Let’s get the disclaimer out of the way: To my mind, a musical with bad music is a bad musical. For that reason, I have never liked The Wiz, notwithstanding its groundbreaking importance as the first all-black musical. It had great success on Broadway in 1975 because, I suppose, it had a great cast and/or production values high enough to make it a good show.

Now La Jolla Playhouse’s Des McAnuff revisits the “ease on down the road” crowd, perhaps in preparation for translation back to the Great White Way.

A lot has happened in technology since the ’70s, and it looks like McAnuff has put most of it into this show. All steel girders, the stage area is now circular and revolving, with a huge trap door in the middle. Some audience members sit in stadium-style seats on each side, taking over part of the wings. New structures have been built – steel, of course – including a round one that goes up and down and two sections on the sides of the theater that serve as orchestra pit and access points for actors.

It looks like a giant erector set, tarted up with weird (and I do mean weird) costumes and props. This is the hip-hop Wizard of Oz.

I’ll give this production points for a great cast of belt-it-out singers, though. Every single one has a loud and true voice that could probably be heard at least across campus to Mandeville Auditorium.

It’s got glitz and whiz-bang technology – though they’d better work out the press night kinks if they want to take it anywhere. A weird hum delayed the beginning for at least 15 minutes; the need to reboot the computers kept the audience waiting another good 20 minutes for the second act.

The Wiz is not my cup of tea – to my mind, this is techno-trash – but if the erector set look is your bag, ignore me and ease on down the road with Des. Somebody likes this show: It’s been extended through Nov. 26.

The Wiz plays through Nov. 26 at La Jolla Playhouse’s Mandell Weiss Theatre. Shows Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday at 8:00 p.m. and Sunday at 7:00 p.m., with matinees Saturday and Sunday at 2:00 p.m. For tickets, call (858) 550-1010 or visit www.lajollaplayhouse.com.

Playwright Tracy Letts likes to write about things gone awry. He was shortlisted for a 2004 Pulitzer Prize for his most recent play, The Man From Nebraska, about an insurance agent who goes to London in search of his lost faith.

Now Cygnet Theatre presents Letts’ 1999 Bug, a dingy foray into the dark night of paranoia (or is it madness?), exacerbated by alcohol, drugs, violence and loneliness. Bug is directed by Sean Murray and plays through Nov. 19.

In a seedy motel on the outskirts of Oklahoma City, waitress Agnes (Robin Christ) smokes, paces and becomes increasingly unnerved by repeated say-nothing phone calls from her ex-husband, Jerry (Manny Fernandes), recently sprung from prison and apparently headed her way.

When Agnes’ no-nonsense girlfriend R.C. (Monique Gaffney) shows up with cocaine and another misfit – drifter Peter (John DeCarlo) – in tow, Agnes offers the homeless Gulf War vet her floor.

It’s a meeting of two sad and broken people. Peter is convinced the government has deliberately infected him with subdural aphids as part of some nefarious experiment. Agnes still grieves from having “lost” her 5-year-old son in a grocery store a decade earlier.

The attraction that often pairs sick people leads them to share both the bed and the illness, as Peter jumps up screaming he’s been bitten by those bugs and they must get them out of the sheets. Agnes sees nothing and is a bit bewildered, but is so grateful for the company (“I get damned lonely sometimes”) that she goes along, creating a grimly funny scene as these naked misfits feverishly shake the bedding.

By the second act, the paranoia has escalated to fever pitch. The room is festooned with bug strips and cluttered with of bottles of Raid and the like. Peter is hunched over a microscope examining slides.

Jerry shows up and so does a Dr. Sweet (Jim Chovick). If Sweet’s function isn’t clear to the audience, Peter is certain he’s from the government: “Their experiment is over and they’re coming to pick up their Petri dish,” he says, and the action accelerates to a fiery finish.

Bug succeeds or fails on its ability to creep you out, to make you itch and wonder whether these people might have a point. Though Christ and DeCarlo work well with each other, they didn’t bring the paranoia close enough to make me feel it. I felt rather that I was looking at peculiar specimens under glass – strange, mildly interesting but quite distant.

Bug plays through Nov. 19 at Cygnet Theatre, located at 6663 El Cajon Blvd. Shows Thursday through Saturday at 8:00 p.m. and Sunday at 2:00 and 7:00 p.m. For tickets, call (619) 337-1527, ext. 3 or visit www.cygnettheatre.com.

“Once upon a time, I began a new life as a single woman.”

Nothing new or original about this, especially here in the U.S., where one in two marriages ends in divorce. But this isn’t just any divorcée speaking; this is Lynn Redgrave, of the illustrious theatrical family, and she wrote and delivers her monologue called Nightingale at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles through Nov. 19.

