alan (Sachs) tries to explain the solution: The way to get waited on is to show no interest in it. And to get food, order the opposite of what you want. It works.

Variations on the Death of Trotsky: Trotsky (Sachs) sits at his desk with a mountain climber’s axe embedded in his skull, pondering his death the day before. His wife (Strassburger) reads about it in a future encyclopedia article.

“Will the capitalist press never get things right?” he rants, noting that it was an ice pick and it was smashed, not buried in the skull. But Mrs. T. will have none of it, explaining for the umpteenth time: “It was a mountain-climbing axe. Can’t you get that through your skull?”

The bell rings and an alternate reality appears: Mrs. T. and Ramon do the tango and plan to off the inconvenient Trotsky. There’s more, but I’ll leave it to you to discover the rest.

Ion Theatre, which last season mounted a fascinating Marat/Sade and recently presented Beckett’s one-act classics Krapp’s Last Tape and Not I in repertory with Ionesco’s The Chairs, is establishing itself as a fine and adventurous company worthy of your support. Don’t miss this evening of wacky theater.

Ion Theatre’s All in the Timing plays through Aug.13 on the New World Stage at 917 Ninth Ave., downtown. Shows Friday and Saturday at 8:00 p.m. and Sunday at 7:00 p.m. For tickets, call (619) 374-6894 or visit www.iontheatre.com.

La Jolla Playhouse is “re-imagining” the old hit The Wiz. UCSD’s Dr. Marianne McDonald is re-translating the Greeks. Now North Coast Repertory Theatre presents a reinvention of the music of Burt Bacharach through Aug. 20 at the Solana Beach theater, co-directed by Javier Velasco and James Vasquez.

The question is: Why?

There’s hardly a person alive who wouldn’t recognize one or another of Bacharach’s songs. One of the most versatile composers of the time, he wrote one hit after another in the ’60s and ’70s (with lyricist Hal David, the David of the show’s title), including “Walk on By,” “The Look of Love,” “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” and “(They Long to Be) Close to You.” Several of his songs have been used in films (Alfie and many others). He has also written for the stage (most notably Promises, Promises).

Known for unexpected chord, key and rhythmic changes, Bacharach’s subject is the heart. From falling off the marital wagon in “24 Hours from Tulsa” to life changes in “I Just Have to Breathe,” Bacharach taps into that deep part of all of us.

Bacharach is a known (and, by many, loved) quantity, and most of us know what a Bacharach song “should” sound like. But things change, and Steve Gunderson and cohort Kathy Najimy conceived a reinvention of the songs several years ago. Gunderson did the arrangements, and the show played a successful run at the Manhattan nightclub Club 53 in 1992. The local version stars Gunderson and local favorite Melinda Gilb, two of the original cast members. Tiffany Jane and Jenn Grinels round out the cast.

Gunderson knows his way around composing and arranging; his songs for the runaway local hit Suds made that show. So it’s puzzling to see what he’s done with Bacharach’s considerable oeuvre.

Bacharach did not write for today’s full-bore, pull-out-all-the-stops decibel levels, nor is this theater large enough to support such sound without doing violence to eardrums and, I submit, to Bacharach’s songs.

Jane and Grinels are most often guilty of adding more volume than finesse to the proceedings in songs such as Jane’s “Are You There With Another Girl?” and Grinels’ “Walk on By.”

Co-director/ choreographer Javier Velasco’s choreography is only occasionally helpful, too often giving the songs a twitchy, nervous quality. For example, the show’s opening number, “The Look of Love,” features cheerleader-like gestures that do more to distract from than complement the music.

But there is a lot of talent here. Gilb is closest to the original sound, and her erotically itchy interpretation of “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself” is easily the highlight of the first act, followed by Grinels’ quietly lyrical “I Just Have to Breathe.”

Sunderson’s close, Four Freshman harmonies (especially when blasted at full voice, a feat unto itself), Velasco’s busy-to-frantic and sometimes just puzzling choreography, and the too-frequent belt-it-out approach all work at cross purposes to both Bacharach’s melodies and the combo’s arrangements, which often seem to be playing in a different show.

The second act is better, as the shouting is kept in better check. Pianist Bill Dodge’s interpretation of “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” and Gunderson’s lovely “Alfie” are highlights. Unfortunately, the show ends with terrible harmony (or perhaps missed notes) on “Promises, Promises.”

Thumbs up for the talent on display. But the old dictum still applies: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Bach to Bacharach and David: The Songs of Burt Bacharach and Hal David plays through Aug. 20 at North Coast Repertory Theatre. Shows Wednesday at 7:00 p.m., Thursday through Saturday at 8:00 p.m. and Sunday at 2:00 and 7:00 p.m., with select Saturday matinees at 1:00 p.m. For tickets, call (888) 776-6278 or (858) 481-1055, or visit www.northcoastrep.org.