It’s a strange hybrid, interweaving three stories (her grandmother, the fictional Mildred Asher and her own), the scenes separated by Redgrave’s exit behind a series of screens on the stage, to emerge again for the next scene.

Nightingale speaks to women’s changing social roles through time in episodes like the young Mildred’s question to older sister Ethlene about the reason for her upcoming marriage:

“Is he going to save you from spinsterhood?” asks Mildred.

“Exactly,” responds Ethlene.

And when Mildred’s turn comes, Redgrave reports the tired old wedding-night advice from her mother: “Remember, Mildred, just close your eyes and think of England.”

Redgrave is a fine, Oscar- and Tony-nominated actor, but it must be admitted that she isn’t a great literary light. The problem of Mildred’s envy in the face of Ethlene’s relative affluence won’t resonate with many modern women: “Oh, the indignity of having to penny pinch,” she laments. “Errol even thought we should get rid of Flora, the maid.”

But other things will, such as her comments on the all-consuming nature of motherhood: “Rose [Mildred’s daughter] demanded my love, all the time,” and the disappointment of marriage: “I was in love with you this morning. Where’s it all gone?”

On the technical side, black-bordered screens are lovely but could be more helpful in telling the story. Several different life scenes are projected (or possibly painted on). It would work better if they could change the projections as the scenes change.

It’s wonderful to see Redgrave on the stage, but Nightingale is not the best script she’s ever interpreted.

Nightingale plays through Nov. 19 at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. Shows Tuesday through Saturday at 8:00 p.m. and Sunday at 7:30 p.m., with matinees Saturday and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. For tickets, call (213) 628-2772 or visit www.centertheatregroup.org.

Living in an apartment once owned by legendary actor John Barrymore inspired playwright Paul Rudnick to write I Hate Hamlet, which is about a cardboard pretty-boy TV star (mis)cast as Hamlet and the acting lessons he gets from the ghost of the great thespian.

Stan Madruga reprises Barrymore, the role he played earlier at North Coast Repertory Theatre, and he’s terrific as the sardonic, larger-than-life actor who owned the part of the melancholy Dane before he moved to Hollywood and succumbed to commercialism.

Madruga plays well off Jason Maddy, also fine as the actor’s apprentice, Andrew, who at least has the sense to know he is out of his league. But aside from Barrymore, by far the best lines belong to Gary Peter Lefkowitz (Sean C. Vernon), producer of Andrew’s TV series, who weighs in from time to time with lines like: “I know you are no actor. What’s an actor? A British guy who can’t get a series.”

The women don’t fare as well in parts of minimal interest. Andrew’s girlfriend, Deirdre (Marci Anne Wuebben), seems out of place and whiny as a girl who wants to remain a virgin until her wedding. Jennifer Lee Vernon’s realtor Felicia has an inexplicable Southern drawl that seems just odd. And as Andrew’s agent, Lillian (who has history with Barrymore), Deborah Wenck has the presence, though some of her lines are lost in her thick German accent.

I Hate Hamlet is fitfully hilarious and largely predictable. But the sight of Madruga lifting his tunic to reveal a jeweled codpiece is worth the price of admission alone.

I Hate Hamlet plays through Dec. 12 at the Broadway Theater in Vista. Shows Thursday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m., with matinees Saturday and Sunday at 2:00 p.m. For tickets, call (760) 806-7905 or visit www.premiereforkids.com/ticket_order.htm.

The man who defended teacher John T. Scopes in the so-called “monkey trial” of 1925 has returned to tell us about his life.

Joe Nesnow stars in David Rintels’ Attorney for the Damned: A Visit with Clarence Darrow, playing an open-ended run at 6th @ Penn Theatre, directed by Nesnow and Dale Morris.

Darrow, with his rumpled clothes (“I spend as much on my clothes as anybody here. The difference is, I sleep in ’em”) and down-home approach, saved every one of his 102 clients accused of death penalty crimes from the gallows (though he had to plead a few of them). Here he speaks engagingly of some of those cases, spending more time on the lesser known cases than on the high-profile Scopes and Leopold/Loeb trials.

He also speaks of his family life and of his two marriages. He relates that his father, who had helped slaves escape on the Underground Railroad, influenced his son’s opinion on the death penalty with his story of the horror of witnessing a public hanging.

“The problem with the human mind isn’t that it’s small, but that it’s closed,” he says.

Nesnow wears this part like his comfortable old clothes. Like talking to an old friend, it’s a pleasure to spend an evening with this American giant, and Nesnow does him proud.

Attorney for the Damned: A Visit with Clarence Darrow plays an indefinite run at 6th @ Penn Theatre. Shows Saturdays at 2:00 p.m. Tickets are $10 and $12, and no reservations are required.